MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Lewitzky Troupe in Two Premieres

A ghost of the past materialized Friday when the Lewitzky Dance Company appeared at Royce Hall--a marvelous one, in the person of Li Chun Chang.

Small, rock-solid and exquisitely articulate, the Chinese dancer boasts the same compelling power and superb technique as did Bella Lewitzky during the performing part of her long career. Little wonder that Chang served as inspiration for “Episode 3,” a Los Angeles premiere.

Strictly speaking, however, it was last year’s riots, and not the new company member, that the choreographer responded to when making this dance subtitled “The Outsider.”

But few could mistake the nuts and bolts of Chang’s two magnificent solos as other than Lewitzky’s--split-second direction changes, computer-like isolation of body parts, quicksilver motion and, above all, a legible accounting of every breath drawn in that dancer’s space.

The first solo found Chang alone onstage, a figure in jade-green silk. A flute obbligato traces her elegantly formal movements as they alternate between lovely, chaste arcings and pinpoint punctuations--all of them in an Asian motif.

Then the mood shifts and the music takes on a loping, indolent, Americana tone as three jeans-clad characters enter. Chang shadow-dances in the background and finally attempts to join them, but the situation breaks into conflict, the chasm proving too great to bridge. Her end solo, Grahamesque in its fury and mythic gravity, is a show-stopper.

Larry Attaway, whose score aptly suggests a contemporary Chinese mode, and Newell Taylor Reynolds, whose abstract design of bamboo-like fragments lends atmosphere, also collaborated on the other premiere, “Episode 4,” a piece of pure drama emanating from a source seldom tapped by new-age choreographers: sculpted musculature in motion.

The four quasi-nude men, each positioned on a wood box under a bright light that outlines the planes of their physiques, hint at a gladiatorial contest. It comes, by way of a drum-roll and a game of musical boxes, just prior to the climactic and picturesque pile-on that turns skirmish into unity.

Two older works, the whimsical “Eight Dancers/Eight Lights” and the earnest “Nos Duraturi,” completed the program that is scheduled for a repeat Saturday.