Zarbang sets high standards

Mystical traditions warn how easy it is to veer from the path, particularly when you’re near the goal. That precept was demonstrated anew in “Outer Circles,” a program performed by the musical group Zarbang and dancer-choreographer Banafsheh Sayyad and her Namah troupe Saturday at the Japan America Theatre.

After a first half of inspiring musical heights, the program -- billed as “Contemporary Mystical Persian Music and Dance” -- collapsed into a celebration of secular egoism masquerading as devotional dance.

The musicians of Zarbang could scarcely be faulted. Playing tombaks -- or goblet-shaped drums -- Mehrdad Arabi, Pejman Hadadi and Behnam Samani set high standards from the beginning. In an 18-minute structured improvisation, the trio explored an amazing array of sounds, colors and techniques in complex rhythmic passages, hair-trigger responses to one another and their selfless joy in one another’s contributions.

When they were joined by santur player Javid Afsari Rad and percussionist Hakim Ludin in a 22-minute structured improvisation, the delirium level rose appreciably. Rad began with a heartbreaking solo on the santur -- a kind of cimbalom or dulcimer struck by small, hand-held hammers. You didn’t have to be Persian, as many in the audience were, to feel the tidal, nostalgic pull of the music.

The performance was so evocative that it took a while to realize Rad was working dazzling, complicated variations on the opening tune. His colleagues looked on in admiration, then joined in and rose to his level.

It was a great pity that these superb musicians were reduced for much of the second half of the program to serving as a rhythm and mood group for Sayyad’s threadbare choreography, haltingly delivered.

However much dressed up in mystical hokum, Sayyad’s “Come From the Light,” a solo for dancer Doaa Ali, owed the most to Alvin Ailey, while the rest of her choreography was motivated more by limelight than any inner light.

Drenched in glamour, wearing a red velvety costume by Shahla Dorriz, Sayyad turned, stretched, bowed and rose, swirled her long hair and -- above all -- spun and spun, as if executing a religious ritual by a whirling dervish in her two solos, “Pain of Separation” and “Mud and Glory.” But she never lost sight of the audience.

Her movements were surprisingly stop and go, alive in the arms but blocky in the torso. In a group piece, “View From the Core,” that characteristic was shared by her dancers, who also included Kelly Archbold, Angela Chiodo and Dayse Tarakdian.

In the encore section at the end, they threw all pretense to egolessness overboard in showoff-y individual turns.

“Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep,” read a verse from the great Persian mystical poet Rumi printed on the front of the program. “That’s when the real art, the real making, begins.” His advice remains worth taking to heart.