DANCE REVIEW : Heavy-Footed International Show at Arts Center Is Light on Content

More like light hors d’oeuvres than a true ethnic feast, the International Music and Dance Festival on Saturday was the first Orange County Centennial event at the Performing Arts Center.

That may have been the reason for the cloying Disney-style garnishes (spotlighted dancers whirling to “Around the World in 80 Days” and a finale of “It’s a Small World”). But there was no excuse for the inane and often shockingly ethnocentric commentary written by Thomas N. Moon and delivered by Carl Princi.

Despite the necessity of boiling down leisurely dances into fast-food tidbits, most of the companies--nearly all California-based, despite confusing program notes--succeeded in conveying at least the flavor of a specific style.

Live indigenous music frequently helped keep the pot simmering. (The Chapman Symphony, the Santa Ana Winds, the Master Chorale of Orange County and vocal soloists Henrietta Davis and Alexander Henderson were called in for all-American duty.)

But even canned music didn’t dampen the discovery of the evening: Chester Whitmore’s Black Jazz Group. Its four witty and clean-lined dancers stylishly recreated the jokey content and tricky moves of American Depression-era tap dance.

Orange County’s own Relampago del Cielo Ballet Folklorico flashed through dances from the Mexican state of Jalisco to the hearty accompaniment of the Mariachi Feria de Ensenada. Drumming and dancers’ chanted shouts underlined the hunkering, hip-rolling Congolese frenzy of Fua Dia Congo. Ote’a Polynesian Music and Dance Troupe vigorously sustained an undulating “Welcoming Dance” to drum and wood block rhythms.

The Korean Classical Music and Dance Company wended its way through a disciplined fan dance, and the Chinese Folk Dance Assn. of San Francisco turned ribbon streamers into airborne calligraphy. Energetic, if somewhat sloppy in ensemble work, Hamazgayin Seven Dance Ensemble supplied a sampling of Armenian high jinks.

Disappointments ranged from tepid performances to ersatz style. Lola Montes and Her Spanish Dancers, with bland guest Oscar Nieto, offered no clue that Spanish dance has a fiercely rhythmic soul. Viji Prakash Dance Ensemble diluted the nimbleness and precision of India’s bharata natyam into amorphous groupings of 10 dancers with wafting dry ice.

Working with the hymn “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” Orange County-based Gloria Newman Dance Theatre made American modern dance look like a politely lyrical activity. Arms were frequently raised in supplication, bodies leaned and turned, and somehow the women wound up acrobatically poised on the men’s thighs. From the first tier, the American Sign Language that Newman supposedly incorporated in the movement was invisible.

But the true embarrassments were Los Gauchos--an Argentine troupe trying to add pizazz with a strobe light--and the Austrian Beverly Hills Formation Dancers. Johann Strauss would scarcely recognize their waltzing, in which women are lifted way off the floor and otherwise spend much of their time vacuously swishing their lavish dresses.