A carnival celebration of culture

At home, Peru Negro is a vehicle for black pride, expanding and enhancing native cultural traditions with influences from West Africa, Cuba and elsewhere to create a diverse, vibrant statement of contemporary Afro-Peruvian identity.

On tour, however, this 35-year-old music and dance ensemble unleashes a nonstop carnival of rhythm that only briefly turns serious -- as in the pithy ballad “De Espana” -- and grows increasingly celebratory in a 2 1/2-hour performance.

At Royce Hall on Sunday, the second half of the UCLA Live program emphasized comedy, starting with seven quasi-competitive box drummers and including a corps of masked Corpus Christi devils (“Son de Los Diablos”) too intent on showing off their percussive footwork to do anything evil.

Dominating all the merrymaking: artistic director Ronaldo “Rony” Campos and his brother Marcos, who not only joked through their impressive display of intricate Zapateo challenge dancing but joined singer Monica Duenas in an extended audience-participation songfest.

Despite the Campos siblings’ best efforts, though, the comic highlight may have been “Toro Mata,” the traditional Peruvian equivalent of the African American cakewalk, in which slaves mocked the pretensions and rigidities of their masters. Here the dancers’ spectacular torso and back flexibility brilliantly complemented their parody of minuet-style formality.

The first half of the program had plenty more examples of the 10 dancers’ ability to look loose and improvisational while matching one another perfectly step for step, beat for beat, shake for shake. It even offered the evening’s only dance solo: wild head-lolling bravura by Jose Durand.

Much of this first hour belonged to the versatile Duenas, alternately somber, serene and sensual but always intelligent -- and nearly always dancing. The company boasts an array of fine instrumentalists, including some who can coax music from animal jawbones. But dance proved absolutely integral to the Peru Negro experience, so everyone danced sooner or later.

As Juan Morillo writes in the introduction to the group’s latest CD, “the dancers become the timekeepers and the percussion and guitars swing to their mandate.” So did the audience Sunday at UCLA.