Harlem Troupe Unites in Pure Balletic Power

Emphasizing structural discontinuity to the exclusion of any other way of organizing movement, Dance Theatre of Harlem appeared at El Camino College on Friday in a program overloaded with pieces that had no evident beginnings or endings, that distilled their themes in fractured collages of images and that varied so little in pace or attack that they left some balletomanes feeling numb, burned out and maybe even cheated.

But never by the dancing, for the company fielded a constellation of distinctive artists united in their power, versatility and technical finesse. In two of the three pieces on Friday, DTH veteran Donald Williams dispatched fearsome partnering challenges with a consummate ease and control desperately needed in the recent local engagements by National Ballet of Cuba and Ballet du Capitole de Toulouse. Company newcomer Alicia Graf added her own fireworks to the evening with a kind of stunt that used to belong only to French star Sylvie Guillem: flinging one of her impossibly long legs straight up, alongside her ear, and only then pointing the toe.

Graf’s spectacular extension came in “Sasanka (Pride)” an aggressive, eclectic suite by South African choreographer Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe. Indeed, eclecticism or diversity proved its subject, with Mantsoe indexing the resources of the contemporary dancer through a pileup of multiple vocabularies and identities. Obviously, Africa doesn’t lack for examples of powerful drumming, but Mantsoe chose recordings by the Japanese percussion ensemble Ondekoza, as well as the pop group Synergy, reinforcing the internationalism of his choreography.

With green boughs hanging overhead, the 22 dancers surged through whirlwind juxtapositions of animal motion, gymnastics, modern-dance torso contractions, wiggly jazz whimsies and plenty of formal ballet maneuvers, wearing bare-legged costumes by Pamela Allen-Cummings that provided their own combinations of influences--including sheer, nude-look chiffon and imitation leopard fur.

Unfortunately for Mantsoe, Bay Area choreographer Alonzo King outclassed him on the same program by developing a similar action plan more inventively in his familiar group showpiece “Signs and Wonders.” Using recordings of African folk and popular music, King worked intently to fuse and assimilate all the varied idioms he called upon in a unified new style, incorporating classical pointe-work, which Mantsoe had avoided and which the Harlem women glory in. Even the black net costumes by Robert Rosenwasser and Sandra Woodall boiled down potentially conflicting intentions (maximum elegance, maximum exposure) to an essential statement.

Brilliant at hyperextended body sculpture and at the sophisticated interplay of forces--four women, a male soloist and a male-female partnership all pursuing different yet congruent activities in the same passage, for example--King proved less successful in quasi-dramatic episodes: the man raising up and manipulating a fallen comrade, for instance, or the related pas de deux that followed.

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Puzzling and unresolved, these sequences were easy to overlook in the complex, rapidly evolving flow of the piece. In “Adrian (Angel on Earth),” however, Canadian choreographer John Alleyne made unresolved, quasi-dramatic enigmas the main event. Using Timothy Sullivan’s “Two Pianos,” Alleyne initially focused on Cedric Rouse as an outsider figure but soon grew preoccupied with two couples, portraying their relationships in a dense, fluent classicism often at odds with the musical impulse. However, he also eventually abandoned this new line of development for contrasts between the five women (treated as a joyous unified corps) and the six men (defined by combative partnering gambits). A program note mentioned “physical and spiritual rejuvenation,” but this viewer found the work expressively opaque, with the various actions and states of feeling never connecting.

Besides contributing a swirly painted backdrop that could be lit to suggest fire, clouds and marbled walls, designer Nancy Bryant put the women in simple dresses delicately differentiated in color and the men in fussy, suit-like outfits, with frock coats cut high to expose bare navels: hunky Harlem belly buttons. Definitely not the only curiosity on the program but arguably the weirdest.