DANCE REVIEW : Goldberg Troupe in West Hollywood

Naomi Goldberg should get out more. As artistic director, choreographer and lead dancer of L.A. Modern Dance & Ballet, Goldberg promotes both community access and audience participation. A published credo emphasizes her “populist aesthetics” and “a shared common vision.”

However, most of Goldberg’s works remain elitist in structural and technical priorities as well as their insular, studio-based outlook: dance feeding on dance.

If Goldberg has ever thought about the crucial social, racial and political issues of the moment, you wouldn’t know it from the well-crafted exercises in navel-gazing and backdated whimsy she presented Thursday at Poinsettia Recreation Center in West Hollywood.

Set to an eerie score by Nathan Birnbaum, the fluid quartet “Clearing” developed from a chain of entrances to group fireworks ornamenting Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself.” Equally intriguing music by Foday Musa Suso freshened “Your Eyes, Your Hands, That Violin,” a formula lyric duet skillfully danced by Goldberg and former San Francisco Ballet principal Timothy Fox.

Songs by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins prompted deadpan slumps and staggers in “Three by Screamin’ Jay,” while cartoon soundtracks by Carl Stallings sent the cast of “Mickey Mousing” into such infantile gambits as hitting one another with plastic mallets.

Fox’s parodies of ballet cliches enlivened both this piece and “Stampede Into the Big Dance” (music by J. Strauss), which also lampooned ballroom manners and ended with audience members waltzing with the company.

None of these pieces proved boring and some made Goldberg’s company as a whole appear tolerably accomplished. But only “Romanian Folksong” looked beyond the media world for inspiration.

Even here, Goldberg abstracted her subject (the 1989 Romanian Revolution) into a formal etude but without losing the immediacy of Michael Nyman’s third string quartet or the feeling of a statement made for the first time.

Filled with inventive arm motion, this sinewy trio demonstrated beyond doubt that Goldberg can deeply express the life outside her studio.