A program less than the sum of its parts

Set in capital letters, “NOTHING IS PERMANENT” formed the central statement in the four-line biography of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin in the program booklet at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday.

Don’t believe it: Whenever you see Naharin choreography in Southern California, it’s always, inevitably, the same greatest-hits jumble. Like it or not, you can count on that kind of permanence.

The audience-participation cha-cha, the autobiographical talking/dancing segment, the eccentric intermission solo, the full-company round-dance in a semicircle of chairs: It never changes, whether we’re watching the Rambert Dance Company, Nederlands Dans Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago or Naharin’s own Batsheva Dance Company of Israel.

On Saturday it was Batsheva’s turn, courtesy of UCLA Live, with material originally created from 1985 to 2001 gathered into a full-evening compendium titled “Deca Dance.”

If you wanted to be charitable, you could consider the result something like what Merce Cunningham calls “events”: a flow of work that put the emphasis on the act of dancing.

But all too often, it seemed nothing more than an audition reel: clips that ended before you could get fully involved in them -- or that canceled one another out.

Yes, yes, yes, Batsheva looked terrific, dancing in a volatile, twitchy, hair-trigger style that could be suddenly suspended for moments of great tenderness -- as in “Black Milk,” a quasi-gladiatorial male quintet that offered a disarmingly intimate perspective on peer pressure, bonding and the different kinds of strength needed in a time of war.

“Queens of Golub” explored different facets of female resilience with equal power, and Naharin always kept the program from becoming too sedate by fielding a wild card or two: Maya Weiser lip-synching on stilts, for example, or Talia Landa telling us how she enjoyed being beaten as a child.

But too many of the 13 segments relied on a permanent Naharin fixation: cycles of formal movement structures executed with intimidating intensity, sometimes incorporating grunts or screams for extra impact. And why scatter four sections from “Mabul” through an evening instead of performing the full work?

Obviously, many balletgoers prefer highlights programs of showpiece duets to their full-evening 19th century sources. So Naharin’s taste for reconceiving his choreographic past as modern-dance vaudeville could be more in touch with his public than the usual format for contemporary repertory.

The risk is cheapening past work -- and dance itself -- by throwing out everything except the hard-sell stuff that can stand alone, out of context. There’s no resonance to such a compilation, no cumulative effect except admiration for the dancers. And, anyway, you could argue that a program of nothing but highlights really has no highlights at all.