Talent and youth are put to a lesser use

Youth, the saying goes, is wasted on the young. But an exception might be the Compania Nacional de Danza 2, the junior company created in 1999 by Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato to train young dancers, 17 to 21, for his popular, more senior Madrid-based troupe.

Superbly trained and full of energy, the 14-member younger ensemble -- often called CND2 -- made a splash in its American debut at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., in 2003, and it similarly invigorated the audience at the Ahmanson Theatre on Friday when it opened a three-day engagement as part of the Dance at the Music Center series.

Duato played to the strengths and allure of youth: lithe, vigorous men dancing with their shirts off, suave women more modestly clothed (usually in long black dresses) but allowed more overt, if stylized, expression.

What the company didn’t have was a sense of emotional weight and individual personalities. But Duato’s choreography did not encourage any of that, at least in the three pieces on this program, which all inclined to the sensuously superficial.

Take “Gnawa,” a work created for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in 2005, which closed the program. Purportedly about religious meanings in the music and dance of a people descended from sub-Saharan slaves, “Gnawa” consisted of a series of touristy postcard scenes.

Dancers slowly carried sand candles to the front of the stage, moved in ritualized phalanxes that were sliced through occasionally by diagonal runs by Gabriela Gomez and Ruben Dario Banol, and finally carried the candles away again.

Danced to a collage of ethnic music and lighted dramatically by Nicolas Fischtel, the work looked pretty, generated huge applause and revealed practically nothing significant.

“Remansos” (Backwaters), premiered by CND2 last May in Spain, is an expansion of a trio for men (“Remanso”) created for American Ballet Theatre in 1997.

Duato prefaced the original work (danced here splendidly by Joaquin Crespo, Kenji Matsuyama and Aleix Mane) with a series of duets and trios and a brief quartet that also reflected the various moods of piano pieces by Enrique Granados. Gomez, Anjara Ballesteros and Macarena Gonzalez were the attractive dancers in the new section.

Throughout, the emphasis was on geometrical shapes and playful interactions. Even in the original trio, in which suggestions of interpersonal need sometimes surfaced, Duato explored little emotional meaning. This section was lovingly lighted by ABT’s Brad Fields. Fischtel lighted the new sections.

Created for the Cullberg Ballet in Sweden in 1990, “Rassemblement” (The Gathering), which opened the program, was danced at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in 1999 by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Focusing on Haitian slaves’ struggles for independence, the work explored the same theme of oppression treated with more literal narrative intention and movement gravitas by such earlier choreographers as Katherine Dunham and Jose Limon.

Duato’s work, however, was so abstracted (a stylized beating, a ritualized mourning sequence, a fist-raising finale) that the struggle was generalized almost to the vanishing point, although again Gomez and Banol made a strong central couple.

In avoiding emotional depths in this and the other pieces, Duato may have made a popular program, but arguably he underestimated his junior company’s potential.

chris.pasles@latimes.com