Israel’s Liat Dror/Nir Ben Gal Cooks Up a Hot Performance

Fusing contemporary dance with traditional idioms from North Africa and the Middle East, the Liat Dror/Nir Ben Gal Company of Israel provided an unstinting display of power, sensuality and stamina in USC’s Bovard Auditorium on Tuesday.

Named after its two founders, the 9-year-old ensemble cultivates a scruffy, proletarian image, beginning this uninterrupted two-hour performance by making bread onstage, putting it in small electric ovens at the back and, after the curtain calls, distributing it to the audience as slightly burnt offerings.

OK, so these dancers can’t bake--but they sure can cook, from the hot, intricate solos by Orit Alkabetz early in the evening-length dance drama to the steamy undressing duet for Hannan Marsiano and Alkabetz that launches the engulfing finale.

An imaginatively expanded use of undulation forms the core of the dancing, with the four women and three men constantly stretching up on their toes and then sweeping down to touch the floor while sustaining their torso rotations--not exactly conventional belly dance.

This swooping athletic style looks as good on the men as the women, as virtuosic on the skinny dancers as on the fleshy ones,and may somewhat eclipse the full-evening piece on view:”The Dance of Nothing,” from 1998.

Accompanied by three fine onstage musicians as well as recordings, this Dror/Gal collaboration doesn’t so much tell an Israeli-Palestinian love story as make occasional, oblique references to it, aiming for a kind of generalized, ecstatic sense of union. A spoken fable about generosity in loving spells out the theme (as does the gifts of bread), but nothing could be more generous than how much of themselves these young dancers put into every moment.