Dance : Love Fuels ‘Kaleidoscope’ at Cal State Los Angeles

Flamboyant diversity has always been the hallmark of “Dance Kaleidoscope,” the festival of Southern California achievement that opened its fifth annual Cal State Los Angeles season over the weekend.

The Saturday program offered flamenco and folklorico, ballet and bharata natyam, modern and postmodern segments, celebrating (as usual) the range of local dance, but also exploring the concept of love as an energizing force.

However, it was a non-romantic relationship that inspired the evening’s most intimate love-dance: the late Gloria Newman’s “Fragmented Flashback Blues.”

From Betzi Roe’s spoken reminiscences (on tape) of her grandmothers, Newman created an artful solo for Roe full of a deep sense of connection to her forebears and role models. As easygoing and accessible as the best Newman pieces, it also held treacherous technical challenges and plenty of surprises.

Two excerpts from Jean Isaacs’ “Love Dances” showed restless, unhappy young people caught in cycles of Dantean punishment. “Liebe” deployed seven Isaacs/McCaleb company dancers in turbulent statements of need and desperation while the accelerating frenzy of the solo “Heartbreak” showcased the stamina of Faith Jensen-Ismay. But, somehow, the choreography looked preliminary, unfinished.

Performed by members of Ballet Pacifica, William Soleau’s double duet, “Dream Dances,” ricocheted between formal adagio rhetoric and quasi-narrative, never deciding if it wanted to dabble in lyric abstraction or depict real people. Worse, the ballet courted overkill in pace and scale, with the men racing to sling the women over their shoulders during the slowest, most delicate music.

More ballet overkill occurred in Patricia Kirshner Stander’s “Romeo and Juliet” pas de deux, a competition showpiece disguised as a love duet, with Ashley Wheater of San Francisco Ballet looking exhausted by the relentless technical fireworks, but Helena Ross staying light, fleet and enraptured.

The artists presenting dances of India, Spain and Mexico neglected nuance in their forceful, disciplined segments, but at least Ramaa Bharadvaj and her Angahara Dancers added a ravishing sweetness to their performance of the devotional Hindu epic “Nadanta Natanam.”

Boasting the only live music on the program, Roberto Amaral’s “Zorongo Gitano” found Antonio de Jerez singing about lunar influences on passion while the equally authoritative Amaral and Linda Vega confronted one another in what looked more like a public test of wills than a courtship. Lots of heat but no chemistry.

With invigorating buoyancy, the 18 members of Ballet Folklorico del Pacifico brightly attacked dances of Guerrero in a suite adapted by Jose Vences. However, the celebrated iguana dance (in which lovesick men slither at the feet of their women) proved under-interpreted--just a playful charade compared to the mythic transformation achieved by some Mexican companies.

Mehmet Sander was the only choreographer on the Saturday program to forsake love as a subject, preferring to investigate the gymnastic and design possibilities of putting three people inside a transparent plastic cube. His “Inner Space” has been praised in these pages more than once, but it again looked sensational.