Melinda Sullivan Brings "Gone" to Ailey Citigroup Theater Ian Douglas for The New York Times Gone Lindsay Fulton, left, and Melinda Sullivan, the creator of this dance-theater show, performing in its world premiere on Monday night at the Ailey Citigroup Theater. In her program note to "Gone," a new dance-theater work, the choreographer Melinda Sullivan identifies two schools of tap-dancing. One comes out of jazz and is rooted in improvisational solos, emphasizing rhythm over spectacle and story. The other swerved through Broadway and Hollywood, producing the choreographed routines of musical theater. Though the divergence can be overemphasized - with racial connotations that Ms. Sullivan's note carefully acknowledges - the distinctions are still in force. Ms. Sullivan, 25, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in both schools. She trained with Jazz Tap Ensemble and has worked with Jason Samuels Smith. But she was also a finalist on "So You Think You Can Dance" and toured with "Cats." "It doesn't get any more commercial than that," she writes. She wants to bridge the two worlds. It's a worthy goal, but "Gone," which had its world premiere at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on Monday, is a wobbly first try. Its ambition is admirable. The 50-minute work seeks to tell a kind of story, centering on a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, the last of whom immigrated to New York from Colombia in the 1950s. Though there is no dialogue or singing, there is a recorded piano-and-string score, by the young composer Nikos Syropoulos, that fuses jazz with chamber music. Unfortunately, the story (credited both to Ms. Sullivan and to J. T. Horenstein, who also directs) doesn't make enough sense. The main character, the mother, played by Ms. Sullivan, is clearly troubled: fixated on an empty seat at the dinner table, rude to her daughter's boyfriend. An absent father can be inferred, but the source of the mother's pain remains too opaque. Unmotivated, the moodiness of Ms. Sullivan's character comes off as adolescent petulance. She looks off to the side compulsively, and persistently interrupts her emphatic dancing with unconvincing shows of dissatisfaction. Instead of giving us the mother's story, the work flashes back repeatedly to the grandmother's youth, introducing the grandfather as a young man (Derek Roland), a nondescript character to whom nothing much happens. Fortunately, Ms. Sullivan also plays the grandmother in her youth, and a flashback to a reunion with the grandfather in Central Park is the work's best scene. Here Ms. Sullivan, with a sly smile and a sense of wonder, is at her most engaging, and her choreography - setting the romantic duet amid interference by her six-member female ensemble - captures some of the playful joy of the musical-theater tradition. Elsewhere, the choreography never quite takes off, neither illuminating character nor justifying itself as musical composition. Ms. Sullivan incorporates ballroom lifts, arabesques and jetés, a suggestion of sand-dancing and ersatz flamenco, but with few yields in originality or expression. She pays close attention to Mr. Syropoulos's score, but the music lacks drive and seems to restrict her - as a choreographer and as a dancer of high ability and polish. What Ms. Sullivan is trying is very hard. The flaws of "Gone" are no reason she shouldn't keep going.