DANCE REVIEW : Choreographic Sampling From the Dark to Absurd : Performance: Works by six local choreographers are staged during program at Palomar College.

Contemporary dance is well represented in San Diego, when the number of active choreographers is taken as an indication. Six local choreographers joined in a group show in North County at Palomar College Theater Saturday, and their dances, one from each, were performed before an audience of about 300.

Patricia Sandback’s “Dark Rumors” opened the program. Sandback, who directs the dance program at San Diego State University, set a trio of dancers in black to the agitated, distraught string sound of Terry Riley’s minimalist music. Three grieving Graces seemed to struggle with loss or some unspoken tragedy from which they achieved no relief. They walked backward offstage, clutched fists to their bodies as if taking a knife to the gut, and projected contrasts of aggression and lament. Marta Keeny-Jiacoletti, LaBelle Haeger and Tonnie Haig danced with emotional power but were soft on exacting technique.

Voices murmured unintelligibly at the beginning of “Whispers,” Melissa Nunn’s duet, danced by Faith Jensen-Ismay and Stacy Scardino. These two reached to each other across time and space in a language of intimacy reminiscent of sisters. They twirled and spinned, let their arms fall gently across torsos, not in joy or pleasure, but in regret.

Carl Yamamoto’s darkly comic “Phobia Mortatas” featured Diana Ballantune, CoCo Campbell, Shera Fake, Sarah Fanoe, Katie Stevinson, and Haig in white pajamas, seeming escapees from the dance asylum. This work used eclectic actions of the individual against the group, of arm movements more than the expected leg language, and played on our discomfort at facing bodily manifestations of brain damage or neuroses.

For “Take This Waltz,” John Malashock crafted striking visual designs, then repeated them for effect. Danced by Malashock, Loni Palladino, Debbie Toth and Maj Xander to three songs by the inimitably wry Leonard Cohen, the work opened with a trio’s two-against-one interaction, which revealed a prickly anger and cruelty just under its skin of highly stylized, slow-paced gestures. When a fourth dancer was added, couples were paired for a compositional shift. Though the meter changed, the restraint in movement and dynamics did not.

“Waltz” stayed safe in dance terms, sculpted tightly as it is in the external realm of image. Just as two dancers in the final segment kneeled to watch a duet danced before them, the work looked onto itself for impetus. The monotony of tone and limited use of space unfortunately had the sensory wallop of wallpaper: You notice the design and pattern, and then you stop looking.

Jean Isaac’s brief “Elegy” followed and, by contrast, reveled in pure kinesthesia. Jensen-Ismay and Terry Wilson, a dancer with a signature compact grace, gave competent performances, but the sense of suspension, of “angelic” hovering that at any moment might lift and release into evanescence, was lacking. Nevertheless, throughout the swaying, sliding, serpentine unfoldings and seamless reversals, set to the music of Vivaldi, the two maintained an uncompromised tenderness.

Isaacs has been creating and presenting contemporary dance in San Diego for close to two decades. With Nancy McCaleb, she heads Isaacs, McCaleb & Dancers (3’s Company). McCaleb’s “Osirian Fields,” which closed the concert, paired her penchant for humor and props.

Five dancers in black, donning derby hats, responded with skepticism and mindlessness to a score of overlapping voices--a response that cleverly mimicked the relationship dancers have with choreographers. Life-size white lilies decorated this underworld, and the dancers were mocked by two males who one-up them. The bushels of oranges strewn onstage at the end brought gleeful cheers from an already delighted audience.