Energy and Attitude Drive Philadanco

Philadanco is a company that can find 50 ways for the beat to drive a dance. And when those ways are good, this Philadelphia-based troupe is like pure oxygen in a smog alert. You wake up, you think life’s not so bad, and you wish you could make those shapes, with that elegance and strength and just that amount of attitude.

This seems to happen when founder-artistic director Joan Myers Brown chooses choreographers who exploit the talent pool--16 dancers whose batteries never run low and whose considerable skills are forged from ballet, jazz, street moves and West African dance.

For their mixed program Saturday night at the Luckman Theatre at Cal State L.A., the best choices were two dance suites with titles as sassy as their steps. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s “The Walkin’, Talkin’, Signifying Blues Hips, Lowdown Throwdown” featured quirky or steady taped percussion by Junior “Gaba” Wedderburn and a series of scenes in which the women strutted plenty. The cleverly vibrant Hope Boykin began with a playfully powerful solo called “Batty Moves” (Jamaican slang for “Butt Moves”).

The last two sections seemed to take place in a dance class with definite “batty” overtones, as a line of dancers faced upstage, doing what spoken instructions told us was “the attitude walk” and getting “all up in it” with hip grinding, arm swinging and torso swiveling.

Talley Beatty’s “Pretty Is Skin Deep, Ugly to the Bone” quickened the pace. Made in 1976 and recently reconstructed (by Kim Y. Bears and Debora C. Hicks, the piece vibrated with jazzy, nonstop comings, goings and small solos in which dancers like Boykin, Bears, Brian Brooks and William Grinton unleashed their technical prowess and individual charm.

What Beatty’s work had going for it was vivid choreographic variation, which took advantage of the dancers’ articulated force and gleaming presentation. In Donald Byrd’s “Bamm” (1994) and Elisa Monte’s “Dreamtime” (1989), the performers were harnessed into a kind of homogenized, nonspecific aggression. The percussive beat in both pieces seemed to drive automatons who were on strange--and not very interesting--maneuvers.