Dance Through Time Moves Into Realm of High Energy

Although a program note for Dance Through Time at Pepperdine University on Friday called the performance “a journey through 500 years of social dancing, traveling from court to country, ballroom to bistro, salon to street,� this unfailingly energetic eight-member Bay Area company seemed more at home in the world of pop culture than anyplace else.

Not only did the dancers bring a broad musical-comedy attack to brief samples of antique European idioms, but their choreography increasingly focused not on social dancing as much as showy, theatrical adaptations and, in particular, the performances of unique stars: John Durang, Vernon and Irene Castle, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, John Travolta. This emphasis shortchanged dance as courtship in favor of sheer display--lots of fun, of course, but the easy, empty way to package potent source material.

At the end of the evening, dancer and executive director Lawrence Ewing spoke with pride about the company’s reconstruction of long-forgotten step sequences and gestural codes. Admirable, though accompaniments were not always as carefully researched. For instance, in a party scene dated 1859, the company danced to a suite from “Die Fledermaus,� an opera that premiered 15 years later. And the spoken reference to Bizet’s operas at the beginning of the same scene also proved ahead of its time.

Happily, if you ignored the historical and thematic pretensions, Dance Through Time won you over through the dancers’ fusion of versatility and stamina, with amazingly fast changes of costumes and dances creating a jet-propelled cavalcade of images.

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Perhaps inevitably, Ewing captured Travolta’s bold disco moves more persuasively than Astaire’s subtler adagio style, but he alone delivered the rhyming introductions to the various sections loudly and pointedly enough to make them effective. Impersonating Ginger Rogers, willowy Sonia Fava may have settled for nothing more than sleek costume swirling, but she delivered a sublime rumba soon after and may have been the only woman to look perfectly comfortable in the formal court dances early in the program.

Other performers included Justin E. Bosch, James Brosnahan, Mario Marchiaro, Sally Van Loon, Tatiana A. Virmond and Megan Watt. Carol Teten founded the company in 1980 and remains its principal choreographer.

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* Dance Through Time performs Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Haugh Performing Arts Center at Citrus College, 1000 W. Foothill Blvd., Glendora. $10-$22. (626) 963-9411.