Music and Dance Reviews : Inner City Cultural Center Hosts Barro Rojo Dancers

With its primal images of proletarian struggle, Barro Rojo works in a modern-dance style that seems as classic as Isadora Duncan’s “Marche Slave” and as contemporary as the latest activist performance art.

In its Los Angeles debut Saturday at Inner City Cultural Center, this eight-member company from Mexico City presented six short, intense pieces expressing solidarity for the downtrodden. Hands desperately reaching out dominated all of them, as did a sense of oppressive weight and fierce communal pride. These artists know what modern dance was created to do--and, for all their beauty and technical skill, they wasted no time on personal display.

Fueled by the deepest anger, Laura Rocha’s “Atadura” showed four women in fringed shawls confronting the implications of this archetypal garment and then furiously hurling it away. Mime-based, her “Crujia H” depicted two men so trapped and brutalized that they could relate to one another only as deadly enemies.

Arturo Garrido’s three group vehicles each exploited the company’s technical expertise and might have looked slick except for the extra stretch and muscularity of the execution. Whether in jeans (“ . . . Y Amanacera!”), overalls (“Aztra”) or traditional loose white pants tied at the ankles (“El Camino”), his men would fling back pinioned hands and brandish clenched fists. No less committed, his women excelled at his signature stag-jump: arms flung back as the contorted body heroically lunged into space.

Serafin Aponte’s “Buscando Tierra” initially explored the range of movement possible for someone badly injured, a concept Paul Taylor took much further in “Dust.” Nevertheless, this solo proved inventive in its contrasts between large-scale choreographic motion and intimate pedestrian activity--and for such odd, compelling step sequences as the passage in which Francisco Illescas kept swiveling in place, his weight repeatedly shifting from toes to heels and back.

Barro Rojo takes nothing for granted--not even this pitifully limited physical freedom and mobility. Indeed, it celebrates endurance most of all and embodies it in dancing of selfless stamina. This is an exciting, important company that deserves to be much better known north of the border.