DANCE REVIEW : Kaleidoscope Revived at Cal State L.A.

To the isolated, nomadic dancers and choreographers of Southern California, Dance Kaleidoscope has become an annual gathering of the clans--a chance to display individual achievement in the context of a community showcase.

For eight years, starting in 1979, the performance series survived its unwieldy grab-bag format and wildly fluctuating standards of quality control only to vanish with the collapse of its sponsor: the Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance.

Enter Cal State L.A., a blue-ribbon selection panel and the city’s Department of Performing Arts, all working to reconstitute Dance Kaleidoscope as a three-program (six-performance) event spread across two weekends. As before, the focus is on presenting up-and-coming artists: 24 soloists and groups who need a stage. The event no longer takes place at the John Anson Ford Theatre--but that venue was never exactly ideal for dance and, anyway, who needs more summer traffic in Cahuenga Pass?

The important thing is that the new, on-campus location, the city money, the uniform audition process and the shared commitment to excellence have made no difference whatsoever. Dance Kaleidoscope re-emerged over the weekend exactly as it used to be: flagrantly, gloriously uneven, boasting some dancers that only a mother could love and choreography that amounted to budget knockoffs of the era’s most celebrated innovations.

On Program A, Saturday night, Naomi Goldberg’s new, ad hoc Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet Company perfectly caught the gestalt of the event with the playful Baroque suite “Looking in a Fishtank,” in which people of nearly every possible age, race, sex, physical condition and level of expertise executed the same movement tasks in a procession resembling the epic winning-of-the-West sequences from “Billy the Kid.” Welcome to the new frontier: dancing as variegated as the Los Angeles audience.

This endearing throwback to the anyone-can-dance phase of early minimalism found its complement in the sensational contact-style duet that opened the lumpy genre piece “Dawg Tired and Dirty,” with Karen Johnson boldly lifting and swinging Steven Craig as if declaring her emancipation from societal partnering stereotypes.

Liberation of another sort informed Stephanie Gilliland’s solo “Sticks and Fall,” in which involvement in music and formal movement process seemed to bring the dancer close to a personal breakthrough--a mode of direct, instinctual expression beyond performing. It didn’t happen Saturday, but the attempt provided the only genuine risk and experiment on the program.

Recently reviewed, Ferne Ackerman’s finely crafted group piece “Flame” looked hectic and oversold at this performance, just as Andor Czomp’s fluent Herdsman’s Dance (“Ecsegi Kanasztanc”) for Karpatok Hungarian Folk Ensemble proved curiously flat. Even more disappointing: the insensitive and often unmotivated dancing by California Theatre Ballet of “Sunflowers,” the late Antony Tudor’s masterful 1971 study of shifting emotional alliances.

Though Young-Ae Park’s “Da’Mong” (Dream Layers) began in tantalizing processional vignettes, it soon dumped dance altogether to emphasize play-acting cliches. Still, the solo at least had Park’s technical skill and concentration to recommend it.

During intermission, the Katja Biesanz Dance Theatre presented the modest, whimsical “Chagall’s Circus” on a small platform stage outdoors. Problematic visibility alone made this a dubious innovation in Kaleidoscope tradition, though the piece’s artful costumes and body masks (especially the gleaming fish) certainly looked alluring close-up in the moonlight.