Masterful inventions blend old, new

The Skirball Cultural Center hit another home run Wednesday when it presented the Los Angeles debut of the London-based Akram Khan Company in the Magnin Auditorium. Born in London to Bangladeshi parents, Khan, 29, has taken his study of kathak -- the Muslim-influenced, north Indian dance idiom that stresses rhythm and music over storytelling -- and audaciously combined it with elements of Western contemporary dance.

He uses kathak positions, rapidity of footwork (but without the ankle bells) and certain mudras, or hand gestures although with nontraditional tempos and weight of attack. But he also applies the form’s nonrepresentational geometric fixations to his use of stage space, and its bursts of rhythmic improvisations -- in which a dancer mirrors increasingly complex percussion accompaniment -- to his short structural units, whatever movement vocabulary he is using.

He is even willing to let his dancers stand and do nothing at all while a (prerecorded) singer fires off one of those machine-gun-syllable sequences that a dancer is supposed to beat out precisely with her feet.

The latter occurred in “Kaash (Unplugged),” two sections of a larger work presented without its set design and using all five dancers -- Khan, Shanell Winlock, Moya Michael, Inn Pang Ooi and Eulalia Ayguade Farro.

Without sets, the full effect and meaning of the 35-minute excerpt could not be properly assessed, but its brilliance of movement invention -- its parallelisms, canonic sequences and asymmetries -- danced with such clarity and energy, proved compelling.

Still, in a long, floor-bound segment initiated by Michael, Khan ventured most extensively and riskily into an expressive contemporary dance idiom. The seamlessness between styles is what characterizes Khan at his best. This was a somewhat discordant section, which may be clearer in a full production.

Khan presented signature elements of his vocabulary and approach in two solos -- the 15-minute “Fix” and the 12-minute “Loose in Flight” -- that opened the program. “Fix,” which alludes to Sufism’s whirling dervishes at its center, has a centripetal structure. “Flight” presented the not-always-successful struggle to maintain a dance posture without collapsing. But the “failures” were under such perfect control that you knew Khan was joking.