The world learns some new steps

When Broadway dance diva Chita Rivera received one of the Kennedy Center Honors on Dec. 7, her award set the seal on a year that showcased Latinos in dance to an unprecedented extent.

Highlighted by September’s three-week Tierra Latina festival in Lyon, France, an event that offered Europe a greater concentration of Latino modernism than the continent had ever encountered, the trend also reached local stages with new kinds of Latino involvement in the Grand Performances summer programs at California Plaza downtown and the series at the John Anson Ford Theatre in Hollywood.

On other Southland stages, Latino activity proved equally eventful. In an encore season, the New World Flamenco Festival at the Irvine Barclay Theatre introduced artists exploring invigorating and sometimes radical approaches to a traditional art, while such companies as National Ballet of Spain and Noche Flamenca returned with updated artistic agendas or repertory.

Latino dancers also reached critical mass in a number of companies not identified with Latino culture.

Consider the choreography-challenged American Ballet Theatre, which never seems more exciting these days than when such paragons as Julio Bocca, Jose Manuel Carreno, Paloma Herrera, Angel Corella, Joaquin de Luz, Stella Abrera, Herman Cornejo and their compadres dominate the casting. Call it Latin American Ballet Theatre on such occasions -- and be very, very grateful.

In the first Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film, “Flying Down to Rio,” a gringa asks plaintively, “What have these South Americans got below the equator that we haven’t?” Interesting question, even if we ignore the innuendo and expand the frame of reference to embrace the whole Spanish-speaking world.

Your answer might differ from mine -- I think it’s a commitment to mastering state-of-the-art technique and style without diminishing the passion that inspired a dance career to begin with. But whatever the reason, the growing prominence of Latinos in dance could well transform the art in the U.S. and, particularly, the Southwest during the next few years. Some of us just can’t wait.

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Lewis Segal’s best of 2002

Here are the most memorable local dance performances of the year from one aficionado’s calendar, in chronological order.

Philadanco danced a Black History Month modern dance program at El Camino College in February that probed beyond mere celebrations of blackness to explore the uniqueness of African American identity. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s imaginative “Hand Singing Song” caused the greatest stir by using handshakes and other gestures from the black community as evidence of her people’s deep creative impulse.

Antonio Marquez had danced locally six years ago with National Ballet of Spain, but this flamenco firebrand arrived at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and other local venues in March as an international sensation -- and for once, the hype proved justified. Fine proportions, sensitive musicality, magically expressive hands and the knack for projecting every movement detail to the next galaxy lent his dancing extraordinary impact.

Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet arrived at the Kodak Theatre in June unheralded and little known in the U.S., but it displayed a fresh, incisive command of classical style. Although many of its innovations had been plundered long ago by other companies, Vladimir Bourmeister’s 1953 version of “Swan Lake” proved the strongest production -- startling for its surreal ballroom scene and the use of the original score instead of the traditional cut-and-paste job.

Mauro Bigonzetti’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” turned out to be the most original and compelling dance drama of the year, transforming Shakespeare’s comedy into a daring contemporary meditation on irrational desire. Boasting a rich commissioned score by Elvis Costello, the ballet received its U.S. premiere in July at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, danced by Italy’s accomplished, versatile and sensual Aterballetto company.

Andres Marin presented his controversial update of flamenco at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in August, looking like a workman and dancing with jackhammer force. In his 90-minute “Mas alla del Tiempo” (Beyond Time), his deliberately roughhewn technique, curt stage demeanor and grungy appearance seemed to defy tradition. Yet Marin ultimately extended it by stripping away the excesses and mannerisms that keep the art linked to the past.

Marcel Marceau remains unchallenged as the poet of pantomime, and his engagement at the Geffen Playhouse in August not only confirmed his stature at age 79, but also set an imposing standard for the new century. Every mime depicts invisible objects and human foibles -- although seldom with such mastery of gestural nuance. But who else wordlessly reenacts the creation of the world or comments on the corruption of art or physicalizes the duality of human nature?

“Mare Tranquillitatis” created some of the year’s most indelible images on an outdoor platform stage in front of the Japan America Theatre. Part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in September, Hirokazu Kosaka’s multidisciplinary tribute to the harvest moon used pieces of paper sculpted by the wind to depict the impermanence of all things, including the people watching this profound vision of our place in the cycle of time.

The Junebug Symphony is at once the name of a performing company and its current production, both of them offering deeply whimsical and poetic movement theater at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse in October. Brilliant 28-year-old gymnast James Thierree wrote, directed and starred, fusing the hallucinatory theatrical style pioneered by Eugene O’Neill (his great-grandfather) with the inspired physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin (his grandfather).

The Sean Curran Dance Company focused on tributes to the past in an emotionally resonant modern-dance program at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in October. The happiest piece depicted how vintage pop culture transformed our images of ourselves, the saddest how the memories of people no longer with us haunt our consciousness. Ambitious concepts, imaginative choreography, memorable dancing: Curran’s reach proved masterly.

The Cullberg Ballet made its local debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall in October, introducing one more radical “Swan Lake,” this one by Swedish dance iconoclast Mats Ek. From his barefoot, bald, contorted swan corps to an ending in which the Prince chose the carnal black swan instead of the virginal white one, Ek’s version confounded expectations and asked the audience to consider alternative insights, plus a fresh, complex approach to Tchaikovsky dancing.

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Disappointment

Disappointment of the year: the Bolshoi Ballet in “La Bayadere” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in November. Arriving after dancing other ballets in other cities, the company wasn’t ready to open, the production proved a dud and only one of the three casts offered anything like the old Bolshoi excitement. Very expensive Russian roulette.

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.