SENEGAL DANCERS

If confirming a sense of social unity is a major goal of most forms of tribal performance, then the 27-year-old National Dance Company of Senegal was undoubtedly a great success in its program Friday at Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College.

Ignoring the tidy, artificial distinctions between performer and spectator, stage- and audience-space, Them and Us endemic to Western culture, the boldest members of the company and the most liberated ticket holders mingled and even exchanged places for a time, leaving Africans rushing up the aisles and Angelenos kick-stomping in the spotlight.

Even the more conventional portions of the program sustained a happy balance between showcasing technical virtuosity and depicting crucial societal contexts.

Bouly Sonko’s “Samine” suite, for instance, began with pantomime vignettes--the men sitting around singing, gambling and occasionally threatening one another--before it expanded (perhaps too abruptly) into high-energy harvest dances based on rice-processing activities.

Ultimately most of these and the other celebratory dances Friday exploited percussive legwork, with the dancers’ torsos bent forward and slightly down, arms swinging overhead and then down to the knees in slashing double arcs.

Changes in the direction of steps--front-to-back, side-to-side, or Charleston-like diagonals--varied this characteristic attack, as did the resourceful spatial deployments (with sometimes as many as four groups dancing separate unisons) and the shifting polyrhythmic drum patterns.

Although the males in the 34-member company excelled as musicians, gymnasts and in such flashy stunt-steps as knee drops and squat kicks, it was the Senegalese women who delivered the most sharply articulated and brilliantly sustained dancing.

Whether bare-breasted over grass skirts and anklets in “M’Bini N’Dam,” or wearing rich, loose-fitting robes in “Sargal,” they exuded awesome aplomb. A man may have been crowned “king of the dance,” but these proud, powerful women were seen as principal workers, spiritual leaders and even fighters of their nation.