Dance Reviews : Community Effort From Goldberg Troupe

Ballet neophytes normally share a stage with professionals only in “The Nutcracker.” But Naomi Goldberg’s two-year-old company, Los Angeles Modern Dance & Ballet, finds a place for nearly everyone, recontextualizing ballet as a community endeavor.

Saturday in the gym of Poinsettia Recreation Center, you could watch former San Francisco Ballet principal Timothy Fox dance alongside eager, inexperienced (and sometimes lazy or inept) company colleagues: 44 dancers deployed in seven pieces.

However, Goldberg’s four works all pursued sophisticated music visualization and the expansion of the classical vocabulary, goals ill-served by the wildly uneven artists at her disposal. Dancing opposite Fox in her new “Clapping Steps for Two,” she presented intriguing (if tentative) playoffs between classical methods and modernistic tics, angularities or non sequiturs.

“India Bound” (the program’s other premiere) looked at forms of Asian dance from a ballet perspective, focusing, for instance, on the torso twist and asymmetry in Bharata Natyam. Most often, however, Goldberg experimented with a divided body: upper and lower halves belonging to different worlds.

Fox again looked splendid in a duet with the vibrant Alissa Mello, and Goldberg danced with her distinctive drive and nobility of placement. But many cast members could scarcely hold a position reliably, much less dance in unison, so the result proved consistently inconsistent.

Goldberg’s “Monk” and “Time Lapse” completed the program, along with workshop-level pieces by Sun Mi Jin, Leo Tee and Janet Roston.