Contemporary bonding

In a celebrated 1965 essay titled “Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets,” American critic Edwin Denby related national dance styles to the way people move in their everyday lives and the architecture that conditions that movement.

His insights provided one key to the intriguing three-part program “Big Bang -- Desir,” performed by Montreal Danse at Cal State L.A. on Saturday. Whether born in South Korea, France or Venezuela, the participating choreographers adopted an expressive vocabulary prevalent in Europe that draws its look and energy from the way people talk with their hands, rush about in interior spaces and bond in tight, conversational clusters.

With no links to classical ballet and little interest in the major themes of modern dance or the physical purity of postmodernism, this contemporary idiom teems with broken, flyaway limbs, impulsive and even eccentric torso action, and rhythms based on speech and gesture. Stamina is a central issue.

Drama arises in physical confrontations, as in Karine Ponties’ quartet “Desirabilis,” where the need for intimacy fuels all manner of partnering switches. Street clothes and the use of legless chairs enforce a sense of ordinary life on fast-forward, as relationships quickly form, grow oppressive, dissolve and draw everyone involved into a tight society of the lovelorn.

Set to recordings by Dominique Pauwel and Tom Waits, the piece often spotlights gender issues -- the men tussling while the women huddle, for instance, or Annik Hamel and Frederic Marier taking turns lifting each other. Such passages showcase the dancers’ impressive skills, so even when you sense that “Desirabilis” isn’t going anywhere, you keep watching.

Jose Navas’ duet “The Heavens, Burning With Hours” looks at gender issues in isolation, using music by Alexander MacSween built from evolving sound loops. Marnier and Manon Levac are kept apart, dancing side by side in squares of light -- or, in the final section, Levac flails inside a circle while Marnier whirls around its circumference.

Initially, we see how each body responds to gravity, as the dancers roll up from the floor, swivel into falls and collapse. Later, they explore cycles of evolving phrases parallel to the buildup of verbal patterns in the score -- together on the same stage but never in sync.

The movement may be more rounded here, but it’s just as nervous, flung out and insistently unpredictable as anything in “Desirabilis” or Ae-Soon Ahn’s feverish “One Second,” the final, best piece on the program.

Sensitive to the shifting moods of John Adams’ “Phrygian Gates,” Ahn uses space boldly, and her attention to emotional values displays another facet of the dancers’ artistry, as in an early, loving duet for Hamel and Rachel Harris.

But it’s the force of Ahn’s moves that makes “One Second” more than just another Montreal Danse twitch-and-shudder spectacle. And that force is superbly embodied by Peter Trosztmer in a central solo. He dances here like no one else on the program, and the scale of his performance calls into question everything we’ve seen.

The contemporary European idiom adopted by Montreal Danse refuses to heighten ordinary movement into something archetypal or superhuman, preferring to show us the figure in the carpet: the inescapable DNA that makes us very small players on a huge environmental stage.

However, dancers such as Trosztmer can’t stay minimal for long; sooner or later, they disrupt normalcy by projecting an innate heroic power. And even if their dancing reinforces an old-fashioned and even dangerous fantasy of godlike prowess, we honor and cherish them as the connection between the smallness of our lives and the largeness of our dreams.