Dance : Floricanto Premiere in San Gabriel

Gema Sandoval, founding director of Danza Floricanto/USA, set herself an ambitious but probably impossible task: To show within the brief compass of two hours the detailed evolution of Mexican culture from the pre-Columbian period to the present.

The result, the seven-part “Epopeya Mestiza” (Mestizo Epic), as produced by Rafael Zamarripa, a respected authority on Mexican folk dance who teaches at the University of Guadalajara, received its premiere Friday at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium. The work, not surprisingly, was a mixed success.

Heavy with symbolism and simplistic in history, the work seemed fragmentary and bound to the printed program for its meanings.

In dance terms, the most successful section consisted of the massed circle dances, stick fights and wedding sequence of the pre-Columbian period.

But the hit of the program was the “Mexican Revolution” sequence. Here the company, clad in black as if they were Bunraku puppeteers, comically manipulated large marionettes representing grand ladies, soldiers, revolutionaries and historical figures such as Porfirio Diaz, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata--all with the white faces of skeletons.

At the other end of the scale was the obscure “Modern Mexico” section in which the company animated portions of Diego Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park.” Here, an impersonation of death (La Muerte) drew out the “painted” figures to dance and simulate life. But the interactions between La Muerte and the other figures looked arbitrary and without significance.

The best part was Rodolfo Castaneda Trujillo’s fluid sketching of the figures on an overlay of the mural at the start of the piece.

At the end, the representatives of the pre-Columbian period returned to give their blessings on their descendants and portentously to announce a major event on the horizon of the next century.

The Mariachi Mexicapan provided live music. Ernesto Cano Lomeli wrote the music for the “pre-Columbian” and “Conquest” sequences; Miguel Martinez arranged the music for the mural section.