Folklorico gets a colorful update

In rejecting the antique costume spectacle that has become a cliche of folkloric performance in favor of something more contemporary and socially aware, choreographer and company leader Gema Sandoval has helped redefine the art.

On Saturday at Cal State L.A., her locally based Danza Floricanto/USA again explored the lore and legacy of Veracruz, a Mexican port where indigenous, Spanish and African influences merged, century after century. And she took Veracruz style across the border into our community, adapting it to depict issues including the consequences of restrictive immigration policies.

She called the Luckman program “Un Zapateado Chicano -- Rhythmic Footprints” and used every possible staging strategy to vary its central choreographic agenda: updating the Veracruz tradition of people pounding out step patterns atop resonant wooden platforms or boxes.

Except for one brief glimpse of the lacy white dresses with black aprons beloved by other folklorico ensembles, she kept her dancers in the kind of party clothes you might find on any weekend at a Latino dance club.

Along with the new costuming, she offered music by a sensational seven-member band led by young Veracruz composer and performer Cesar Castro -- music with such energy and flair that it soon became the primary experience of the evening.

And the participation of the rapper Olmeca added a raw urgency that is definitely not a quality you’d normally associate with Floricanto.

These nondancing performers also moved with ease and even sensuality, supplying the sense of individual expression missing in Sandoval’s step-driven ensemble choreographies in which the members of Floricanto danced in place, their arms and upper torsos motionless as they never are in such percussive idioms as flamenco, tap, Indian kathak or even Irish step-dancing these days.

In the “Y Tu Veraz/You Will See” finale, Sandoval dumped the boxes to use the stage floor as a resonant platform and allowed the dancers to move more dynamically: a blessed relief and an indication that she might be willing to update restrictive Veracruz physicality to reflect contemporary American influences.

Other pieces -- a serpentine processional dance, for instance -- reflected her experiments with stage space and the problem of making her dances an expression of solidarity without reducing everyone in them to faceless pawns.

Not everything worked on Saturday, and the documentary text in her solemn immigration saga “Los Chiles Verdes/The Green Chiles” needed rethinking. (Young girls with dreams of becoming movie stars get victimized all the time wherever they live -- don’t blame everything on the Feds.)

But who else currently active in folkloric dance has Sandoval’s commitment to replacing ethnic vaudeville with a vision of how people live in the real world and how their culture sustains them? As her skills grow, the horizons of the whole field expand.

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lewis.segal@latimes.com