DANCE REVIEW : Aman Celebrates 25th Anniversary

The Aman folk ensemble went back to its birthplace, UCLA, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, a milestone that even the company’s most fervent admirers must regard with surprise and awe.

As usual, the program Saturday at Royce Hall was a feast for the ears as well as the eyes. Two new works were unveiled--one from Canada, one from Iran--with typical freshness and authority.

With its square-dance and quadrille formations and spiffy clog-tapping, Yves Moreau and France Bourque-Moreau’s fluent suite of dances from French Quebec looked both familiar and slightly exotic and proved irresistible, especially as reinforced by the series of snappy tunes--characterized, at times, by a rising lilt.

Dressed in filmy costumes of shimmering red, green, gold and purple, the Aman women wafted scarfs of sherbet colors while advancing in slow-moving circles to open Robyn Friend’s new suite of dances found among the Qashqai nomads of southwestern Iran.

The women flicked their wrists and waved their arms in stylized patterns evoking work movements. Later, in a third dance, they would be joined by the men, who imitated their breezy scarf play and even their sensuous shoulder-shimmies.

In between was a short dance of practice fighting, where two men with poles exchanged roles of attacker and defender with others, depending on who was struck first.

Among several works added to the repertory this season, Don Sparks’ duet from the Hungarian village of Mehkerek, stood out, with Sparks and Paul Sheldon generating complex, flamenco-like rhythms through vigorous hand claps, foot stomps and slaps upon their boot-heels and thighs, in counterpoint to rhythms played by two fiddlers.

Trudy Israel’s a cappella women’s choral group, Nevenka, appeared as guest artists, singing several striking Bulgarian songs.

Joined by Aman singers for “Dragana i Slaveja,” the vocalists explored swelling shifts not only in dynamics but also in timbre. They started with dulcet, plush tones in calls-and-responses between paired duos, and finished with arresting, plangent unisons by the full chorus.

The versatile Aman instrumentalists provided excellent support as the dances shifted from country to country, but also had their own moments to shine. Saxophonist Eran Fraenkal, violinist John Zeretzke and clarinetist Tim Rice had individual turns at expressive wailing in a selection of Romani tunes from Yugoslavia.

Their backup musicians, incidentally, included electric guitar players, which suggests that folk music traditions may be alive and evolving in contemporary Eastern European urban centers.

Stuart Brotman was the lyrical autoharp soloist in Appalachia Suite, which closed the program.