DANCE REVIEW : UCLA COMPANY PRESENTS A POTPOURRI

In a potpourri of new and older fare ranging from ultra-stageworthy to rather pre-professional, the UCLA Dance Company showed Friday at Royce Hall, UCLA, just how flexible its standards can be.

Murray Louis’ “Porcelain Dialogues” (1974), for instance, made an immediate impact by way of its inspired choreography and the deeply comprehensive performance it received, thanks to a stellar sextet of dancers and an equally remarkable ad hoc string quartet playing the Tchaikovsky score.

Here was collective artistry that could stand beside the best in today’s theaters, artistry that began with the highly cultivated vision of a creative mind at its peak and that ended with a model realization of the product.

Louis sets his dancers pristinely in place, sleek balletic figures in sheer white tights and glittery bodices, their movements grafting visual humor and romanticism of the subtlest sort onto Tchaikovsky’s D-major Quartet. Whether articulating elegant, angular shimmies or suggesting sculptural gesture or isolating movement ergs, the three couples seemed on an expressive wavelength with the music and the dance-maker’s kinesthetic response to it.

Similar things could be said of Martha Kalman’s new, keenly crafted “Common Ground,” which closely interacts with Elliot Wolf’s score by progressing from dark esoterica to a folk frolic. The piece is notable not only for its clever evolution of tone but also its cogent, whirling theme.

Not so the other premiere, “Cavern,” from the “Idyll” series by Carol Scothorn, to Henri Lazarof’s score: fanciful dabbling in the realm of anthropomorphism. Angelia Leung’s jazzy “Two Bits” and Margalit Oved Marshall’s primordial “In the Beginning,” both familiar, completed the bill.