There’s beauty amid the bawdy in ‘Blush’

It was 13 years ago that Ultima Vez last visited Los Angeles. Accordingly, the Brussels-based troupe’s presentation of Wim Vandekeybus’ “Blush” at Royce Hall on Friday night qualified as one of the most eagerly anticipated performance events of the season.

Given the audience’s excited state, it seemed somehow appropriate that this 2001 opus’ beginning depicts a woman gratifying herself atop a sleeping partner.

But although the audience’s expectations may have been well sated by a dance theater piece designed to make spectators, in a word, blush, Thi-Mai Nyugen’s seduction of a loudly snoring Robert M. Hayden was among the few pleasures to be earned by the 10-member cast of men and women during the nearly two-hour, intermissionless piece.

Instead, the actors and dancers enacted a demanding lexicon of humiliating interactions. Mixed in were also scenes of stunning beauty and tenderness.

As “Blush” makes clear, it is hunger for contact that sets up the possibility of abuse from others. We can blush only when we are at our most exposed.

Especially exposed Friday were the audience members nearest the stage, who found themselves involved in the proceedings: first grilled by Hayden on their bedroom proclivities, then solicited by spitfire Lena Fokina for “private” dances.

Discretion, dignity and decorum were just some of the social graces detonated in a roundelay of bruising physical encounters determined by mysterious rules of who was allowed to touch whom and where.

Also on the chopping block was the Romantic ballet-era ideal of ethereal womanhood. In one of the most captivating sequences, female troupe members (Nyugen, Fokina, Ina Geerts, Laura Aris Alvarez and Linda Kapetanea) dived headlong into a large-screen projection of water, only to magically reappear swimming about in the film’s aqueous depths.

Returning to the stage, they toyed and teased the men (Vandekeybus, Hayden, Thomas Steyaert, Josef Frucek, German Jauregui Allue), luring them into the film as well.

The notion that these otherworldly mer-women embodied any female paradigm, however, was undercut by high-impact movement sequences integrating Vandekeybus’ signature explosive physicality with animalistic crawling, crouching and climbing -- all set to a brooding, blues-inflected rock score by David Eugene Edwards of the band 16 Horsepower.

That Vandekeybus found such rich possibilities in all this attests to his inventiveness, which one can only hope will manifest itself more frequently.