Modern Troupe Offers New Works by Goldberg

From wry ritual observances of death to the establishment of new community, the Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet troupe powerfully traversed important conceptual ground when introducing two new works by founder Naomi Goldberg on a program Friday at Cal State Los Angeles.

Well, make that one-and-a-half works. Two sections of the new five-part “Sleepwalker’s Travel Guide” were considered unready and so were omitted, according to a spokeswoman for the company.

Left were a duet, a solo and a quartet, all brightly responsive to sweetly compelling New Orleans funeral-procession jazz played (on recording) by Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band.

Alissa Mello and Louis Trisoliere were stiff-jointed mourners (“Hotel on the Avenue of Fates and Furies”), contrasting with Susan Marie Castang’s upbeat, free ranging solo (“Hotel of the Great Secret”). Goldberg joined the three others in finding fluidly shifting images of mutual support (“Hotel of the Erased Name”).

Goldberg’s new two-part “American Studies” (music by John Adams) began almost as typical satire of Christian evangelical fundamentalism, but evolved into something quite different.

Castang, Goldberg, Mello and Miki Inoue were the first quartet of struggling, lock-step Congregationalists. Kathryn Sanders, Castang, Mello and Inoue made up the second quartet of women forging new alliances of relationship and community, a project that also closed the final work on the program, Goldberg’s “Immediate States” (reviewed in October at the “Prime Moves” program at Cal State L.A.).