DANCE REVIEW : Energetic Show From Lar Lubovitch Co.

Rejecting the appeal of the XVII Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, a near-capacity audience filled the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday to see the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company.

What people saw was a strong, energetic, vibrant troupe in four works with less to offer than meets the eye. All the choreography was by the company’s founder.

In “Four Ragtime Dances,” he churned out idea after idea after idea, shifting between lyricism and brassiness to match the abrupt changes in four ragtime pieces by Charles Ives. Lubovitch must have incorporated every dance movement cliche ever seen in minstrel shows, Broadway musicals and Hollywood movies, but without fusing connections between them.

Similarly, his spendthrift movement imitations and permutations in “Marimba” failed to generate any visual momentum and logic, and often, in fact, did not seem even to be initiated by the changes in Steve Reich’s minimalist score (18 minutes of “Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ”).

“Waiting for the Sunrise,” an eight-part suite to pop hits by Les Paul and Mary Ford and by Johnny Puleo and His Harmonica Gang, is clearly designed to please an audience, as it did when Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project ensemble danced it in 1991 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Here, the lanky Scott Rink danced the hit solo “Tennessee Waltz”; Rebecca Rigert and Jeffrey Hankison were the jitterbug couple in “There’ll Never Be Another You.” For all its easy appeal, though, the piece revealed nothing about the songs or their period, and looked soulless and cold.

Of all the works, the most interesting and least compromised was “Fandango,” a duet to Ravel’s “Bolero” in which the on-again/off-again eroticism owed more to the gym than to the Kama Sutra. Mia Babalis and Lane Sayles were the virtuosic couple whose tough, architectural, impossible entanglements, unfolding in ways that offset the hypnotic score, varied between cool and hot.

The New York-based company was the latest in the Feet First Contemporary Dance Series sponsored jointly by the Irvine theater and UCI Cultural Events. The troupe will dance the world premiere of Lubovitch’s “So in Love” at Wadsworth Theater in Westwood on Friday and his “Concerto Six Twenty-Two” there on Saturday, along with works seen in Irvine.