DANCE REVIEW : LUBOVITCH & CO. AT ROYCE HALL

Lar Lubovitch has always been less a movement creator than a collector. His choreography not only borrows from a number of distinctive dance styles but incorporates elements drawn from gymnastics, pantomime and other non-dance disciplines as well.

His remarkable sense of fluidity has enabled him to juggle, link and sometimes fuse random components without losing an illusion of spontaneity. Indeed, there have been times when he’s made the process of movement collage a kind of playful virtuoso display.

For example, in his new group romp, “Concerto Six Twenty-Two,” at Royce Hall, UCLA, on Friday, Lubovitch continually undercut formal, balletic arm positions with such modernisms as twisty footwork or shuddery torso accents--and then overlaid all that with bursts of Charleston steps, group jogging, Groucho-esque slouching, drunken staggering, muscle-builder flexing, hand-to-brow mock-emoting and more.

Not for an instant did any of these eccentricities lose the pulse of the Mozart clarinet composition that gave the work its name--and Lubovitch also unified the piece in neat geometric terms through skillfully evolving circle and line formations for his 13-member cast.

But despite its undeniably deft (and daft) eclecticism, “Concerto Six Twenty-Two” remained in the shadow of much better classical caprices--a whole line of Paul Taylor creations, for instance, culminating in “Esplanade” that have offered the same type of cheeky athleticism, the same rhythmic and technical sophistication without the incessant jokiness prevalent here.

Even Lubovitch’s most serious and daring achievement--a duet for guest Edward Hillyer and the spectacularly pliant Sylvain Lafortune that used shared weight to define the relationship between two men--simply failed to match the sensitivity and invention of the male duet in Taylor’s “Sunset.”

Both choreographers intended to depict heterosexual friendship. But where Taylor had established a context that reinforced male bonding without raising sexual implications, Lubovitch (for all his published remarks on the subject) left the dancing far too ambiguous and then, as an awkward resolution to the problem, suddenly drafted two women for Hillyer and Lafortune to dance with in the finale.

Lubovitch’s moody octet, “A Brahms Symphony,” also kept sending contradictory signals about its four soloists, often implying romantic attachments and elsewhere not. But the question of possible dramatic content mattered far less than the arbitrary approach to the music (the first three sections of the Third Symphony).

Lubovitch never developed either a plausible style to reflect the score or a persuasive structure. Instead, waves of motion obsessed him to the point of disassociation with Brahms--frantic shifts between dancing by four soloists (in colored costumes) and an eight-member corps (in black).

In the clumsiest passages, the corps would surge on and off while soloists nervously awaited their cues upstage like runners listening for a starting gun. They then came to life for a few measures of head-lolling excess only to be displaced anew (sometimes in mid-phrase) by the corps. Only Christine Wright managed to dominate the mindless sorties and the imposing accompaniment with dancing of extraordinary force and even more extraordinary control.

Lubovitch’s familiar “Big Shoulders”--a clever sculptural/gymnastic tribute to workday Chicago--completed the program, minus its set units and, even more damaging, minus Rob Besserer. Leonard Meek brought a spidery elegance to Besserer’s role, but the absolute steadiness that once graced the big (and still anticlimactic) duet simply wasn’t consistently there.

Previously unaccompanied, the first half of “Big Shoulders” featured an uncredited tape collage of construction noises Friday--perhaps meant to be an aural equivalent to the girder, tractor and work-site doors we used to see.