DANCE REVIEW : ISO and the Bobs Add Voice to Movement at Royce Hall

Like cute commercials, ISO’s pieces are goofy and brief. Like college revues, they are powered more by rambunctious high spirits than by striking movement ideas. Saturday night, in Royce Hall at UCLA, the 2-year-old group that spun off from Momix teamed up with the Bobs, a Bay Area a cappella vocal quartet. The results seemed calculated to please a generation weaned on MTV videos and late-night TV.

The Bobs mix their singing (of retooled pop oldies and upbeat tunes and modern-life lyrics written by members Gunnar Madsen and Richard Greene) with a lexicon of silly backup-singer noises.

Teamed up with these self-consciously ironic performers, the ISO crew (Daniel Ezralow, Jamey Hampton, Ashley Roland and Morleigh Steinberg) have abandoned most of their Momix-era feyness.

But their free-form approach to dance is still limited to just-noodling-around sketches that don’t develop beyond the concept stage. Props and silhouetted sequences--which used to be the inspiration for surprising imagery in the group’s Momix days--are now little more than gimmicks.

A comic book-costumed Captain Tenacity flung himself in various poses on a large slanted board to mimic air-borne flight while a recording blasted Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

A boy and girl parked their cars on opposite sides of the stage (clever business with headlights, authentic sounds of car radios) and segued into a duet more notable for acrobatics (Roland’s one-armed balance on Hampton’s shoulder) than mood.

In a doctor-patient skit, “Rubber Band,” a resuscitated Hampton awkwardly manipulated huge rubber bands while the Bobs offered a postmodern takeoff on Jimi Hendrix.

A hint of the group’s Momix style came through in “Deprogrammer,” featuring Roland and Steinberg swathed in white drapery and attached to long ropes allowing them to swoop around the two men like lost angels.

And every now and then ISO settled down to do some real dancing.

In “DNA,” Ezralow and Roland offered a cool, almost too-careless ‘80s-style replay of nostalgic Big Band-era struts and whoopee arms. “I Do,” a hot-and-cold lovers’ duet set to the Kronos Quartet’s recording of Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 8, featured Ezralow and Steinberg in moments of elbow-bristling frenzy and smashed-together couple dancing. But an overabundance of isolated acrobatic movements and a wavering level of intensity bled strength from the piece.

Meanwhile, the Bobs kept perking along, taking offbeat subjects as their cues to wallpaper the airwaves with busy textures of sound gussied up from the ‘50s. Scott vamped, Greene’s foghorn bass resounded and the audience was utterly adoring.