DANCE REVIEWS : ‘Voices in Motion’ Fills a Community Gap

Offering opportunities for growth and recognition to emerging choreographers, the Inner City Cultural Center’s “Voices in Motion” series fulfills a vital, neglected function in the local dance community. The current edition at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood focuses almost entirely on African-American expression, with the creative scope encompassing everything from potent social commentary to mindless nightclub glitz.

On the four-part Friday program, nobody provided hotter, more accomplished dancing than Frit and Frat Fuller in three pieces for their Kin Dance Company. These are intuitive, continually surprising artists, and even if you couldn’t always follow them through the puzzling mood shifts of “Within,” some sections of this quasi-narrative suite proved memorable for both intensity and movement design. Moreover, their nine-man ensemble delivered a consistently exciting performance.

Oddly enough, the Fullers glory in group statements and don’t bring off intimate passages as successfully: “My Father’s House,” a piece about urban violence for three dancers, looked thin and schematic compared to both “Within” and “Stomp,” their rich, complex and sometimes outrageous large-scale military showpiece.

Integrating street and commercial idioms, modern dance and realistic gesture, the Fullers managed to avoid slickness and empty display in nearly every instance here, using their stylistic arsenal to portray character and social attitudes in a disarmingly fresh and personal manner.

Laura Gorenstein’s “Jargon of Justice” boasted a great idea but not, unfortunately, enough choreographic sophistication to bring it off. In this solo, Diana Mehoudar literally danced the news--physicalizing the events described in a 1993 Times account of jury deliberations in the Rodney King police beating trial.

Numbered free-standing signs represented the jurors and Mehoudar raced between them, rocking them on their bases as she reflected the actions and emotions in Ted Rohrlich’s reports. But neither the formal manipulation of the signs nor the dramatization of the text ever developed far enough to make the piece definitive. However, it conveyed its intentions more persuasively than Gorenstein’s alternately striking and incoherent women’s sextet, “Under Adam’s Rib.”

Pat Taylor’s “Midtown Sunset” had its own problems with muddled expression, but the company itself, Jazzantiqua, looked highly promising. Basically, it’s the Jazz Tap Ensemble minus the tap: four dancers working with the Black/ Note Jazz Quartet and trying, with some success, to find a common style. Excellent live music and dancing that matches it in verve, rhythmic complexity and free-form invention: a proven concept, here distinctively reshaped.

Completing the program: two sections from Ashlie Elie’s delirious “Calypso Bacchanal,” recently reviewed in these pages.