Helios’ Moves Range From Amusing to Baffling

Helios Dance Theater, a small, locally based contemporary ensemble, has collected a following over the last few years--enough to sell out Schoenberg Hall at UCLA on Saturday night for the group’s most recent program of works by artistic director Laura Gorenstein Miller. But their momentum was occasionally stalled in the zone of “where is this piece going” and “is cute playfulness enough?”

For instance, the 1997 piece “Sisters” rambled as three dancers connected by their braids revolved around each other. And “Electric Lilys,” a 1997 solo expanded into a trio, looked like techno-pop noodling interspersed with moody introspection that wanted to be satire or earnest commentary--but couldn’t decide which.

Most dynamic was the premiere of “Yellow Roses,” in which Loni Palladino-Lane and Diana Mehoudar created a quirky world of energetic and lyrical adolescent musing--adolescent because it consisted of big, sprawling movement, seemingly powered by restless, meandering curiosity. To Ry Cooder’s cowpoke versions of “He’ll Have to Go” and “Yellow Roses,” they shrugged, stretched and struck romantic poses as if they’d seen them in a movie, affectionately leaning, and wrestling.

A short slide show, unconnected to the piece, was its pert denouement--a funny, “Zelig”-like “Brief History of Helios,” in which sketches by Chris Miller showed the dancers “paying dues” everywhere from the Boston Tea Party to the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Less amusing was a new piece called “Red Foxx” which had Mehoudar gyrating in an oversized Afro wig atop 3-foot-high platform shoes (built by Jeff Frost)--a kind of Mother Ginger meets disco jerk.

A similar, surface-level humor dominated parts of “Angels’ Domain,” a 1997 piece to which two new sections have been added. Despite some sharp Python-esque animation (by Chris Miller), much of the piece’s humor was stuck in a kind of capering, ‘60s-movie cuteness or else overwhelmed by stately, evocative taped music.

Like much of modern dance these days, Helios often features a lot of enigmatic gesture and flopping spines that whip forward and rebound relentlessly. But there is also an attempt at expanding this vocabulary, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not quite coalescing into something powerful.