DANCE REVIEW : LIMON COMPANY IN SOKOLOW’S ‘POEMS’

After more than 50 years of making dances about the isolation of the human spirit, Anna Sokolow is surely entitled to venture into other territory.

But the intense elemental drive that marks her best-known work is missing in “Poems,” which received its world premiere by the Limon Dance Company at Cal State Long Beach Thursday night.

Unfolding in a piecemeal, additive way, the piece is also dully predictable: If a dancer turns to the right, you know he’ll next turn to the left; a backbend will be followed by a bend forward. With Richard Justin Fields at the piano playing unidentified Rachmaninoff and four women who join hands and lift knees in unison, “Poems” initially looked like a leaden offspring of a Duncan dance.

But Sokolow must have buried a message here somewhere. There were moments of sweet supportiveness (women leaning with heads dropped on their partner’s shoulders) and moments of private, huddled despair. At one point the 11 dancers repeatedly jumped with clenched fists, with the incongruous effect of Black Panthers rooting for the home team.

In the end, social harmony seemed to win out, via a square-dance-style sequence that seemed as arbitrary as anything else in this puzzlingly unfocused work.

The treat of the evening proved to be Limon’s “The Traitor” of 1954, a taut dramatic work about a charismatic leader, his followers and a traitor, danced by Carlos Orta with enormous passion and power. When he plucked inside his shirt, removed--his soul?--and drove the fingers of one hand into the other with a crushing fervor, his arms seemed to distort themselves into expressionistic monstrosities.

In Limon’s 1950 duet, “The Exiles,” to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 2, company artistic director Carla Maxwell offered an emotional commitment missing in her mild-mannered partner, Gary Masters. The company as a whole also looked rather lightweight in Limon’s “A Choreographic Offering,” based on segments of works by his mentor, Doris Humphrey, and framed by a gravely fugal composition for 12 dancers mirroring the Bach score.