Hispanico Outclasses Its Selections : Dance review: Tina Ramirez’s New York ballet troupe is impressive, but the contemporary showpieces lack distinction and integrity.

During the last 25 years, founder Tina Ramirez has shaped Ballet Hispanico of New York into an institution resembling the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in its emphasis on building an eclectic modern-dance repertory, on providing community outreach and on offering professional opportunities to dancers of color.

Working from a technical base dominated by classical ballet infused with elements of flamenco, Ramirez’s 12-dancer ensemble looked impressive in a four-part program at Occidental College on Thursday. But, if the company again proved itself a treasure, the repertory represented a liability: a collection of rootless contemporary showpieces lacking distinction or even much integrity.

The dance-hall duet from Venezuelan veteran Vicente Nebrada’s “El Baquine” smoothly recycled exhibition-ballroom platitudes to music by Willie Colon but depended totally for its impact on the heat and prowess of two devastatingly attractive young performers: Veronica Ruiz and Donald Roman Lopez.

The full-company “Si, Senor! Es Mi Son!” squandered the vitality of Gloria Estefan recordings on a curiously static cavalcade of Cuban social dances spiced with colorful quasi-folkloric processions.

Choreographed by Cuban ballet hack Alberto Alonso (best known for the dreadful “Carmen Suite” performed internationally by his sister-in-law Alicia and by Maya Plisetskaya), it dabbled at contrasting pop trends and an enduring national culture without defining either very strongly.

In the same way, the score for Amanda Miller’s “Two by an Error” ricocheted from Baroque classicism to tinny recordings of old Spanish pop hits. However, Miller’s expert, all-purpose swirl-and-stretch choreography for four women and two men obliterated any changes of accompaniment in its relentless and ultimately enervating fixation on postmodern flow.

The sole relief from the wan choreographic proficiency on view Thursday: the septet “Good Night Paradise,” a passionate statement of collective unhappiness by Catalan modernist Ramon Oller. Set to intense guitar and vocal music, it immediately established an intriguing counterpoint between mimetic, everyday actions (somebody folding linen, for example) and surging, sinewy group dancing.

The terrible sight lines of Thorne Hall blocked much of Oller’s floor work, but not his brilliant use of hands--hands drifting up and away from the body to define a separate reality, hands suddenly lashing out, pummeling a partner’s chest, flinging a drink or pulling the person into yet another fleeting sexual liaison. Hands as a center of energy, hands with a life of their own, hands as another layer of meaning in a work teeming with strange and complex relationships between emotion and movement expression.

* Ballet Hispanico appears tonight at 8 in the Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. (714) 432-5880. Tickets: $23-$29.