‘Aeros’ Gymnastics Impress but Lack Dramatic Impact

Ballet and modern dance have borrowed technical fireworks from gymnastics for so long that replacing dancers with gymnasts might seem overdue--a chance for audiences to experience nonstop bravura with no artsy padding. You might even suspect that American Ballet Theatre and a few other companies have already made such a switch without telling anyone.

You’d be wrong. As “Aeros” conclusively and invaluably proved at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, the gulf between gymnastics and dance is a lot like the difference between data and metaphor, physical reality and poetic illusion, a discipline and an art.

After all, when a platoon of high-profile choreographers who have spent decades infusing dance with gymnastics can’t nudge champion Romanian gymnasts across the great divide, you know that the dichotomy is real. And that’s the “Aeros” dilemma at its core.

Make no mistake: The 18-member company’s coordinated flying, vaulting, flipping, cartwheeling maneuvers are indeed awesome, and “Aeros” also raises the bar for dance when it comes to matched slow-and-steady virtuosity as well as perfect control of the angles that bodies can define in space.

The athletes of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation throw themselves onto and across tables, stools, trampolines, rings, parallel bars and a giant, jiggling/rotating jungle gym with faultless brilliance. But most of the time there’s nothing going on besides technical display, and it soon grows thin.

Perhaps the clearest example comes early in Act 2 with a lyric duet for Cristian Moldovan and Lacramioara Filip under a giant moonlike disk. As she balances off his back in ever more impossible positions, you marvel at their skill but never find in the partnership any suggestion of romance, any hint that something more than skill is at issue.

Any ballet cavalier worth watching would have supported Filip’s balances as an act of worship, and made you see her as miraculous. But Moldovan and Filip perform together efficiently, impersonally, asexually, and that moon might as well be a digital scoreboard.

Even on the event’s own terms, there are disappointments. The Act 2 trampoline showpiece, for instance, lacks the spectacular aerial design of Elizabeth Streb performances, and Streb’s daring emphasis on high-impact landings and plunges through plate glass is likewise missing here.

For dance fans, some of the fun of “Aeros” comes from guessing which sections were created by which of the five famous choreographers listed in the program as co-directors. Did, for example, confirmed technophile David Parsons arrange the trio for swirling ropes under black light? Did scrim-and-projection addict Moses Pendleton devise the swimming sequence with its enormous slide-screen bubbles? And did Daniel Ezralow expand the off-the-wall comedy he used to explore with Jamey Hampton in ISO into a mock-competitive men’s quartet around a kitchen table?

Probably not. All we know is that “Aeros” is officially a collaborative endeavor and that Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas of “Stomp” not only added their input to the staging but also supervised the composition of a heavily percussive original score by the TTG Music Lab of Toronto.

Lit with a painter’s eye by Howell Binkley, “Aeros” may initially seem the ultimate statement of a whole stream of postmodernism that began with Pilobolus Dance Theatre (co-founded by Pendleton) 30 years ago. Inform gymnastics and other non-dance vocabularies with a dance sensibility, and you had something genuinely new and exploratory that you could call movement theater, kinetic sculpture, action painting--anything to distinguish it from idioms focused on a single technique.

But that dance sensibility came from inside the performers/creators of Pilobolus 30 years ago. In “Aeros” it has been imposed by the co-directors, and it contradicts all the imperatives of the performers’ training and experience.

Those imperatives ultimately dominate the evening and chill it to the bone. In its own way, gymnastics is as restrictive as any highly codified dance technique, and once “Aeros” dramatizes its many difficulties and challenges, it has absolutely nowhere to go.

* “Aeros,” Jan. 23-24, 8 p.m., at California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido. $15-$42. (800) 988-4253; Jan. 25-26, 8 p.m., Jan. 27, 2 and 8 p.m., Jan. 28, 2 p.m., at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in Westwood. $20-$35. (310) 825-2101.