FESTIVAL ’90 : DANCE REVIEW / L.A. FESTIVAL : ‘Native Dance’ at Sunset Canyon Center

By staging “Native Dance of North America” in two separated outdoor areas of the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Festival denied its audience a fixed, passive perspective. Some parts of the program were sequential, others simultaneous--so you had to choose, to keep moving, to get involved.

The program emphasized the diversity of Native American dance, ranging from the surging spatial freedom of the Ikooc from Southern Mexico to the weighty rootedness of the King Island Inupiat from Alaska. Sometimes the focus narrowed to a simple two-step, such as the one taught the audience by the Cahuilla Bird Singers from California. Elsewhere, it expanded to encompass the intricate, buoyant footwork executed by the Jemez Pueblo Turquoise clan from New Mexico.

Accompaniments varied, too: violin and guitar in the Jemez Matachina ritual, large tambourine-like drums and voice for the Inupiat, gourds for the Cahuilla singers, flute and bells (plus percussion) for the Ikooc.

Such differences eventually helped you appreciate issues drawing the groups together: performance as a family matter, for example. Celebrating the natural world (especially animals). Using song and dance to safeguard the continuity of a culture.

Carrying life-size wooden replicas of swordfish, the Ikooc swooped across open lawn looking joyously connected to their environment--and perfectly placed against a backdrop of pines and a full moon. In the same space later on, the Jemez Matachina ceremony made a statement about nurturing innocence and neutralizing savagery--but lightly, within vivacious group dances revealing stylistic links to both Spain and Mexico.

In a more conventional setting (amphitheater seating, a slab stage backed with banners), the six Cahuilla men shared the creation and migration lore of their people through excerpts from song cycles that can last the whole night. Later, the Inupiat offered a survey of their traditions--games, crafts, performance--with women prominent for the first time on Tuesday.

Indeed, the sight of Inupiat women patting the air with gloved hands and bobbing in place, while their men did a punching, stamping version of the same movement, provided one of the most telling contrasts in an evening teeming with them.