Dance Theatre of Harlem Spins Styles to Strong Effect

If the upper half of your body wants to boogie but the lower half prefers ballet, you’re perfect for the kind of program presented Friday by Dance Theatre of Harlem at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Throughout two extended suites on this four-part contemporary program, colloquial gestures and torso moves originating in the African American community embellished and punctuated classical steps originating in the royal courts of Europe. At best, the stylistic playoffs reflected the complex, dual perspectives that inform artists of color; at worst, they revealed a fractured sense of cultural identity. But, either way, they showcased the technique and versatility of the Harlem company with maximum impact.

Robert Garland’s 1999 rock divertissement “Return” found plenty of humor in the bold juxtapositions of street attitude and classical formality, hip wiggles and pointe work. Dancing to recordings by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, his 12-member cast worked hard to make all the switcheroos look not just effortless but endearing--a kind of party game in which Preston Dugger, for instance, could strut insolently through “Superbad,” toss off a hard-sell series of pirouettes yet end up looking boyishly cute.

Paunika Jones defined the work’s hybrid stance in her opening and closing solos, ricocheting between extremes with faultless control, while a number of others (Bethania Gomes and Lenore Pavlakos, in particular) looked born to the collage of idioms that a Garland program note labeled “post-modern urban neoclassicism.”

Garland frequently ran out of ideas midway through a solo or duet, but had the grace at those moments to stage fade-outs involving a few extra dancers and then try something new. You could argue that he never decided which of three different finales he preferred, so included all of them: a display of flashy classical steps on the diagonal a la the Bolshoi “Ballet School”; a jaunty parade through a double line of dancers a la some New York Vogue house; and an outburst of mass whirling.

But his caprices proved preferable to the joyless, unyielding action plan of choreographer Dwight Rhoden in “Twist,” and his dancers never betrayed the strain evident in section after section of Rhoden’s plotless 1999 suite to music by Antonio Carlos Scott.

A kind of child’s garden of neoclassicism, “Twist” featured the same contrasts between colloquial and classical moves as “Return,” but drastically pared down, drained of vitality and set against smoky vistas featuring long, narrow bands of color that traveled behind the dancers and sometimes appeared overhead. The look and sound seemed forever to promise something momentous, or at least genuinely original.

It never happened. “Twist” turned out to be what they call a dry hustle: an empty tease, very demanding in its pulled-up classical style, but so devoid of flow that the dancers had to attack it task by task. One of the few principals to nail the choreography with no sweat, Kellye A. Saunders (she of the woodsy thigh tattoo), had the benefit of exemplary partnering by Donald Williams. Other Harlem paragons such as Don Bellamy, Leslie Anne Cardona and Lynda Sing coped resourcefully and broke out into something resembling expressive freedom whenever possible.

In the dance-drama “Memento Mori,” the sinewy Ramon Thielen stalked three happy, color-coded couples in the role of a menacing figure who not only reminded mortals of their eventual deaths but actually conducted one of them from this world to the next.

Augustus van Heerden’s startling set (a portal that rapidly irised open to the full width of the stage) may have outclassed his merely serviceable choreography, but dances of death speak profoundly to audiences in every generation, and this one, created five months ago, boasted an intense score by Peteris Vasks as well as committed performances by Thielen, Kip Sturm (the victim), Saunders (his bereft partner) and the others.

Completing the program: Royston Maldoom’s familiar and still effective “Adagietto #5,” a lyric 1976 trio to Mahler that found Amy Johnson torn between the passionate Mark Burns and the enigmatic Kevin Thomas, who may have represented her memory of a past love. Even without the contrasting vocabularies of such works as “Return” and “Twist,” dancers can seem to inhabit different planes of existence and interact metaphysically. As Maldoom and Van Heerden showed, what you see is very often far less than what you get.