Music and Dance : L.A. Chamber Ballet Celebrates Anniversary at Japan America

“Dream, when you’re feeling blue. . . .”

Los Angeles Chamber Ballet’s 10th anniversary season begins with this pop anthem, reminding us of both the company-as-dream and its emphasis on wistful fantasy down through the years.

The song could introduce nearly any of the works being danced in the two-weekend Chamber Ballet retrospective at the Japan America Theatre. However, it belongs to “Dream Baby,” Raiford Rogers’ latest essay in wry nostalgia.

Accompanied by Roy Orbison records, “Dream Baby” is a one-stop Wild West ballet, bringing together the ranchers’ daughters and corral fences of “Rodeo” with the romantic, macho loner from “Billy the Kid.” Everyone wears tights under backless chaps--with the six women sporting fringed cowboy shirts and Eric Rochin bare-chested as the resident dreamer and dreamboat.

Even if we didn’t hear every dream-ballad Orbison ever sang, the ballet uses enough sleepy floor-stretches to deliver its message. But beyond its atmosphere of communal yearning and the Western gestural motifs--both strengthened by humor--there’s a level of movement invention and, particularly, development that simply doesn’t exist.

Right now, “Dream Baby” is all manner and attitude, all dream. Like so much of this company’s repertory, it’s a sketch--an intriguing, unfinished approximation.

Still, it holds more interest than “Black Angels,” the Friday program’s other premiere. Too rhythmically feeble to meet the challenge of George Crumb’s assaultively squealing, skittering score, the choreography by Lawrence Blake merely piles up flamboyant neo-Expressionist discontinuities and showcase opportunities a la William Forsythe.

It’s all here: Forsythe’s black-on-black stage (with ornamental artwork in the middle, somewhat elevated). His colorless overhead lighting. His phalanxes of the drastically picturesque (women in veils, men in goggles). But where Forsythe dismantles classicism and reassembles it in startling new ways, Blake just reworks the hallmarks of modernism defined by other people.

The dancing, however, has its moments--Blake always demands from others the high level of accomplishment his own performances sustain. Deborah Collodel, Lisa Deyo, Theresa Arteaga and (again) Rochin dance with impressive power and control, just as Blake himself and Victoria Koenig give his familiar love-hate duet “Goodbye” a dimension beyond its relentless choreographic cliches.

Performances of comparable excellence grace other oldies on the Friday bill: Trina Nahm-Mijo’s “Wheels (2),” with Koenig and Italia Dito-Berger, Earnest Morgan’s “Hawaiian Suite” solo with Koenig and finally Rogers’ company vehicle “Wishes and Turns,” newly situated in the splendid setting Mark Stock designed for “Orpheus.”