Johnson Troupe Offers a Winning Mix

There is something irresistible about the choreography of Robert Henry Johnson, the Bay Area dance maker whose small company ended its two-week residency at Cal State Long Beach with a performance at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night.

Johnson seems to take the best ingredients of six or eight dance traditions and throw them into a blender--no, more like a kaleidoscope really, because although Johnson’s movement elements fall together smoothly, his dance is also vibrant, shifting into angles and curves to produce freshly animated designs with every turn. And he appears to have the gift of getting the best out of dancers, including the students who were woven into the program.

In “Road to the Yellow Carnival” (1993), set to the melodic harmonies and a capella percolating of Zap Mama on tape, Johnson and his excellent dancers--I. Vincent McGinnis, Thomas McDonnell, Cria Merchant, Lakisha Austin and Lise Hulse--frolic like kittens. Maybe not just like kittens--Johnson’s work has a certain joyous bounce to it, but there is always a combination of the pristine placement and controlled extensions of ballet, as well as the elegant dips and vibrant rebounds of West African dance.

Moods come and go--there is a hint of friendship, preaching, rejection. But mostly there is this really beautiful dancing, which recurs in Johnson’s “Late Nite at the Upper Room.” Named for an EP by the hip-hop group Midnight Voices (which did a short set alone), the piece has a score made up of several songs and sound effects, played by the band in the pit. It’s almost a narrative, a dreamlike day in the life of a man in a suit, who could be billed as “Gangsta Chaplin,” in that he can break-dance and waddle forlornly.

Around him, making phone calls, hanging on subway straps, passing by, are groups of minimally clad figures from different ethnically accented planets. There were flamenco arms, serene sashaying that could be from kathak or Philippine dance (or the catwalk), a bit of Brazilian capoeira and the molasses moving of Japanese butoh, which Johnson himself performs with exquisite style and humor.

Students, well used in this piece, began the program making passes across the stage with some of the snappiest Euro-African fusion steps around--sophisticated and idiosyncratic. So it’s something Johnson can teach, and from this program, it looks like the more he spreads around, the better.