Music and Dance Reviews : Floricanto Celebrates Mexican Cultural Identity

Whether known as Floricanto Dance Theater or Danza Floricanto U.S.A. (its new name), Gemma Sandoval’s home-grown, mom-and-pop folklorico company can both celebrate cultural identity for the Mexican-American community and charm outsiders with its energy and color.

What it cannot do is rival the great state-supported Mexican ensembles in scale and professionalism--but, unfortunately, it keeps on trying.

Instead of capitalizing on intimacy, dancer personality or connection to the material, Floricanto’s performance at the Santa Monica College Amphitheater on Saturday locked its 16 hard-working dancers into formal group patterns with an emphasis on unison footwork.

That footwork often looked well drilled, but the dancers’ obvious strain throughout the evening proved too high a price. Only in the loose, comic solos of the “Lindo Guerrero” suite and a few passages elsewhere did Floricanto suggest the sense of people dancing for their own pleasure, rather than a corps assigned mass presentational effects.

The most sustained exception: the “La Guacamaya” sequence in the Veracruz suite where the men swooped past the women, removing their hats, and the women kept turning their heads to find them. Only when focused on one another (rather than the audience) and executing expressive movement (rather than arbitrary routines), do Floricanto dancers seem free, relaxed, in command. Who can blame them? Who really wants to go through life as the third peon from the right?

If Sandoval’s spoken introductions are often more interesting than her dances, it’s simply because they reveal purposes and contexts missing from what we’re shown, a deeper and more complex Floricanto that she’s chosen to leave offstage. A pity. She could make a daring contribution by giving us folklorico purged of empty spectacle--Jalisco and Veracuz suites that take us to the heart of these regional styles and invite us to perceive Mexican dancers as individuals.

Certainly the example of the innovative, accomplished Mariachi Mexicapan ought to inspire her. Besides providing vibrant accompaniments, this stylish eight-member group held the stage alone with specialties that expressed Mexican tradition in a distinctively American manner.