Relinquishing all control to the music

After seven years, the award-winning “Spectrum: Dance in L.A.” series remains an index of the local dance community’s ability to upgrade its own future by creating opportunities to showcase excellence, foster growth, build audiences and sustain an invigorating communal spirit.

The 20th “Spectrum,” Saturday at the Ivar Theatre, featured the usual mix of ambition and experience: from jaded pros trying to wring one more commercial showpiece from stale formulas to unheralded experimental artists taking dance into new modes of expression. Working to taped music that ranged from Bach to Bjork, 14 choreographers and companies participated.

In four powerful solos, dancers did not so much perform to music as yield complete control to it, letting it seize and shake them, often with unexpected results. Choreographer Tye Gillespie’s forceful “In Passing” boasted the widest technical range, with Corina Gill as adept at executing ballet steps as raw, twitchy modernism.

Charismatic Jeremy Hahn seemed the most overwhelmed by the music in his “Ashes of Leaves,” the most deeply (perhaps unwillingly) changed by it.

In “Asura,” Kenji Yamaguchi danced brilliantly and offered the weirdest, most distinctive moves of the four but could not always successfully integrate technical flourishes with the solo’s earthy movement vocabulary.

Finally, Viktor Manoel embodied an extreme sense of dance-anarchy in Alif Sankey’s “Raw/Phisico (He Has No Choice).” But the impact of the solo eroded through repetition.

The program also included solos by improvisational tap-dancer Chance Taylor (technically sensational, disarmingly sweet in spirit), and choreographer Allan McCormick (the fluent, conventional “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today,” neatly danced by Melissa Moti).

Two thoughtful, life-affirming duets gave the evening a special richness of feeling. In Patrick Damon Rago’s “Two,” Rago and Anni Blackhurst explored the difficulties and rewards of marriage through a modern dance idiom seasoned with gymnastics. Rago is widely recognized as one of the Southland’s finest dancers, and Blackhurst matched him Saturday with ravishing sensitivity and finesse.

In Amy Santo’s “Born and Raised,” Santo and 10-year-old Kadar Vernes distilled the joys and challenges of parenting in dance-games and other task-driven sequences that knitted together in a remarkably cohesive, heartfelt whole.

No group piece proved as adventurous as the best “Spectrum” solos and duets, but Jennifer Edmond’s women’s jazz-dance sextet “Only You” added an edge of parody to a blend of over-the-top sensuality and menace you’d expect to find in a James Bond title sequence. Yes, even Hollywood dancers can laugh at Hollywood excess.

A more soulful femininity emerged in Hilary Thomas’ plotless modern dance sextet “The Breath That Reminds Me,” a work more compelling for its striking, original spatial configurations than its off-the-rack movement.

Jeffrey Page’s courtship sextet “Relentless Love” relentlessly piled up black-dance cliches, ballroom cliches and ballet cliches in its five-part depiction of how some women will accept abuse and neglect as long as some man -- any man -- eventually pays attention to them. However, his cast sold this nonsense with flawless expertise.

In contrast, Ralph Glenmore’s abstract jazz-dance septet “Orange and Blue” needed more rehearsal to make its unison passages and exposed balances-in-extension pay off. But its best moments displayed thrilling freshness and urgency, plus performing prowess.

Billed as a “preview” (a work in progress?), John Castagna’s “Women of the Sea” trio deftly combined a 19th century Franco-Russian style of ballet with spontaneous character interplay, though the Bizet music that Castagna chose sometimes sounded too sophisticated for his narrative purposes.

The familiar “Dunes” landscape trio by “Spectrum” artistic director Deborah Brockus completed the program. Pieces by Gillespie, Yamaguchi, Sankey, Taylor, McCormick, Rago, Santo and Glenmore were all premieres. Where else can local audiences find so much new work, so many kinds of talent and inspiration? Multiply by 20 the finest achievements on the Saturday program and you can glimpse the contribution that this series has made and is making. Now all it needs is a larger stage than the Ivar can provide and a lot more funding.