DANCE REVIEW : Black Choreographers Point Toward 21st Century : The 1992 edition of the festival shows the influence people of color have in the development of modern dance.

It was always an unwieldy title for a dance festival: “Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century.” Still, it reminded everyone of how progressive choreographers of color have been in the development of modern dance. And it staked a claim to the creative future.

Maybe that’s why some of us felt a little disconcerted to find the words “Black Choreographers Moving” printed five times larger than “Toward the 21st Century” in promotional materials for the three-city 1992 edition of the festival. But not nearly as disconcerted as we felt after the festival performance at Wadsworth Theatre on Thursday.

Fully half the black choreographers on this six-part program seemed to be retreating toward the 1960s, recycling those ideas and vocabularies that have caused major African-American artists to rebel against the term “black dance” and define themselves outside its limits. Emphasizing glitz, glamour and the body beautiful, these dance makers scarcely seemed to understand the festival mandate, much less act upon it.

The evening began disastrously with Karen McDonald’s endless five-part suite “Entering the Path of Enlightenment,” a kind of junkyard of other choreographers’ ideas executed so raggedly by New Age Dance Workshop that it quickly veered into self-parody. One passage of especially notable overkill: hard-working Ralph Glenmore yanking the equally blameless Dionne Rockhold over his head in upside-down splits during a duet appropriately titled “Love on a Higher Plane.”

Next came the evening’s major artistic achievements. First, Maia Claire Garrison reclaimed the Wadsworth for professionalism and artistry with an untitled solo that took apart traditional West African dances and then recontextualized them in highly personal, contemporary and imaginative ways. A sharp, brainy, powerfully danced statement of heritage.

Equally bracing: Donald Byrd’s “Drastic Cuts,” in which nonstop multiracial, pan-sexual couplings formed a bitter orgy of manipulation. Male/female, hetero/homo, black/white/Latino: Byrd shuffled all the cards so that each of his five dancers could be groped, discarded and cruised by everyone else, sooner or later. Nasty, uncompromising, and very, very funny as danced with the iciest hauteur imaginable by Darrian C. Ford, Andre George, Elizabeth Maxwell, Ruthlyn Salomons and Hector Vega.

After intermission came three works that camouflaged fairly obvious or familiar movement ideas with show-bizzy fashion statements and lots of bare skin. Clothing the members of Dallas Black Dance Theatre in silver lame, Milton Myers’ stale suite “Pacing” contrasted African-based movement (torso-driven, low to the floor) with the more linear style of ballet (limb-dominated, stretching up from the floor). The company looked accomplished--especially Darryl Sneed in the opening section--but Garrison had already dealt with both extremes far more pertinently.

Five men in peek-a-boo harem pants met in Daryll Stokes’ “Baciagulupo” (Kiss of the Wolf) with intimate gestural and facial signals as if the work were a portrait of gay cruising a la Byrd. However, all the fluidly interlocking solos soon grew impersonal, fusing in a group showpiece with no statement to make other than the fact that the members of Electrotonus can dance in unison. Confusion or cowardice, Mr. Stokes?

Wearing only an orange dance belt, but bathed in almost as many smoke and lighting effects as graced the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, Kevin Jeff danced Anthony Marshall’s florid solo “In His Name” with unsparing rigor.

Jeff is himself an important choreographer--one who doesn’t stoop to the mindless flexing and writhing exploited here. If his performance managed to put over a slush-pump indulgence that didn’t merit a major showcase, that accomplishment doesn’t exempt the showcase itself from the need to be a lot more protective of its mission--and its audience.

Performances continue tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m.