Stirring Themes in Aman’s ‘World Beats’

Putting its emphasis on musicianship, the Aman International Music and Dance Ensemble opened the fourth “Summer Nights” season at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood over the weekend with a varied program titled “World Beats.”

Fine guest players from such specialist groups as Quetzalcoatl (Mexico) and Musicantica (Italy) alternated with the supremely versatile home team--the latter introducing an invigorating Cajun interlude that warmed the stage for the familiar Appalachia finale.

You might argue, however, that the musical highlight of the Saturday performance was exclusively vocal: an unaccompanied Bulgarian folk song sung with power and restraint by 13 Aman women. Immediately afterward, Richard Crum’s large-scale “Lazaruvane” ritual and finale involved those women in folk processions, pantomime and some highly intricate line dances with eight men--but it was their lyric vocalism earlier that remained in memory.

Moreover, Olga Skovran’s staging of an unaccompanied “Staro Bosansko Kolo” from Bosnia proved one of the evening’s most memorable dances, mostly because some secret, life-and-death agenda seemed to inform the actions of the six men and six women, endowing their fast, formal circle and couple formations with a grave intensity.

Aman co-founder Leona Wood’s newly revived Algerian women’s ensemble also conveyed this same sense that the colorful, fascinating dance on view represented merely one detail in a complex cultural panorama--that each of the eight women on stage knew every souk and back alley in North Africa and could tell more tales than Sheherazade, if given the incentive.

A life beyond the stage, that’s atmosphere in folkloric performance, and some of Aman’s suites remained clueless in this regard (Tahiti, Canada and Mexico, for example), however accurate or well-drilled they looked. But whenever a staging got beyond national step-patterns or even style into matters of consciousness, something special happened: something eminently worth celebrating, remembering and sitting on a chilly Hollywood hillside to see.