DANCE REVIEW : Irie! at the Los Angeles Theatre Center

Black dance with a British accent: That’s Irie!, the eight-member, 2-year-old London company that appeared over the weekend at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as the sole dance attraction in the ongoing UK/LA Festival.

The subjects in the five-part Irie! program proved familiar--African roots, the Caribbean heritage, contemporary urban experience. However the characteristic emphasis in British dance on shaping a pose, on refined placements of hands, on smooth articulation and integration of all physical tasks, gave even the dancers’ frequent excursions into gymnastics an unexpected Cecchettian elegance.

Sometimes the restraint of the style took you by surprise, as in the several false endings of Beverley Glean’s celebratory “Hints of Afrikah” suite in which the dancers never did completely cut loose in the manner of more athletic and also more technically accomplished black American ensembles.

In comparison, Irie! operated on a modest dynamic scale and could not always muster the strength and control needed for group statements. But this is a company with a mission and its sense of purpose, its role as a vehicle for British black identity and pride, helped sustain the weakest dancers and works.

Like London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Michael Clark’s company, Irie! obviously has great significance in ballet-dominated British dance, but, once again, the choreography often looked oddly backdated and rudimentary out of its original context.

Dressed in Jane Coombs’ inventive white costumes suggesting different classes, nationalities and eras, the dancers in Albie Ollivierre’s “Inner Circles” (music by Stevie Wonder) defined intriguing characters and relationships that were never explored. But the piece did demonstrate a flair for bold juxtapositions and confrontations.

To music by Bob Marley, Glean’s “Mansongs” began strongly with a slinky duet between the sinewy Beverley Jones and the intense Prince Albert Morgan. But the mood of tense expectancy and hot, blocked feelings soon eroded in increasingly hackneyed dances for Jones, Lati Saka and Pat Banton.

Glean’s “A Reggae Suite” offered a potent dose of strutting, competitive male bravado along with loose and spontaneous interplay between dancers. The abundant gestural material here remained unstylized, giving the piece a quasi-documentary texture and Raymond Wilkes, in particular, took to its hard-edged movement contrasts with enormous surety.

Best of the lot: Jackie Guy’s festive “Hail” suite, which expertly grafted balleticisms to traditional dances of the West Indies and made the Irie! company members look as comfortable doing classical scissor-jetes as rippling their spines or executing rhythmic hopping steps.