DANCE REVIEW : OTIS SALLID’S CO. AT LATC

Beware of choreographers bearing what they call “art pieces” and “healing dances.” Or don’t take them seriously.

Otis Sallid, for one--the only one, it is hoped--promises both.

But the partisan crowd that cheered him and his New Art Ensemble on Monday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center was content to have a hoot-and-holler love-in with the choreographic hero of the TV show “Fame.” No matter that he did not distinguish between the disco-pop-gospel-blues dance he regularly delivers and anything more high-minded.

Since the brash exhibitionism Sallid serves up has nothing to do with dance as an art form, however, one wondered in vain about his pretensions. Could the occasional balletic punctuation, awkwardly grafted onto the frantic, funky posturings, qualify as a new genre? Could the bare torsos plastered with glitter represent an advance in creative design? And what about the dancers, encouraged to give their expressive all no matter how embarrassingly sappy?

The evening-long revue began a half-hour late and ended with Sallid giving an inept, grandiose speech: “This day has changed my life. I want to dedicate this concert to peace and world hunger. Now let’s all pray.”

But there was something about the event--as much energized by audience response as by anything on stage--that censored ordinary judgments. Sallid would set his dancers to hyper-hysterical emoting and flailing-cum-acrobatics and the crowd shouted its approval. Anyone who maintains social distance just might have been caught between laughter and tears.

When Sallid wants to plumb emotional depths he favors melodramatic mugging activated by lurches and jerks, the kind seen in psychiatric wards. When confronting the romantic duet, he’ll have the woman leap onto her partner’s waiting thigh, landing in arabesque, and later assume an upside-down supported split which earns the man’s subsequent obscene gestures. For depicting lonely-lady verismo, he’s expert at directing vulgar full-frontal positions. The man has no couth.

Fortunately, there is some kitsch humor. The best of it comes in a cat’s meow of a trio that features two toms hissing and a feline fatale sinuously strutting. But surely Sallid is fooling when he offers his “Hour of Power” gospel as anything more than an entertainment.