DANCE REVIEW : Benita Bike Co. Lifts Craft Over Content in Long Beach

A closet traditionalist, Benita Bike makes artfully shaped, carefully constructed modern dance more focused on movement values than expressive content.

At Cal State Long Beach on Saturday, Bike’s four-woman, locally based DanceArt company explored gender issues and national identity among other contemporary subjects. But her four contrasting, essentially meditative pieces remained committed to the display of choreographic craft and dancer refinement above all.

With its sound collage of deconstructed anthems and quasi-documentary talk, Bike’s restless “Reflections on Being American” worked the hardest at being socially aware. But the movement extremes of the piece--sunny balletic turning leaps for parade-ground patriotism versus clenched, terror-stricken pantomime to gunfire--seemed to interest her more as etudes than as paths to the formal unisons closing the piece.

Boasting an atmospheric score by Bike’s longtime collaborator Dean Wallraff, the suite “Songs of Change” again knit a number of striking images into a social panorama--this one of struggle and endurance.

Brook Notary and Rebecca Pringle proved especially versatile here, but Bike’s final dance-of-change left them and their colleagues at a loss: Coming out of intense depictions of interpersonal relationships, their four-woman pole-dance made a curious finale, a divertissement without much more than dexterity in its favor. Maybe the earlier sections had become more involving than Bike intended, but this switcheroo into pure formality simply didn’t play.

As executed by Cari Reese Beehler and Sharon Hoy, “Little Dances With Women” explored a forceful, full-bodied physicality incorporating gymnastics and stances borrowed from bullfighting. Very strongly etched in space, it achieved a bolder feminist tone than Bike’s “Angels and Wantons,” but without the lushness and subtle permutations of the latter: a moody quartet not nearly as violent in its contrasts as the title suggests.

The whole program Saturday benefited from the accomplished lighting of Doreen Tighe and the deluxe creature comforts of the Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater.