Kaleidoscope Works Present a Many-Sided ‘View’ of L.A.

Like Los Angeles itself, the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series consists of a pileup of many different traditions, contemporary styles of expression and rootless experiences without a focus or center. Defiantly noncuratorial on most occasions, it has in its last two seasons attempted brief escapes from the prison of its compulsive diversity through opening-night event programming.

A year ago, Dance K celebrated 10 years at Cal State L.A. by honoring major California choreographers with reconstructions of their vintage masterworks. On Friday, the Luckman Theatre hosted five newly commissioned pieces on the theme of “Los Angeles View,” though no consensus emerged from the evening--except, perhaps, that the potential excitement of premieres carries with it an equal potential for disaster.

That disaster loomed largest in Fred Strickler’s “Past the Past,” which featured tap-dancing to a rock band and required an intermission longer than the piece itself to get its floor mikes and other sound technology working--and then a fresh start when the technology fell apart early on. If the piece itself had little to say about Los Angeles, the hassles with equipment made an inadvertent statement about our obsession with amplified, electrified, 70-millimeter enhancements of human reality.

Functioning as a rebuke to such gadgetry, Oguri’s butoh solo “Protestation: Silent Shout” showed a body in extremis, struggling for balance and even survival. Relevance to L.A.? Definitely, both in theme and one crucial bit of stagecraft: Oguri lifting a large mirror-panel from the floor and aiming it at the audience, making everyone part of the picture.

In her work-in-progress “Los Angeles View, Phase 1: Spectacle, Scandal and Where Does the Truth Lie . . .,” Lula Washington began with halfhearted theater games parodying celebrity affectations, then settled into energetic dance evocations of L.A. extremes. But only black and white extremes, danced in adaptations of only Afro and Euro idioms: Not a trace of Latino L.A., the subject of Gema Sandoval’s “Fandango Angeleno,” a group showpiece portraying what gets lost, and what remains, when Central American immigrants become absorbed in a new dominant culture.

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Finally, Raiford Rogers provided one of his balletic distillations of L.A. cool: “Charms,” an ensemble piece in which, like Washington, he used objects to evoke subcultures (water bottles in her work, headphones in his) but remained more absorbed in a mood of noir alienation than the specifics of social portraiture.

Unfortunately, the result lacked the intriguing alternation between individual, character-based dances and more abstract group statements that distinguished previous Rogers projects for L.A. Chamber Ballet. It simply kept reshuffling a group of six dancers with another of five, and reworking a vocabulary emphasizing body weight and a kind of dogged steadiness. Meanwhile the stage wings and backdrops gradually ascended until the space looked as bare as the dancing.

A correction sheet given to critics--but not the audience--said that “Kaleidoscope requested a 20-minute piece. The complete ballet is about 35 minutes,” but that’s cheating isn’t it? Did Dance K set out to commission an excerpt or for that matter, a Washington work-in-progress? Why accept a commission if you can’t honor its conditions?

Under the circumstances, the program proved more notable for performances than choreography--though Sandoval earned new respect for mounting a cavalcade of Latin dances (classic folklorico to Tex-Mex and beyond) without ever losing sight of the sensual torso action and percussive footwork that united them. Her Danza Floricanto/USA looked comfortable in every style, and even the filmed sequences involving a devil and angel wryly commented on the process of acculturation.

The dancing in Washington’s piece began with a fabulous solo for Jamal Story: ballet, gymnastics, modern dance, African isolations, street moves and more brilliantly quoted at full power in less time than it takes to list them. But nobody else in the Lula Washington Dance Theatre had the stellar versatility to develop what Story had defined, though Tamica Washington made a hoop-twirling dance seem a life-or-death proposition and Daniel Marshall deserved his prominence as the ultimate survivor in the process-of-elimination marathon at the very end.

Pride of place on Friday, however, belonged to Strickler and Oguri, the former an icon of grace under pressure as well as a master of superbly fleet and intricate tap virtuosity. You could argue that his filigree style seems more suited to jazz music than the rock accompaniment here, that tougher, more forceful dancing would have worked better. But his standard of execution remained stratospheric.

As for Oguri, his ability to make lapses of equilibrium into a powerful statement about human vulnerability seems to grow surer season after season. What he does may not be dancing--it may be closer to the primal movement theater that legendary mime Marcel Marceau explored in his solo “Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death” at Hollywood Bowl the same night. But however you classify it, and however it relates to life in the City of the Angels, it takes us as deep as dance or theater can go.

* Dance Kaleidoscope continues with new programs in three different venues through Saturday. (323) 343-MOVE.