DANCE REVIEW : Verdict in King Case Briefly Takes the Stage : Bella Lewitzky denounces the jury’s decision before her company appears at the Performing Arts Center as part of the Imagination Celebration.

Anger at the acquittal of the four Los Angeles police officers charged with assault against Rodney King flowed from the Segerstrom Hall stage Wednesday as choreographer Bella Lewitzky denounced the decision before an appearance of her company as part of the Imagination Celebration at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

At 76, Lewitzky remains a courageous firebrand for constitutional rights. Many will recall how during the McCarthy era, she had refused to answer questions by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And still more will remember how in 1990 she turned down a $72,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and filed suit against the agency for requiring recipients to pledge not to create obscene work. That requirement was subsequently declared unconstitutional by a U.S. district judge.

Lewitzky received loud applause after she called the Rodney King case decision “scandalous” and less applause after she made a plea for the audience not to regard Los Angeles--under the circumstances--as an uncivilized city.

Nothing proved as dramatic as that in the rest of the program, although Lewitzky was unfailingly interesting in introducing each of the four works and the company danced well, although at less than its well-known peak.

Perhaps even these splendid dancers were overtaxed by the choreographer’s virtuoso demands as compressed into the roughly one-hour family-concert format. At that, the program had to be curtailed beyond the original plan because it ran over the time limit.

For starters, we had the pleasure of watching this doyenne of Los Angeles modern dance playing drums for her “Game Plan,” and encouraged by the choreographer, many in the audience clapped along to her drum beats.

Kids in the audience responded to the kinetic, play element in this somewhat improvisatory but always rule-bound work, and appeared to be particularly enchanted whenever pairs of dancers created strained and stretched-balance constructions, applauding them just as ballet audiences cheer a ballerina after she executes the 32 fouettes in the Black Swan Pas de deux of “Swan Lake.”

The darker elements of the work passed them by, even as did the more sophisticated spoofs of cliched academic ballet classicism in two movements drawn from Lewitzky’s “Pas de Bach.”

Here Walter Kennedy, John Pennington, Ken Talley and Roger Gonzalez Hibner went through dandified mock courtly fencing rituals. Later, with Li Chun Chang, Theodora M. Fredericks, Nancy Lanier, Diana MacNeil, Lori McWilliams and Diane Vivona, they made endlessly symmetrical patterns, especially in waves of dancers advancing toward the audience to milk applause.

Created by Nora Reynolds, Lewitzky’s daughter, “Walking/Falling” allowed Pennington and MacNeil to evoke battle-of-the-sexes implications in angular struggles against gravity, and Talley to show off exceptional control in off-balance leaping turns.

Because of time constraints, Lewitzky’s “Kinaesonata” was cut to the final movement, to end the program in a blaze, with the dancers traversing the stage in jumping, bounding leaps, sometimes ending in split-second catches in the air.

The company also will dance on May 9 at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo.