DANCE REVIEW : ‘Conversations’ Moves a Little Too Quickly : Neofest: Despite its technical brilliance, choreographer Ron Brown’s piece never really allows the pain of his subjects to have full impact.

Ron Brown’s work shows a surprising optimism considering that he is a young black man whose choreography deals with gay and lesbian romance, interracial relationships, AIDS, emotional abuse, rape and other societal taboos and inhumanities.

His dances pan across the scenes of life, picking up bold gestures and little intimacies--to collect emotional “evidence.” Fittingly, Evidence is the name Brown has given his small New York-based contemporary dance company, which he formed in 1985.

At Sushi Performance Gallery on Thursday evening, Brown performed the 90-minute “Conversations in a Whisper” with his company of four. Their San Diego engagement closes Sushi’s Neofest; the final performance is tonight at 8 at the 8th Avenue performance space.

Despite technical brilliance both in the dancing and in the way Brown builds the dance, emotionally the work moves too quickly across various situations, never really allowing the pain of his subjects to have its full impact.

“Conversations” has several segments with brief, and sometimes silly, interludes, such as short spoken or mimed “commercials” for handy condoms on a chain or, in another case, a “protective device for women,” a euphemism for a machete. Such shenanigans show signs of a plucky artistic temperament--too plucky in places for this reviewer’s taste, because Brown wants to include visions of sexual aggression, aggressive sexual rejection, psychological cruelty and a brutal gang rape.

Not that Brown treats these visions lightly, but he passes them by, incorporating them into a whole without scrutinizing the parts. His lack of scrutiny is one way of saying, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” an understandable attitude for one weary of having to whisper conversations, weary of condemnation for sexual preferences and practices, for example.

In a spoken segment, two women with their backs to the audience say in sassy unison: “Get over here! Come sit on my lap! I’ve told you over and over again . . . ! You’re a cutie!” The message is blurred, mixed: It’s not clear whether this is scolding affection by females, or a prelude to childhood sexual molestation remembered by the females.

In the segment that closes the main portion of the dance, before a coda on death, AIDS and resurrection, two anxious women walk about warily. Suddenly they are assaulted, one is gang-raped, the other keeps pulling off the rapists, and, just as suddenly, the attack ends, with the unraped one again walking about warily, this time dazed. The end. Five-minute break.

One senses that Brown wants to tell a story in “Conversations,” but doesn’t want to get too literal. But he manages to anyway. The tension between mystery and clarity, meaning and abstraction, formal constructs and expressionism is one of the fascinations of contemporary dance. Brown certainly has the medium mastered--the dancing is animated, with almost childlike valiance, it’s muscular, tender, urgent and full of elan vital. The score by composer and cellist Robert Een is perfectly suited, and musically desirable in and of itself.

Dancers Terri Shipman (formerly of San Diego’s 3’s Company & Dancers), Jeanne Finnigan, Michael Johoda and Ricardo Sarcos are superb actors, as agile emotionally as they are physically. Nuances and gestures--nuzzling at the arm of a lover, wiping something out of the corner of one’s eye, swapping gum (that’s what it looked like), rubbing worried circles on the sternum and so on--gestures that might otherwise seem odd or awkward--are executed with sensitivity.

Central to the dance is the contrast between two duets that are strongly sexual in nature--the first is danced by a man and a woman, and the second, consisting of the same movements, is danced by two men. The dance is the same; our reactions reflect our own biases. Brown’s strength as a choreographer comes from his ability to use dance to confront societal conditioning.

The 100 or so in the audience filled nearly half of Sushi’s floor space, leaving little leeway for the full-throttle spins, leaps and kicks, but the athletic moves were performed with confidence, even derring-do, despite the spatial constrictions.

Ron Brown’s Evidence performs “Conversations in a Whisper” today at 8 p.m. at Sushi Performance Gallery , 852 Eighth Ave.