Reaching for the heights

Transformative. Transcendent. Life-affirming. These are some of the ways dance can -- and does -- affect us, when insightful, provocative choreography is combined with the beauty of trained bodies moving through space. And so it was for much of Saturday evening when the sixth annual Dance Moving Forward Festival unfolded at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre.

Produced by dancer-choreographer Arianne MacBean (the Diane Keaton of dance -- quirky, endearing and eminently watchable), this year’s event, dubbed “Ways of Thinking About Ways of Moving,” featured six premieres by local dance-makers, with onstage dialogue from several revered terpsichorean figures, including Donald McKayle and Victoria Marks.

Kick-starting the evening was MacBean’s “Inside Dance (and other dialogic structures).” A Marx Brothers-like romp set to Vivaldi, with text by the performers (Liz Hoefner, Pablo Santiago and MacBean), the work satirically deconstructed the making of a dance, aided by Santiago’s onstage video work. Hoefner, asking, “What is this?” pirouetted, leaped and skittered as MacBean directed, her gamine face filling one of the two video monitors. Movement became the message, with Santiago abandoning the camera to join the dance doings.

Also making use of text, albeit with a far darker scenario: Hassan Christopher in his “Side Effect (Excerpt from Digital Rome),” spoke of the decision to clone himself for money in his voice-over narration, as he and six dancers powerfully portrayed a neo-robotic universe. Cool, crisp and creepily sad, where violent quivering and manic hopping ruled, the work was a perfect fit with Kronos Quartet’s edgy string serenadings.

Holly Johnston created an alternate universe as well in “Passage I Etched,” a work-in-progress featuring a topless Johnston and seven other dancers. A Tongue member, Johnston continued that troupe’s hard-driving, hyperphysical tradition, creating a mesmerizing, Butoh-like final tableau in which four dancers stood atop the backs of another quartet of dancers who, slowly rotating, precariously balanced their precious cargo.

Spareness punctuated Stefan Fabry’s muscular duet with Jeff Grimaldo. Dressed in black, the pair began face-to-face, mirror images in a pool of light, before executing a series of jazzy unison lunges and lifts. Warily, they circled each other, with the mood becoming alternately bleak and playful, as Korey Ireland’s taped music veered from tango-esque accordions to windy whooshes, the balance of power always shifting, literally and metaphorically.

Less successful: Banafsheh Sayyad’s hair-tossing, trance-spinning quintet, “Light, Earth, I in between” and Rande Dorn’s aimless “A Quiet Journey,” Jordan Szabad’s elegant solo work notwithstanding.