Music, Dance Reviews : Polish Troupe at Citrus College

For partisans in the audience, the Mazowsze Polish state folk ensemble offered a gleaming celebration of ethnic pride Friday at the Haugh Performing Arts Center at Citrus College in Glendora.

The 85 company members worked so hard, the dancers and singers looked so attractive and the costumes so colorful that not responding to the speedy cavalcade and quick-change spectacle would have seemed mean-spirited and impossible. Fat chance, anyway.

Under the artistic direction of Mira Ziminska-Sygietynski, Mazowsze zestfully, determinedly made it a point to establish contact with the audience.

There was so much good-natured hand waving to the people out front, there were so many pieces that ended with dancers advancing to line up at the front of the stage, there was such clockwork instant-replays of the big finishes that it came as no surprise when one dancer actually sat down to “flirt” with a person in the audience.

This was a communal ritual.

But to the person who hoped to gather some insight into the rich authentic Polish folk tradition, Mazowsze offered merely a slick show in which one region segued into another nonstop and folk sources were refined virtually out of existence into kaleidoscopic images and patterns that no villagers could be expected to dance.

The common denominator of many of the pieces would seem to be adrenaline.

A girl says goodby to a new friend who is going off to war. “There is a note of sorrow,” says the program note. What we see is a smiling girl draping a scarf around the boy’s neck; then, without missing a beat, a group of girls come in to dance, then a group of boys enter to show off their determination to fight for their country. Sorrow? Not an instant of it.

Certainly, the men’s virtuosity and vigor and the women’s grace and loveliness commanded respect, but as show-biz entertainment not cultural revelation.

An elegant garland dance from the Lubuskie region proved a welcome respite from the allegro tempos, but also raised the nagging question of whether this kind of thing inspired Marius Petipa, the master choreographer of 19th-Century Imperial Russian ballet, or whether Petipa inspired company choreographer Witold Zapala.

The program ended with a medley of American tunes, sung in charmingly accented English.