Dance : Shapiro & Smith in Long Beach

There’s nothing wrong with the Shapiro and Smith Dance company that a little good choreography can’t fix. But that may be a problem because husband-and-wife-team Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith create the works, and, on the basis on a five-part program seen Saturday at the Cal State Long Beach University Theatre, they seem to be stuck.

The dances ranged from dramatic vignettes (tightly focused and hilarious in “Cafe”; sprawling, simplistic and only moderately funny in “George and Betty’s House”) to abstract movement pieces (tight and resonant in “To Have and to Hold,” amorphous in “Rhapsody”). A hybrid of the two, “Square Dance,” was billed as a “preview.”

The six-member company, which includes Shapiro and Smith, worked hard, ran risks, drew upon athletic prowess and cut splendid shapes in the air. They were always on top of the material, but the material often failed to warrant their full-out exuberance.

Set to a commissioned score by Scott Killian, “Square Dance” meandered through sequences that evoked the movement patterns and social interactions of that recreational dance form. In one section, Shapiro proved an odd-man out and assayed various efforts to make contact, with no success. But the work ran on inconclusively and with little inner cohesion.

“Rhapsody,” danced by the company for the first time, contained some remarkable catches in the air, but appeared a mere movement exercise in which dancers jumped on, over and off of five plush red settees, with some fleeting bondings and jealousies and lots of unclear purpose. Killian composed the moody movie-music-style score.