DANCE REVIEW : Hispanico’s Complex ‘Portrait’ at Orange Coast

Ballet Hispanico of New York was forged in a milieu of deprivation and passionate commitment.

Tina Ramirez created the group in 1970 to provide opportunities for young Hispanic dancers who longed--but had little chance--to make it in those days in a closed professional world.

So it is always a celebration when this 12-member troupe appears, even when not all the works show the dancers to their best advantage, as happened on a three-part program Friday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

Blame the choreographer in the case of Vincente Nebrada’s “Group Portrait of a Lady,” a vague retrospective look into a woman’s life.

To Ginastera’s moody, mercurial “Variaciones Concertantes,” a central woman, Justine DiCostanzo, animates the other dancers, then joins or observes them.

Two pas de deux portray earlier relationships. One, danced by Merceditas Manago and Eduardo Vilaro, is brutal and brutish; the other, with Mercedes Gudino and Pedro Ruiz, is lyric and consoling.

After some fleeting, unclear episodes, the brute returns humbled. The lady absolves him, brings him into her circle. The dance ends with her exaltation.

Do we care? Not much. The choreographer fails to illuminate the woman’s character, the other people or the situations in her life.

Talley Beatty’s romp, “Recuerdo de Campo Amor,” on the other hand, seeks nothing so ambitious. Set to Latin jazz by Felipe Campuzano, R. Pachon and Tito Puente, the work apparently means to evoke a popular New York dance hall in the 1930s.

But the choreography is refined virtually out of all period, and remains stylized and impersonal. The company swirls on and off the stage. A central couple, Nancy Turano and Jose Costas, appears to have a spat. Over what? Who knows? The two quickly, easily reconcile. The beat goes on.

But not too long: The dance comes to an abrupt, premature--and, as it turns out, deceptive--end. Costas then voices an invitation for everyone to rumba and the dancers make a series of grand (and finally) individualized entrances.

These curtain calls turn out to have more interesting choreography than the dance itself.

Beatty’s tricks mount up in a giddy, aimless way until the choreographer runs out of ideas, meanwhile putting his dancers at some physical risk. Then they take several final stop-action, chorus-line poses, and the audience goes wild.

Too bad the dance ignores the company’s real talent--talent nowhere so evident as in Graciela Daniele’s “Cada Noche . . . Tango” (music by Astor Piazzola), first seen in Orange County in April.

On second viewing, it remains an electrifying, disturbing, complex work, and the company is simply fabulous in it.

A dance-drama set in a Buenos Aires brothel, the work depicts the men’s macho contempt and control of the women and the women’s willing subservience and quiet mediation of the men’s power.

This master-slave dynamic is most vividly sketched as Costas brutalizes the newcomer (Turano), like a trainer breaking in an animal. The event is shocking, and is meant to be shocking.

Too bad, then, that this time around the company management gave in to the temptation to simplify the ambiguities rather than let them multiply. The program now identifies specific roles for the dancers--the Madam, the Outsider and (least likely of all) the Brothers (Costas and Pedro Ruiz).

Well, the program may say that they are brothers, but the movement doesn’t. The ambiguity of their sexual pursuit--evident when their hands touch on the woman’s bare back--is only part of the work’s complexity, so brilliantly realized by Ballet Hispanico.