Dance Reviews : UCLA Company at Royce Hall

In some of its annual concerts, the UCLA Dance Company has shown itself to be more slick and sleek than it was on Friday at Royce Hall. But rarely has this academic troupe managed to pinpoint so well, intentionally or otherwise, the graphic evolution of modern dance in a program of ensemble pieces.

Pop art, for instance, had no recourse to concert dance in the days of Doris Humphrey and Jose Limon. So when the curtain opened on Kathryn Posin’s “Shock Crossing,” one of those whimsically confessional exercises in urban ennui that takes the form of show-and-tell, we had pop art with a sleazy vengeance--sometimes more respectably known as performance art.

But the minute Limon’s 25-year-old “Choreographic Offering” came into view--its solemnly intricate and stylized formalities deeply attached to Bach’s complex fugues and fervent piety--one could see with stunning clarity how many worlds away from this we’ve come. However, what followed, Angelia Leung’s “If Fallen Seven Times, Rise Eight Times,” still seemed to belong to the Limon genus. For its playful realization of the title proverb, the work adhered to a movement structure that might be called neo-modern.

Finally, with Rene Olivas Gubernick and Martha Kalman’s “Of Widows and Generals,” came a piece of Nicaraguan sociopolitical agitprop that deftly used screen projections and would have probably earned Limon’s praise: It deals with a serious theme and relies on the expressive gesture that makes dance a universally understood art.