Thinking ideas through, or not

Ideas too big for the choreographers to handle, ideas gone missing and attitude aplenty characterized the seven-part “Celebrate Dance 2006” concert produced by Jamie Nichols on Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.

Only the San Francisco-based Viktor Kabaniaev and Dancers, making their Los Angeles debut in “White Light,” engaged both mind and heart and gave a reason for their existence in and through movement itself.

Maybe that was because Kabaniaev, a former principal dancer with the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, thought modestly, realizing that big ideas can be found on a small scale.

Dancer Irene Liu emerged in spotlighted stage areas, posing sometimes awkwardly, sometimes attractively in slightly skewed ballet positions. With the sudden appearance of Emily Liu, who looked like her identical twin, the two used mirror images to explore issues of identity, illusion, reality and the possibility of making contact. The ideas just kept coming.

On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be any ideas at all in Liss Fain Dance’s “The Line Between Night and Day.” Like birds in flight, the seven weightless dancers of this Bay Area troupe -- also making its local debut -- sped through seemingly random couplings and group patterns, without touching any emotions whatsoever.

Hoping to evoke deep communal feeling, San Pedro Ballet’s “Silence,” a response to the events and aftermath of Sept. 11, unfortunately had choreographer Patrick David Bradley hopelessly overwhelmed by his immense subject. He found little for his 16 dancers to do except hang their heads, fall to the floor or dither in circles.

The Pennington Dance Group’s “Out Of” also had ideas of uniting people after communal tragedies such as Sept. 11 or Hurricane Katrina, according to an interview with choreographer John Pennington in the Pasadena Star-News. But the work, premiered last year as part of the “Lewitzky Legacy” concert at the Cerritos Center, skipped the tragedy and focused on fluid, attractive, entwining images that bore little relevance to such heavy themes.

In the Djanbazian Dance Company’s “Ser (a story about love),” choreographer Anna Djanbazian set out to evoke an image of ideal, innocent love. But the results approached never-land fantasy. A lonely Arsineh Ananian prays in a garden and is rewarded by handsome Arsen Serobian, who grows delirious after kissing her hand. A final kiss on the lips and that’s it.

Others on the program set their sights a bit lower, satisfied merely to entertain.

In JazzAntiqua Dance and Music’s new “Mileage: Chasing the One,” for instance, choreographer Pat Taylor skillfully matched the solo flights and background rhythms of music by Teo Macero and Miles Davis with bits of dancer attitude.

But attitude seemed the only reason for being in BackhausDance’s “Love and Other Possibilities,” Jennifer Backhaus’ glossy romp on Latin ballroom dancing, heavily indebted to Hollywood movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s and even to Igor Moiseyev’s “Quadrilles.”

All in all, a hit-and-miss celebration.