Talk drowns out important topics

Talk isn’t always the enemy of dance, but it was Friday when Lula Washington Dance Theatre presented a well-executed contemporary program at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood.

First, all the greetings, pitches for funds and spoken tributes to Washington and black dance icon Katherine Dunham took so much time that late in the evening, whole sections had to be dumped from Washington’s “L.A. View” and “Urban Themes” so the concert could finish by 11 -- the official noise abatement deadline at the Ford.

In addition, the spoken tracts, poems and rap heard during the dances undermined them by supplying a distinctive personal vision and style that the choreography always lacked. Although Washington frequently pays tribute to black dance pioneers such as Dunham and Donald McKayle, her approach seems much more influenced by her years with the Burch Mann American Folk Ballet, a company that simplified and sweetened every subject and genre until the result resembled musical comedy choreography at some suburban dinner theater.

In “African Ukumbusho,” the only unabridged Washington piece Friday, her adaptation of percussive South African gumboot dancing was far more riveting than sections that unintentionally evoked black dance classics: a feisty solo for Michelle Hall, for example, that looked like outtakes from Dance Theatre of Harlem’s “Firebird,” or the use of rippling fabric to represent water, as in Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.”

With Washington, Trina Parks and Bernard Gaddis dancing an introduction, Parks’ staging of Dunham’s 1935 “Rhumba Trio” depicted vibrant Afro-Cuban traditions through choreography that deceptively resembled a floor-show routine but wore its technically complex Africanisms with authority.

Gaddis’ new “Noches de las Companas” deftly alternated and then merged the dancing of two couples but depended so obsessively on the steps, positions and partnering conventions of classical ballet that it really needed its prima ballerina (Nicole Smith) to be dancing on pointe. Without toe shoes, it lost its technical focus.

As a finale, Tamica Washington-Miller (Lula’s daughter) staged “Everyday Things,” a hot hip-hop cavalcade incorporating members of the company’s Youth Dance Ensemble and kids recruited from the kind of valuable, publicly funded arts projects most at risk during this period of government cutbacks. Where’s the talk about that?