DANCE REVIEW : ‘Calypso’: An Overamplified ‘Oba’ Wanna-be

A long time ago, Katherine Dunham taught American audiences to appreciate the wit and elegance of Caribbean performance traditions along with their seductive rhythmic splendors. For writer, producer, director and choreographer Ashley Elie, however, hard-sell Carnival excess is what’s worth commemorating in a 14-part revue called “Calypso Bacchanal.”

Running at the Ivar Theatre on weekends through Sept. 12, “Calypso Bacchanal” wants to be to Trinidad and Tobago what “Oba! Oba!” is to Brazil: a delirious, nightclub-style cavalcade of hedonism seasoned with native folklore. Along the way, the show offers a few words about multiracial harmony and celebrates island cultural diversity with musical numbers depicting influences from Africa and India.

Unfortunately, the words (including lyrics) are trashed by a sound system with only two settings: Painfully Overamplified or Utterly Inaudible. And that leaves the emphasis on flashy group dances and popular songs performed with plenty of energy but no particular distinction.

Elie is no ethnologist: His treatment of voodoo alone would qualify him for anthropological rehab. But the ridiculous glitz of “An African Ritual” does offer the charismatic Berton James Woods and the mercurial Amba opportunities to achieve a level of intensity impossible in their other relentlessly audience-courting specialties.

Among the major pleasures of the evening: the ingratiating singer Einstein Brown and Phillip A. Phillip, who dances on stilts, on broken glass (barefoot) and under the ever-descending limbo pole.

However, for a combination of performing skill and uncompromised dignity, nobody outclasses Ken Laurence’s Trinidad Steel Drum Band, a seven-member group that makes the whole theater vibrate like a giant music box. Besides reclaiming Mozart as people’s music, the band suggests a far different Caribbean perspective than Elie promotes--one infinitely more worthy of respect.

No sequins, no desperately sexy smiles, no flabby bare bottoms shaken in your face. Just black work clothes, a concentration on the job at hand--and music of celestial sweetness.