DANCE REVIEW : Bale Folclorico Trips on Choreography

On its first U.S. tour, the 9-year-old Bale Folclorico da Bahia appeared Saturday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa in a program suggesting that Brazil’s rich cultural traditions can be best seen under lurid colored light and best heard over deafening loudspeakers.

The company’s 15 dancers, five musicians and two singers are uniformly sensational--and they need to be, for the choreography by general director Walson Botelho and artistic director Jose Carlos Arandiba cheapens and misrepresents native folkloric resources for the purpose of lowbrow diversion.

Consider the love duet in Arandiba’s “Berimbau” sequence, for example, in which capoeira kicks and stances alternate with standard nightclub-style gymnastic lifts and intimate body-stroking. Capoeira has always been both a dance form and a martial arts discipline in Brazil--but here it’s offered as steamy foreplay, just as the Botelho/Arandiba “Samba de Roda” sequence makes a street-ful of Bahia character types seem uniformly sex-obsessed. How do you say “sleazy tourist show” in Portuguese?

Happily, another Brazil briefly emerges in pieces by Rosa^ngela Silvestre: a Brazil in which spirited young people dance for their own pleasure and set a high standard of sophistication even at the furious speeds of African-derived showpiece ensembles. The innate elegance and coherence of Silvestre’s choreography shows exactly what’s missing elsewhere on the program and suggests that a major international ensemble could well emerge in Bahia--with new leadership and priorities.