'Allegoria': Two Worlds In Harmony

It has long been fashionable to scoop street dance -- hip-hop, krumping, break dance -- off the asphalt and set it on a stage. But it's no cinch to take a form of aggressive physical release from its native turf and craft it into a piece that audiences can sit and watch for a while, something with sustained theatrical and artistic merit.

Cie La Baraka, from Lyon, France, took an unusual approach by blending hip-hop's flash with a lyrical contemporary dance style. In "Allegoria Stanza," the attention-getting tricks of the street behaved themselves, and the work turned on an overall sense of luxurious physicality.

Abou Lagraa, the French-born choreographer and artistic director, comes from Algerian stock, and his 10-member troupe performed Tuesday at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater as part of the Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World festival. Yet at first blush, "Allegoria Stanza," scarcely more than an hour long, offered primarily a view of European dance trends -- the filmed backdrops (flaunted last weekend by the Italian designers of Caracalla Dance Theatre), the pumping techno beat, the vaguely uneasy atmosphere and the deconstructive program note that begs translation. (Lagraa "attempts to give body to a nuanced plenitude," etc.)

What set the work apart, however, were the elements that felt distinctly Arab: the dancers' flung-open sensuality, especially, and the plaintive recordings by Lebanese singer Fayrouz.

Film of ocean foam and blue skies helped shape the work's theme, which had to do with the human relationship to the natural world. What saved it from seeming hopelessly trite -- at least, for the most part -- was the dancers' intense and well-directed energy.

When she was onstage, you couldn't take your eyes off Nawal Lagraa (who is married to Abou). A petite woman with a frizzy burst of hair, she longed to be airborne. In her solo, she kicked one leg skyward and tipped her body back for a few moments of utter stillness, her chest arcing up as if she were about to backstroke across a pool. Later, one of the male dancers caught her as she curved into the same position, throwing herself into a back dive with an enviable abandon, soaring as he lifted her in bounding arcs over and over again.

Another dancer, Frédéric Boisset, turned a strobing solo into a tour de force, stuttering his moves and even his facial expressions in an exquisitely timed, fragmented sequence that you'd swear was danced under a strobe light. But popping and locking weren't the extent of his talents; within a single musical phrase he mixed staccato robotics with gently melting movements, fluttering an arm like silk.

The company is made up of three hip-hop dancers; the others have had more conventional dance training. What's most promising here is the harmony: two strands of the dance world augmenting each other and creating something intriguingly new.