DANCE REVIEW : FOUR POP BALLETS BY JOFFREY

Although the so-called “All American Program” danced by the Joffrey Ballet in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday merely collected four familiar pop ballets from the company repertory, it did make an intriguing--and, no doubt, unintentional--statement about academic choreography in this nation.

Each of the works defined its look through a signature movement. In Gerald Arpino’s juvenile “Light Rain,” it was vibrations-in-place: finger-shimmers that expanded into torso-shimmies and group tremors--all set to a pulsating quasi-Hindu pop score (by Douglas Adams and Russ Gauthier) and to flickering, dappled lighting (by Thomas Skelton).

Essentially all this hedonistic rippling masked as relentless a display of bravura technique as any crude Bolshoi showpiece, such as “Spring Waters.” In both, stunts serve as sex surrogates.

For example, during Arpino’s central pas de deux--after some steamy mutual hip-rotations--Leslie Carothers grabbed one of James Canfield’s pectorals and he promply cranked one of her legs high up over her head--a chiropractic lunge toward rapture. Dat’s love, baby--in Arpino ballets.

Canfield and Carothers danced with immense skill and taste, but this was the kind of soft-core adagio you can see in Las Vegas supper clubs every night. Only there, both dancers are bare-chested and you get dinner too.

In “Love Songs,” William Forsythe proved far more purposeful about technical display. Indeed, his signature movement--a sprawl--directly expressed the loss of control of five women on the edge.

Set to recordings by Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick, the ballet dramatized sex war through abrasive, demanding solos and duets--the men brutal or unfeeling, the women desperate or crazed. Strong, but carefully crafted.

Intriguingly, Forsythe transformed the very cliches that Arpino merely recycled. When, for instance, Philip Jerry turned Beatriz Rodriguez upside down in their sensational pas de deux, Forsythe made it an act of scornful manipulation; however, when Carothers got upended by Tom Mossbrucker and Jerel Hilding in “Light Rain,” it was just another improbable lift for us to gasp over.

Laura Dean’s choreography and music for “Night” both built up a sense of extraordinary weight through the alternation and permutation of motifs: power through structure. Her signature step (and not just in this ballet) was spinning--often in place, sometimes around a circle--but she also used leaps ornamented with kicks in the work’s most flamboyant sequence.

Unyielding geometric and sequencing patterns held in check the surging energy of Dean’s eight-member cast and brought the ballet to a boil. But it never boiled over. “Night” had the fascination of a gleaming, perfectly designed machine--a dynamo for dancing, glamorously costumed (by Zack Brown) and brilliantly performed.

To the only live music of the evening, Arpino’s “Trinity” used 13 dancers in a period piece: a nearly 25-year-old celebration of youth.

The 1985 cast certainly squeezed the juice out of all the skimming and soaring that Arpino used to unify the work--but, understandably, they didn’t appear to identify with “Trinity” as their predecessors used to do. Thus, such indulgences as the candlelit finale came from nowhere, while the religioso elements in the rock score (by Alan Raph and Lee Holdridge, capably conducted by Allan Lewis) also now seemed pointless.

No matter: “Trinity” served Friday as a kind of animated curtain call for the Joffrey season, with many leading dancers in the new repertory on stage to remind us of the company’s latest achievements.

Here were Canfield and Patricia Miller from “Romeo and Juliet”; Hilding and Mark Goldweber from “Le Beau Danube”; Denise Jackson from “Hexameron”; Edward Morgan from “Jamboree”; Luis Perez from “The Moor’s Pavane”; Glenn Edgerton from “Monotones II” and “Confetti”; Carothers from “Kettentanz”; Carole Valleskey, Julie Janus and Eric Dirk from “A Wedding Bouquet” and Mossbrucker from just about everything .

These are terrific young dancers and it’s getting harder to let them leave each season. Indeed, the dancing Friday--in good ballets and bad--made you wonder how Los Angeles managed to survive without the Joffrey Ballet for so long. Or, more to the point, exactly how soon the company will be back.