Folklorico Troupe Can’t Sustain Its Fire

Ballet Folklorico “Quetzalli” de Veracruz is a pleasant, well-trained company that treads an uneasy line between very theatricalized folk dance--in which costumes are always glittering and identical, and virtuosity prevails--and “actual” folk dance, in which repeated steps, authentic or not, are potentially monotonous.

On Wednesday night, the company of 12 dancers and four musicians, under the direction of Hugo Betancourt Morales (with Jorge Ivan Velasco and Jose Manual Vasquez Dominguez directing the musicians), performed to a relatively small crowd at Bovard Auditorium on the campus of USC.

They were well-received and, in fact, were occasionally dazzling, especially their unison stamping and expert bouncing turns in “Danzas de Concheros,” and the women’s symphony of skirt twirling in one section of “Nayarit.”

Much of the repertory was presented in their 1996 engagement at Orange Coast College, but the technical quality of the dancing has improved, while the nuance-deprived choreography has not. At many times--in “Guerrero” and the Veracruz suite, for instance--an unvarying use of step patterns and predictable formation shifting made for less than involving numbers.

A lack of scenery or dynamic lighting didn’t help, nor did amplification problems that sometimes saddled songs with all the echo of bus terminal announcements.

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Still, the main problem is choreographic--how to build energy and how to keep it alive with dynamic play. Mexican folkloric dancing only has so many steps to work with, but it can have many moods. The “Quetzalli” company seemed either marooned in a somber, devoted gloom (a suite honoring the Virgin Mary was more lackluster than moving) or celebrating with brisk rhythmic stepping. The latter was invariably accompanied with a too-insistent soundscape of traditional hoots, trilling and whistles.

The best of both worlds--the village and the stage--seems to require a combination of staging strategies. While this Veracruz-based troupe has a lot of the recipe ingredients, they aren’t blended well into the mix yet.