Music and Dance Reviews : Armenian Dancers at Scottish Rite Auditorium

The State Dance Ensemble of Armenia is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a Canada/U.S. tour, its first in 14 years. Over the weekend, the Soviet company opened an eight-performance run at the Scottish Rite Auditorium.

The company is a large one and a loud one, with 48 dancers and a dozen highly amplified musicians. Though its real strengths lay elsewhere, Vanoush Khanamirian’s anthology program put an emphasis on spectacle, albeit primitively lit and without sets.

Two busy street scenes, relying on humor, mime and cultural contrasts, proved the best of the massed numbers Sunday evening. Much less successful were Khanamirian’s new, kitschy “Erebouni” and excerpts from “Gayane”--including the inevitable “Sabre Dance”--suggesting nothing so much as “Spartacus” catches disco fever.

Welcome restraint, elegance and gorgeous costumes characterized the women’s work. Arms held aloft, or linked in unison circling motions, palms outward, dominated their vocabulary. Magnified 20 times in sinuous chorus lines and carried to its ultimate development in “Enzeli,” the effect became abstract and mesmeric, like an animated ornamental border.

Sophie Devoyan and Srbouhi Babayan provided eloquent solo elaboration of the liquid arm and hand movements of the traditional dances, most notably in the austere “You Are an Oak” and the seductive “Cranes.”

For the men, it was mostly macho, frenzied legwork, quick hops and scissors kicks. They added acrobatic fillips--standing on each other’s shoulders in a two-tiered Ukranian circle dance--and with orange scarfs filled the traditional “Shalakho” with darting flames.