DANCE REVIEW : Canadian Jazz Ballet Ensemble Has Just One Dancer to Recommend It

Tiny, powerful and technically precise, a young woman named Hua Fang Zhang was the best thing about Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal as seen Saturday evening at Orange Coast College’s Robert B. Moore Theatre.

Wearing a blue Afro-style wig, she opened the program suspended on the arms of two sturdy gentlemen (Eytan Sivak and Aaron Shields) in red and yellow wigs. The three performed “Ebony Concerto,” a 1970 choreography by John Cranko to music by Igor Stravinsky, in a mechanical, pseudo-Bauhaus style.

People acting like puppets are always good for a laugh, and the dancers, in Mondrian-inspired costumes color-coordinated with the wigs, made the most of the acrobatic poses and steps. Imagine Petrushka or Coppelia crossed with a Rubik’s Cube, and you’ll have something of the charming, kewpie-doll quality of the piece.

The rest of the program seemed designed to demonstrate that Canadians can look sleazy. A dozen dancers performed three works practically indistinguishable from one another. Dating from the mid-’80s, they appropriated the styles and rhythms of Afro-Latin culture, but failed to capture the weighted, syncopated energy that has allowed these styles to monopolize theatrical dance for decades.

Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Appearances” was an oddly sexless striptease for three men in white evening clothes by three women who shed black gowns to reveal red teddies. Mauricio Wainrot’s “Libertango” juxtaposed the accordion stylings of Astor Piazzolla with an almost military deployment of dancers; only for a minute near the end, when Hua Fang Zhang took the stage partnered by Yvan Michaud, was the essence of tango ever visible.

Completing the evening, for which recorded music was played at ear-splitting levels, was a suite by Brian Macdonald to the big band sound of Stan Kenton. Macdonald, a Canadian choreographer famous for hoedown-style celebrations of Quebecois folk dance, managed here to make the mambo and the jitterbug look like barn dances.

The men, in hats, padded shoulders and suspenders, mimed the playing of trombones and saxophones; the women, in ugly ruffled skirts, bared a lot of skin and tried, without much success, to capture the atmosphere of a Harlem nightclub.

The dancers seemed more interested in making the audience happy, in the manner of flight attendants, than in really “getting down” with the music and the steps.