Toronto Dance Theatre Bounds With Energy

In its local debut at Pepperdine University on Friday, Toronto Dance Theatre emphasized accessibility, technical finesse and good manners--qualities not always associated with modern dance. And not exactly the same thing as innovation or inspiration.

With 14 dancers on the roster, this is a big company for North American modern dance, and the overall excellence of the execution gave surprising credibility to the generally formula-ridden choreography on view.

Four of the works were by artistic director Christopher House, who clearly likes scores dominated by propulsive motor-energy; spatial gambits in which individual dancers emerge from (and retreat to) social clusters; and cyclical structures in which you can tell you’re at the end of a piece because it looks exactly like the beginning.

In his “Glass Houses” (1983), five dancers in bright colors bobbed, twisted and scampered playfully to piano music by Ann Southam, sometimes adding gymnastic ploys to their buoyant interaction. Call it a game of dance--not so different in approach from “Island” (1989), which initially adopted a frieze-like, archaic look but soon settled into the same happy athleticism.

Here, however, the Steve Reich music and the prominence of the commanding Pascal Desrosiers gave the dancing a heightened scale that strongly projected all the nuggets of motion that House kept combining and juxtaposing.

In “Amor’s Gavottes” (1992), he tested his musicality against Mozart’s “Les petits riens,” attempting another breezy company showcase--with sudden, brief mirror-repeats (the same steps in the opposite direction) and gestural filigree fussing up the choreography to match Mozartian style. It didn’t work. Like the fragments of period attire added over casual contemporary clothes in the finale, the result looked cluttered and ungraceful.

House’s biggest risk came in “Early Departures” (1992), a male pas de quatre focusing none too clearly on what the program called “the uncertainty of relationships in a time of plague.” A dirge by John Rea accompanied fearful, feverish self-inspection and attempts at mutual support, punctuated for no evident reason by eruptions of swooping abandon. Like many AIDS ballets, it proved stronger in feeling than communication skills, but at least it failed at a deeper level than most of House’s other choreography succeeded.

Opening the program was “Visible Distance: A Bach Suite” (1992), by company co-founder David Earle: brisk, balletic, expert in its effects but perhaps a bit relentless and overloaded by the end. Taped music accompanied all the pieces.