Dance : Athletic Stavropol Cossacks Exciting, Colorful at Shrine

Dressed either in bold green-and-red or rich wine-and-black, 12 men of the Stavropol Cossacks State Dance Company surged across the stage of Shrine Auditorium on Friday, thrusting, whirling, kicking and hurling long, lethal-looking poles in a piece titled “Chopyortzy.”

Almost immediately, however, this evocation of the Cossacks’ martial past yielded to audience-courting Soviet virtuosity: spectacular split-jumps, flips, vaults and the inevitable squat-kicks.

In its first U.S. tour, this 10-year-old company clearly aimed to please: Nearly every item on the program could be lengthened--by new bravura stunts or at the very least a repeat of the most complex group passages--with just a little applause. Sometimes a piece ended quickly and inconclusively, with the real finale saved for the encore.

With 27 dancers and seven instrumentalists, plus two vocalists, the Stavropol company proved half the size of the Don Cossacks troupe that appeared at the Pantages in January, 1990. And, indeed, nothing in the Stavropol repertory matched the Don Cossacks’ glorious choral expressions of communal experience.

Instead, artistic director Ivan Gromakov and choreographer Gennady Mynkh emphasized lightweight courtship rituals: flirtatious peek-a-boo in the octet, “Choreographic Miniature,” jealous competition in the trio “Phylip,” lyric elegance in the duet, “Meeting,” character comedy in the sextet, “Cossack Games.”

Larger-scale pieces featured energetic masculine display: knives stabbed into the floor (“Dance of Don Cossacks”), athletic feats involving a portable wine-cask (“Cossack Liberty”), flamboyant whip-cracking (“Steppe”) and group sword-fighting (“Cossack Country Dance”).

Along the way, one of the men executed 16 turning-jumps in place (some of them doubles), and several of the women excelled in high-speed traveling turns, though most often the women’s choreography functioned as intricate, percussive ornamentation: dance embroidery.

“Cossack Country Dance” not only boasted those spark-spitting swords but long scarves deployed by the women in artful architectural patterns. Near the end, they coiled the scarves around their waists and then spun away from the men--the scarves unwinding in the men’s hands in a sunburst of fabric rays.

Stavropol wardrobe provided quite a show on its own, with more than one piece luminous with a gleaming array of reds, oranges and golds.

Classic male attire involved fur hats and long coats tightly fitted on the upper torso but split below to revealed voluminous pantaloons over soft boots. Women usually wore long skirts, tiered in ruffles, sometimes with vests over their blouses--the heavier garments embroidered elaborately.

The use of a single dingy backdrop and the rather primitive changes in lighting made the variety and splendor of costuming especially welcome.