Ririe-Woodbury Troupe’s Dream Sequences

The six performers of the Utah-based Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company danced like a dream on Friday night at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. In fact, they seemed to be dancing in a dream, since the program was dominated by the drifty, non-sequitur gesture of a predominate strain of contemporary modern dance.

David Rousseve gave the dancers their most substantial material with “Bittersweet Chocolate,” in which the rhythms of his own taped narration (as a lovelorn and wise old aunt) seemed to create the swirling, unexpected movements. Eventually, the hyperbolic violins of Wagner took over, and bodies became an ecstasy of rolling waves that turned into churning troubled waters. When narration returned, using repetition and love-sick simplicity, it floated around the dance like an unseen movement of the mind.

In Della Davidson’s “Night Story,” on the other hand, the voiced-over poetic text of an Isabel Allende story walked all over the idea that it needed dancing out. The details and force of Allende’s storytelling clearly outclassed the too-literal bodily translation.

Company co-founder Joan Woodbury’s “Seated but Not Settled,” a sort of cutely creative musical chairs, was the least dreamlike piece, and perhaps Douglas Nielsen’s “The Inky Deep” the most like a nightmare, since it revolved around nervous, fragmented segments and a short ladder that always needed climbing for no reason.

In Keith Johnson’s “Traveling (There Are No Stars in My Sky),” dancers returned to the lyrical combination of drifty limpness and dynamism they did so well, with bodies speeding forward, shaping and curving through the air like glassy water rushing over smooth stones. Here and with Rousseve’s piece, it was a stream of consciousness that made it easy to go with the flow.