A Splashy but Flawed ‘Love and Death’

At a time when concert dance is terminally marginalized in America, nobody works harder than Naomi Goldberg to widen the audience base, demystify choreography and make dancing a participatory community event.

As its name proclaims, her Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet combines dance disciplines along with finding a way for non-dancers to share the stage with company pros. Year after year, she attracts full houses to the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, with the premiere there of “Love and Death” on Saturday another example of her popularity.

Keeping Goldberg’s devotion to outreach and access in mind, shouldn’t we just say a large audience applauded warmly and leave it at that? Isn’t that what we say about “Billboards,” most every “Nutcracker” and each new Michael Smuin ballet?

Certainly, there’s no point in comparing Goldberg’s “Love” showpiece to what Balanchine, Robbins, De Mille and others achieved working with Richard Rodgers’ music--or what Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp did to transform the pop song-suite as a creative form. Bypassing all that, Goldberg concentrates on the bottom line: seeking the splashiest display opportunities for her company in the rhythmic pulse, melodic sweep and lyric content of 13 Rodgers and Hart records.

Significantly, she chooses a bowdlerized rewrite of “Bewitched” over the lusty original show-lyric, and the biggest laughs in her piece come from the wordplay in “To Keep My Love Alive” rather than any jokes in the choreography. Guest Christopher Aponte brings enormous flair to the buoyant “I’ve Got Five Dollars” solo and guest Nicholas Gunn manages to infuse the sculptural poses and liquid transitions of “My Funny Valentine” with intense feeling.

But movement invention is conspicuously missing and, worse, there’s no love in “Love”--just vacant smiles and a hand-me-down style combining ballet technique with exhibition-ballroom placement. Relationships are kept lightweight, unconsummated, asexual, and so the proper answer to Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” is no. It’s mediocre.

There’s also no peace or sense of release in “Death,” Goldberg’s restless and often downright confusing 10-part suite to music mostly from the 10th through 16th century church.

The key image here (expanded by two dozen community guests in the finale): dancers cradling one another in statements of individual and collective support for the dying. Goldberg repeatedly makes those cast as victims and survivors switch roles and then switch back, reinforcing the randomness and universality of death at the cost of imposing a numbing predictability on her piece.

Gunn again probes more deeply than anyone else and Aponte lends his authority to a very inconsequential solo--but it’s frustrating to watch him shoring up Goldberg choreography when his own 1991 “Adagietto” duet (last seen locally at “Dance Kaleidoscope” four years ago) spoke far more eloquently about suffering, loss and a sense of communion.

Soloists Bambi Swayze, Alissa Mello, Jian Min Hao and Goldberg herself helped sustain a high level of execution Saturday and the lighting by Mitchell S. Levine created intriguing spatial emphases on the Ford hillside stage.