Dance : New Works, Uneven Results by Aman Ensemble

Capped by a foray into urban Americana, fully half the program was unfamiliar to local audiences when the Aman International Music and Dance Ensemble appeared for the first time in the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles on Friday.

However, only the Aman musicians gloried in the repertory novelties. The dancers continued to look their best in the Eastern European and Balkan idioms that have always been the company’s mainstay. Aman may want to go global, but its essence lies here. The performers know it and the audience feels it.

As a result, Istvan Szabo’s festive Hungarian Gypsy trio proved special indeed: the only time when musicians and dancers met as equals in a new piece.

Rich in atmosphere and artful in its buildup to virtuosic, quasi-confrontational passages for Szabo, Tibor Toth and the quietly commanding Rosina Didyk, the suite lacked only a credible finish--it didn’t end, it just stopped. But, straight through, the seductive blend of instruments, voices and rhythms showcased David Markowitz’s brilliance as music director and co-arranger.

You couldn’t have asked for a bouncier beginning to a survey of Lindy Hop and Big Apple traditions than Robert Freedman’s piano solo. Unfortunately, Christopher Miller and LynnAnne Hanson’s dances stayed curiously dogged--never as joyous and unpredictable as ballroom couples in documentary films of the ‘30s nor as stylish and stylized as show-biz adaptations. The dancers seldom seemed caught up in the music or in self-expression; instead they looked cued, manipulated, anonymous.

A sense of indigenous spirit also proved missing from Don Sparks’ Tuareg pole dance of the Western Sahara--what happened to the pride and individuality of these men?

Leona Wood’s still-alluring Moroccan “Guedra” sequence became an Aman classic by getting inside a culture and recreating the dynamic of a performance event, not just making the dancers rush from task to task like Sparks’ Saharans.

Vivane Hamamdjian’s Ghawazee women showed a lot more leg Friday than their counterparts in the recent “Festival of the Nile” performances locally, but remained at such a subdued level of Egyptian undulation for so long that they became an indistinct visual wash over another of Markowitz’s vibrant arrangements of traditional music.

*

You might wonder why Aman programmed a suite from the Mexican state of Nayarit when so many Mexican American companies exist in the local community. The answer, loud and clear: a level of excellence in Juan Rios’ choreography and a level of professionalism from the Aman dancers that kept the percussive footwork and fluid skirt-swirling free of the rawness that characterizes the recent wave of Southland folklorico aspirants.

Latino culture also invigorated the Aman performance through guest appearances by pillars of the local flamenco community: the gutsy dancer Linda Vega, along with Antonio Duran and Antonio de Triana on guitars plus singers Antonio de Jerez and Jesus Montoya.

Other fine soloists Friday included Maziar Mahjoobi on shepherd’s flute in a Romanian sequence and Deanne Sparks in a Gypsy song of woe. Artistic director Barry Glass supplied rambling but helpful introductions.