Music and Dance Reviews : R Dance Company at Wilshire Ebell Theatre

Shallowly executed dancing is like mumbled speech: It blunts and trivializes whatever message it’s delivering.

In its 2-year anniversary program at the Wilshire Ebell on Friday, the locally based modern dance collective R Dance Company aimed for a statement of high achievement. Company directors Robert Whidbee and Roberta Wolin brought together choreographers and dancers reflecting the full spectrum of our multicultural community. Some pieces tackled big ideas: the restricted options our society imposes on women, the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. Several works boasted original scores and all benefited from professional production values.

None of this ultimately mattered very much, for the dancing remained fundamentally disembodied: clearly defined in shape and timing but never deep in the muscles, never engaged on any primal physical level.

There was no sweat, no electricity, no involvement, no resonance. Garth Fagan’s company makes every foot-tremor significant and the corps in “Oba Oba” puts over the emptiest, trashiest routine with volcanic force, but the R kids seemed to be saving themselves for their cast party, their audition for Mark Morris or their wedding night.

Although, by now, some of us are growing tired of Rene Olivas Gubernick’s gladiatorial shtick and Ronald Brown’s sensitive-moi solos, these artists do call upon their fullest physical resources for their over-familiar specialties. Their committed, powerfully articulate dancing Friday (in Brown’s “Ilsa” and a Gubernick/Whidbee piece titled with a drawing of five interlocked rings) helped isolate the program’s prevalent sense of kinetic anemia.

So did Wolin’s sinewy expertise in her apartheid piece, “South African Suite.” Indeed, when working at the passages here based on an ethnic vocabulary, nearly everyone looked far more connected and absorbed than in modern-dance duties elsewhere. So this company can be challenged or coached into really moving. And maybe next year it will be for more than just a few minutes.