DANCE REVIEW : Choreographer Adria Wilson at Westside

Adria Wilson, who self-produced a program called “Art in Motion” Saturday at the Westside Academy of Dance, boasts many ambitions.

Little wonder at that. As a CalArts graduate, Wilson has been exposed to the avant-garde. As a TV and night-club performer she bears commercial influences. She has also taught dance and appeared in Helsinki and Tokyo, which gives her an international breadth.

But few of these experiences coalesced into a smoothly sophisticated or even artistically savvy whole for this eight-member ad-hoc group.

In “Preliminary”--a strange and stilted title for dirty dancin’ to a fusion salsa beat--Wilson had her best shot. Here she outfitted the ensemble in chic street wear, and the dancers finally did not look like trick-or-treaters.

Nevertheless, their sequence was so brief and under-rehearsed that it failed to end the evening on a triumphant note, even without a timing snafu in the blackout climax.

Elsewhere, the dancer-choreographer either squandered her ideas or didn’t think them through. In “Spider,” she let glitzy show-biz effects undermine Matt Easton’s atmospheric score. Otherwise this portrait of a Black Widow might have conjured the arachnid menace she had in mind--especially with the considerable talent of Kenneth Bowman and Theodora M. Fredericks, whose long-limbed entanglings looked positively deadly.

“Piece of a Dream,” however, was hopelessly sophomoric and confused. Actor Ron Mesa’s virtuosic delivery of his Mephistophelean monologue did little to pull this hocus-pocus, balloon-and-smoke bonanza out of its embarrassing pretensions.