DANCE REVIEW : L.A. CHOREOGRAPHERS AND DANCERS

Los Angeles Choreographers and Dancers gave a mixed and not very satisfying program Saturday at the Japan America Theatre.

Company associate artistic director Alfred Desio recently revamped his sonically enhanced tap solo “Electronic Raga,” but it still looked like a rudimentary exploration of new-age technology, especially compared with his spiffy “straight” tapping in “Implants I”--a jam session with percussionist Roger Boyce--and the matched dancing with lanky Damon Winmon in “Covering Ground.”

The most ambitious new work, however, was guest artist Rene Olivas Gubernick’s “La Danza Contra La Muerte . . . for humanitarian aid???,” an episodic agitprop theater piece that proved embarrassingly simplistic, lining up forces of good (loving, laundry-washing Central American peasants) against evil (American military figures) with absolute certitude.

The dichotomy was black and white: the Americans raped and tortured; the peasants resisted and found solidarity. Artistically, the piece was stillborn; some individual images were effective and the company gave the work its all. But anyone who would squirm at the heavy-handed messages of people’s liberation ballets could only be discomforted by a similar approach taken here.

The rest of the program consisted of previously reviewed works, although company director Louise Reichlin’s “No Story” has been retitled “Matrix/3 Color Impressions.” Under the poverty-stricken circumstances, her “Tennis Dances” (dating from 1979) took on somewhat the status of a classic.