A High-Energy Les Ballets Africains

With thrashing arms, yo-yo torsos and feet on fire, the dancers of Les Ballets Africains drum up a level of insistent energy that rivals the life force itself: the urges, demands and drives that keep humankind on this planet.

Beginning their Southern California tour at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Wednesday night, the 39-year-old national ensemble of the West African Republic of Guinea (last seen during the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival) offers a selection of zealously performed traditional dances warmed by drums, shouts and songs and the harsh music of a Peuhl flute and the xylophone-like balophone.

“Mindiani,” a puberty dance of barefoot, bare-breasted women, features one Dionysiac celebrant whose unflagging energy and rocket-like dashes around the stage recalled the marathon intensity of American modern dancer Molissa Fenley. Men’s dances are powered by high-stepping, powerhouse legs, multiple somersaults, full-body crashing falls, precarious balances and (in one case) a muscled body vibrating all over with almost imperceptible intensity.

Not all the dances unfold at whirlwind speed. A group of courtly works early in the program involve men decorously tapping and balancing canes (“Mamaya”) and women softly winding their bodies this way and that under voluminous, bat-wing dresses (“Lambia”). The women’s snapping fingers contrast piquantly with the Baroque calm of their gently tilted, “listening” heads and grave palm-to-palm gestures.

Two legends in which humans are taught lessons by animals (or a spirit in the guise of an animal) are presented in vaguely naturalistic ways that suggest the performers simply are not terribly good actors.

The woodcutter in “The Bell of Hamana,” in particular, seems oddly half-hearted no matter whether he’s about to die or has just been given the gift of a lifetime. Yet the offhand way the dancer portraying a turtle can shift from a believably animal-like posture to being a guy doing a bit of soft shoe with a pillow on his back is beguiling--and part of the troupe’s fascination with the mechanics of showmanship as the flip side of dances that are all passionate energy.

Most of the dances contain a strong element of playfulness. With a mixture of reverence and mischievousness, one of the women dancers in “Lambia” approaches a musician majestically twanging an ancient stringed instrument and caresses its long spine. Much of the virtuosity displayed by the men stems from switching back and forth from seemingly cutthroat to genial one-upmanship among the performers.

The modern world enters into the company’s performances in various ways: the matter-of-fact internationalism that led male members of the company to hone their tumbling skills with gymnastic studies in China; the rifle toted by the cruel, lovelorn hunter in “Malissadio”; the razzmatazz smoke and lighting effects, the way a big number ends with everyone posed in a smiling tableau.

Actually, the blurring effect of the smoke substitutes for the dust of a rural African setting. And if the beaming poses are irritating to world-dance purists, these TV-style mannerisms are also simply another sign of the ever-fluid state of African cultures--where old ceremonies get new twists, like the Mercedes-Benz-shaped coffins made to honor dead businessmen in Ghana.

Les Ballets Africains will also appear tonight and Saturday at Spreckels Theater in San Diego, Sunday in Pasadena Civic Auditorium and Tuesday at Bridges Auditorium at the Claremont Colleges.