Dance Review : Silayan Troupe Draws on Ethnic Roots for LATC Program

Watching the Silayan Dance Company in “Wings in Flight,” a mixed program at the Tom Bradley Theater of Los Angeles Theatre Center on the weekend, one could sense it is a company in process.

The clues were in the contrasts: lively Philippine folk tales told sing-song brightly, as if for children, next to an elegiac, moody, modern dance solo, and virtuosic dancers who speedily sliced through space one moment and joined stately processions of Muslim dances the next.

But no cultural whiplash injuries occurred; more interesting is Silayan’s challenge for us to rethink the evolutions of “traditional” dance--how it’s never stood still, how it absorbs and transforms. While starting out by trying to do Philippine folk dance as it was danced “at home,” the multiethnic company is now branching further out under the direction of founder Sonia Capadocia’s daughter, Dulce.

The younger Capadocia’s choreography was straightforwardly mimetic in works like “Juan and the Crocodile” (with an athletic, four-person beast and the agile antics of Manop Buranapramest as Juan), but was more inventive in the subtle touches of “The Legend of the Mayon Volcano,” the story of doomed lovers based on Igorot tribal myth. A mesmerizing bathing scene was created with the sultry yet detached swaying unison walk of handmaidens, who then settled into lyrical gathering and washing motions that seemed stirred by a gentle, unseen breeze.

Light, wave-like breaths and side-to-side shifts were present in much of Capadocia’s movement, echoing motifs in her staging of Muslim dances such as “Katsuduratan,” and her reconstruction of Ramon Obusan’s “Malakas at Maganda,” a sweetly simple creation-myth dance.

More dramatic moments worked too (many men with long sticks), but for now, it seemed that the gentle, swaying part of Silayan is saying something essential about identity--maybe the shifting part of identity that is still evolving.