DANCE REVIEW : Lewitzky Troupe Introduces Susan Rose’s ‘Displacements’

When the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company presents choreography by someone other than its founder-director, that’s news. And when this interloper is reportedly a candidate for the newly created position of company co-director, fasten your seat belts.

The dance community has yet to learn how Lewitzky, her dancers, staff and board reacted to the premiere of Susan Rose’s “Displacements,” Saturday at Occidental College. But the Keck Theatre audience clearly enjoyed the work’s structural ingenuity and unusually forceful use of seven of the company’s most refined artists.

Currently on the faculty at UC Riverside, Rose began “Displacements” with John Pennington and Li Chun Chan cast as kinetic twins: Whenever somebody shoved one of them, both hurtled forward. Lift one and they both rose into the air.

Before beginning to exhaust the possibilities of this premise, Rose fractured and reassembled it, with tag-teams forming among the ranks and, eventually, movement phrases passed from dancer to dancer like hot gossip.

Less clear on a first viewing: Why Nancy Lanier became trapped inside a circle like the sacrificial virgin in Nijinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and ended up on a staircase of bodies reminiscent of a grouping in Lewitzky’s own “Spaces Between.” Also a mystery: how longtime Lewitzky collaborator Larry A. Attaway jettisoned his usual sensitively modulated style of music and composed a startling departure for Rose, rat-a-tat-tatting his way to glory on rhythm alone.

Brainy, breezy and energizing, “Displacements” made a persuasive audition piece, displaying other company facets than “Facets,” the familiar three-part Lewitzky/Attaway suite from 1986 that opened the program. Here Pennington’s spectacular balances in the second duet and Lanier’s extraordinary buoyancy in the first reminded even a partisan audience exactly how fine an instrument Lewitzky has shaped.

Lewitzky’s “Episode 3 (The Outsider)” from 1992 completed the program, utilizing Chan’s Chinese movement heritage to advantage in her striking Peking Opera-flavored solos that contrasted with loose, all-American athleticism for a small group. Attaway added the luxury of live accompaniment to this intimate, quasi-dramatic vehicle.