Unfortunate step into uninventiveness

A former dancer in the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Naomi Goldberg formed Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet in 1989, pursuing a vision of community involvement that also found her working in educational contexts and for the Hollywood Neighborhood Dance Project and Performing Artists With Disabilities. More recently, she has provided choreography for plays, mostly in New York.

Her six-part program Friday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre confirmed her talent for choreographic development, her resourceful use of hands to ornament spare movement designs and a dramatic sense that continually resulted in effective endings.

But Goldberg offered little in the way of movement invention or conceptual innovation, so the performance by her and seven others had a curiously backdated and generic feeling, as if it had been created by no one in particular at any time since the mid-1970s.

The two-part, 20-minute “Intermediate States” (1993) explored group patterning to music by Keith Jarrett, with Goldberg’s sophisticated spatial design as much in evidence as her ability to heighten unisons by having one dancer or another break the unanimity.

“Her Story” (2002) used a Mozart aria to accompany a postmodern woman’s duet for Dana Berk and Christy Bolingbroke full of deftly overlapping reaching/running motifs that grew increasingly urgent toward the end.

Goldberg’s solo for “In the Dominion of Light” (2003) and duet for Ragen Carlile and Stephanie Nerbak -- one standing and one seated -- contrasted an expansive use of the stage with a constricted one, using the intensity of chamber music by Augusta Reade Thomas, but not really going anywhere.

In “Tango” (2002), music by Astor Piazzolla supported rudimentary interplay between Joy Mincey Powell in a wheelchair and Goldberg on her feet, on her knees and sometimes in Powell’s lap.

Powell’s mastery of the chair also embellished the new sextet “Frozen Spring,” to Purcell and Vivaldi.

It began with dancers huddling and shivering to lyrics about “everlasting snow,” then abruptly shifted to playful warm-weather athleticism.

Finally, in her new “Possessed” solo, Goldberg depicted a narrative and emotions far more powerfully expressed in the music by the Klezmatics and the lyrics by Tony Kushner.

Artful? Sure. But curiously small in scale and impact.