DANCE REVIEW : Pacific Ensemble Delivers a Varied Program : The five-part contemporary bill at the Brentwood School showcases five distinctive styles.

Displaying their versatility by tackling five distinctive contemporary styles during a single Thursday program at the Brentwood School, the members of Pacific Dance Ensemble also managed to highlight something the choreographers had in common: reliance on drastic juxtaposition as a major element in their work.

Rudy Perez’s company is no longer large enough to perform his 1985 “Fall-Out” and Ferne Ackerman’s locally based group no longer exists, so the evening offered pleasures available nowhere else--in particular Ackerman’s powerful new “Perseverance.”

A brilliantly structured whirlwind of a dance, “Perseverance” harnesses the dynamism of music by Shostakovich to propel sharply defined yet engulfing movement dialogue between four dancers in green and three in orange. This physical counterpoint, and the constant changes of level and direction in the vocabulary, builds up tremendous force before Ackerman’s sly, surprise payoff at the end.

Although complemented by Lloyd Rodgers’ score, the equally incessant contrasts of “Fall-Out” looked less like inspired music visualization than pitiless social satire. Here, sleek, identically dressed dancers hurtle through brief spasms of activity divided by fearful pauses--their self-control constantly eroding as walking steps turn into rigid marches or woozy staggers.

Joe Goode’s clever new “Notes on L” offered a few passages of tidy, academic modern dance, but most of the time shaped gestural movement to underscore--and often ironically undercut--quasi-autobiographical texts spoken in turn by each of the five dancers. The subject? Love in all its banal, crazy, uncontrollable splendor.

The same theme informed the inventive 1992 character-based duet, “Deadman,” by Jeffrey Moore and Shel Wagner. Here the ultimate dysfunctional dance-partnership inexorably evolved into the ultimate dysfunctional--yet enduring--marriage. An antic Derek Penfield and a deadpan Danielle Shapiro conveyed the comedy skillfully enough, but the darker edges of need in the work remained unexplored.

A Led Zeppelin suite designed to counter what choreographer Janis Brenner calls “ ‘60s-bashing,” her new “Ton of Led” seemed to aim for the validating, anarchic freedom of Bebe Miller’s “Jimi Hendrix Project.” Unfortunately, Brenner quickly became bogged down in distracting literal pantomime (people getting stoned, for instance) that seldom funneled interest into her propulsive group dances.

The dances themselves sometimes quoted period originals and elsewhere adopted more recent concepts such as women lifting men. Everything Brenner tried clashed with something else and the result kept misfiring or fizzling out.

Performances continue through Sunday afternoon.