DANCE REVIEW : Dance Festival Salutes African Roots

There could hardly be a more vague mandate than to salute “Dance in America,” but it was the theme of the fifth annual Dance Roots Festival in two programs of diverse works at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on Friday and Saturday nights.

And, actually, producer Leslie Hardesty Sisson didn’t do a bad job of selecting some of the strongest influences in the mix. Coincidentally--or perhaps inevitably in this country--a sort of dance history of Afrocentric forms could be read through almost every piece. To see how dance roots sprout from unicultural seeds--in this case African villages--then blossom into many hybrid species like tap, jazz and hip-hop, this was the place to be.

For the oldest African roots, there was Sona Sane West African Dance Ensemble, with drummer-dancer Malang Bayo setting a furious pace for an engaging ensemble of musicians and dancers.

The polyphonic primacy of onstage percussion recurred in less sophisticated African-inspired works, like Sheetal Gandhi’s sweetly naive ode to mothers (“When Children Sleep”) and Ka-Ron Lehman’s “The Chosen One.”

Two tap segments showed a descendant form of African dance. Omar A. Edwards and Dormeshia Sumbry unleashed a vigorous, complex tap jam, while Richard Kuller’s more modest “Memphis Stomp” (with Gregory Gast and Kristin Wilkinson) looked like a charming “Mr. Smith Goes to Tap School.”

You could see the Irish jig influence on tap when Anne Albritton’s fleet footwork suited a taped rap song as well her traditional Irish music. Shaluza Boot Dancers did another kind of stepping, using hand slaps, hops and stamps to show how South African mine workers celebrate free time.

The jazz and hip-hop strains of Afrocentric evolution were well-represented by a string of mostly fresh, short pieces to taped popular music exuberantly performed by the young members of Tremaine Teen Company and LaVerne Reed Dance Company.

Both companies have many well-trained and rehearsed emerging professionals with an impressive sense of rhythm and attack, but their less-polished dancers also always looked good.

Mild amounts of ethnic fusion were found in flamenco by Laila and Adam del Monte, in Marla Bingham’s “Orenda” (in which subtle Native American weight shifts smoothly joined lyrical balletic steps), and in Malathi Iyengar’s medium-level bharata natyam. Announced as fusion, Naomi Goldberg’s “The Shade Never Was” was actually a straight modern dance fragment.

“Galileo/Jupiter/Apollo,” an overproduced, very bad ballet (with very good dancers) by Bethune Theatredanse was a low point. The high point for modern dance came with Siri Sat Nam’s “Phases,” basically a solo of mood and life changes done with a spare theatricality, wit and pathos.