DANCE REVIEW : L.A. Theatre Varied at El Camino

Lula Washington’s importance to the local dance community can’t be overestimated when considering her achievements as organizer, teacher, company leader and the creative force behind an ever-evolving inner-city center.

Unfortunately, that creative force can’t be glimpsed in her choreography. Looking at the six-part performance by her L.A. Contemporary Dance Theatre, Saturday at the El Camino College Campus Theatre in Torrance, you saw two curious extremes in her work:

In both the familiar 1990 group showpiece “A Duke for the 90s” and the 1989 character solo “Tasting Muddy Waters,” she undercut rich, artful music by African-American masters with a shoddy patchwork of pop-dance cliches, nonstop mugging and forced vitality, plus the inevitable in-your-face technique.

Two recent pieces, however, found her mostly at a loss for dance ideas but struggling to confront powerful social issues with honesty. Accompanied by African drumming, “It’s a Woman’s Thing” tried to deal with abortion-as-choice by equating the right to abort with shopping. That’s right: The piece suggested that choosing abortion is (or should be) the same woman’s thing as picking a red dress vs. a black hat.

Deep within the work, however, beyond its addled metaphor and crude mime, lay a sense of sisterhood and victimization expressed simply and sincerely by the four dancers.

Dance proved the least dominant element in “Check This Out,” a compilation of documentary slides and sound bites about the L.A. riots intercut with angry personal statements by company members. Bob Dale’s soundscore shaped a taped speech by Rep. Maxine Waters into an apocalyptic chorus, overwhelming Washington’s feeble solos for a lone barefoot policemen brandishing a baton.

But at least she avoided fakery.

Eloquent movement did occur on the program--in the company’s familiar revival of Donald McKayle’s modern-dance social portrait “Songs of the Disinherited,” and in “Dounba,” a buoyant African suite choreographed by Carlos Spivy and Stacey Hardwick to live drumming courtesy of the Djimbe company.

Performances remained more reliable than choreography throughout the evening, with Kristopher Jones, in particular, secure in every challenge, from the balletic balances of “Duke” through the gritty intensity of “Songs” to the propulsive folk style of “Dounba.”

L.A. Contemporary Dance Theatre performs much the same program (minus “Check This Out”) at Cal State Northridge on Feb. 13.