Pretty, but a bit out of touch

You could argue that the best Southern California choreographers either leave for more supportive environments (Donald Byrd, for instance) or, like Loretta Livingston, devote themselves to short-term projects that don’t require the incredible energy drain of sustaining a company and repertory.

In contrast, Francisco Martinez has survived among us as a dance maker-company director for 23 years, and it’s cost him. Somewhere else, his talent and training might have placed him at the head of an institution stable enough to allow him free creative growth.

Here, like so many others, he’s fallen behind artistically while working to find audiences, venues and funding and either hold on to dancers or teach newcomers old ballets.

At the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on Friday, three familiar Martinez works for six dancers displayed again his strong sense of craft and innate talent for artful group deployments. But their virtues couldn’t make them seem genuinely contemporary, in touch or even deeply personal.

Worse, perhaps, the crucial dramatic contexts and moods of his pieces fell apart because the current members of the Francisco Martinez Dancetheatre couldn’t realize the inner life of his choreography plausibly. They looked rehearsed but not directed, unable to connect one moment, passage or task to another.

Yes, they could act and yes, they could dance -- but not usually at the same time, so the relevance of their actions to human behavior on this planet had to be taken on faith.

In the rhapsodic “Sing to Me of Love” (2001), Martinez’s lyrical, balletic style and formal gestural language seemed imposed on the cast rather than innate. Key emotional statements (the men deserting their partners at the ends of the first two duets, for example) also appeared arbitrary: cued by the choreographer rather than arising out of character.

The shifting chairs and abortive relationships in the somber “Places” (1987) reinforced the evening’s fatal disconnect between motion and emotion. Everyone worked hard, but the expressive core of the work kept slipping out of focus, and technical lapses also took their toll.

In “Fostering Dreams” (1993), Martinez lampooned florid emotionalism and, perhaps, his own choreographic excesses. Many of his jokes proved artful -- but they would have earned just as many laughs if accompanied by Vaughan Williams in “Sing to Me of Love” or Mendelssohn in “Places,” as they did when danced to Stephen Foster ballads here. When nothing’s really coming across other than the technical prowess of your company, it’s dangerous to solicit derisive laughter. How do you get the audience to stop?

Although Veronica Caudillo overplayed most of her solo opportunities throughout the evening, Courtney Combs and Rowdy Metzger kept interest high by dancing with a sense that they understood the through-line of their roles, even if you didn’t. Noune Diarbekirian, Bernie DelGado Jr. and Gary Franco completed the company roster.