Yorke Project Matches Mood to Movement

At the El Portal Center for the Arts in North Hollywood on Friday, the Yorke Dance Project presented five works by three choreographers who have in common experience performing with the Lewitzky Dance Company. In various styles, they explored the relationship between mood, movement and music in straightforward terms, sometimes following narrative clues provided by lyrics, sometimes matching a dancer’s movements to an instrument’s path.

Looking strongest was “Tailored,” a Baroque-inspired premiere by Yolande Yorke-Edgell, the artistic director who founded the company in 1997. Set to Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto in D minor and full of balletic lilt, it featured four barefoot women, dressed in costumes that suggested 18th century formal wear. With careful buoyancy, they seemed to be moving through still air, combining delicately placed formal steps with the motif of one arm rising gently and settling into a classical curve.

Yorke-Edgell’s other premiere, “Promesse,” also aimed for a musically inspired lyricism, but this time, the choreography seemed overwhelmed by the score. Michael Mizeraney and Roger Gonzalez Hibner kept stretching into shapes of some sort, but who could keep their eyes from drifting to tenor Bruce Sledge and baritone Eli Villanueva, guests from the Los Angeles Opera, singing exquisitely, swaying slightly and filling every molecule of air with Bizet’s famously compelling duet from “The Pearl Fishers”? You could tell by the title that no flow was intended in John Kennedy’s “Di si nt e gr ate,” which covered the familiarly fragmented ground of “postmodern cool” (jittery gestures, menacing walks, abrupt transitions). Whereas Diana MacNeil’s “Once Each Time” existed within the holistic traditions of historical modern dance, creating an emotional landscape with sensuous curves, diagonal stretches and rapid rebounding. MacNeil’s ensemble ably negotiated scenes that embellished the haunting score--musings on life and death by Samuel Barber in “Hermit Songs.”