‘Cocktails With Joey’ Swings With Style

In a year that has already brought local audiences such pop dance disasters as the Joffrey Ballet’s lurid “Legends” and the Cleveland San Jose Ballet’s mindless “Blue Suede Shoes,” it took our own L.A. Chamber Ballet to reveal the secret of successfully combining jukebox music with classical dance: Always work from the inside.

Collaborating with “mambo noir” icon Joey Altruda, Chamber Ballet director-choreographer Raiford Rogers brought his new suite, “Cocktails With Joey,” to Cal State L.A. on Saturday for an evening of consummate swing. In a set preceding the Chamber Ballet’s appearance, Altruda’s 18-piece orchestra bristled with exemplary soloists and delivered a sophisticated, Latinized blare that put the genre of lounge music on a pedestal.

It would have been easy for a choreographer to copy the externals of Altruda’s sleek retro style--for instance, to clothe all the male dancers in the same black smoking jacket with lavender lapels that Altruda wore when leading the orchestra in Act 1. Instead, Rogers kept his seven women and four men in sleeveless, skintight unitards--ballet working clothes--and imposed few flashy agendas on the music. Rather, he listened deeply and out of what he heard developed a unique movement style--something far more difficult and satisfying than merely forcing a ballet dancer onto a trapeze (“Legends”) or into a teddy bear costume (“Blue Suede Shoes”).

In passages of remarkable flow and elegance, Rogers developed persuasive dance equivalents for Altruda’s distinctive energy, rhythmic attack and patterns of diversification. Moreover, as in all his best works, he conjured up a dreamlike contemporary landscape in which people’s emotions became transparent and luminous, the most intimate expression of the music.

With Ben Kubie in the opening sequence and Michael Mizerany in the “Christy” duet opposite Lisa Gillespie, the artful use of stance and empty space combined with the music to tell you exactly what these men were feeling, while the women’s ensemble dances inventively physicalized the ideal of easygoing, warmhearted, all-American glamour that underpins so much pop culture. No vulgarity, no parody and only fleeting lapses into special effects. Miraculous.

Among her very atmospheric strategies, lighting designer Liz Stillwell used hidden smoke pots against a bright sky backdrop to evoke the sense of cities and maybe whole societies burning just beyond our line of sight: exactly the noir perspective needed to set Rogers’ vibrant but sweetly sad dances in context. It was a night in which all the artists and technicians seemed to be working at the top of their talents.