KIN Troupe Explores Contemporary Issues

Whatever the primary focus of a piece, every work choreographed by twin brothers Frit and Frat Fuller for their all-male KIN Dance Company also explores what it means to be a man in contemporary America. The Fullers use outrageous humor and an invigorating pop dance style to sweeten this exploration, but what they discover is dead serious: Men are the killers, the racists, the brain-dead worker-bees of this society.

In its first four years, KIN danced solely on split bills and in such community series as Dance Kaleidoscope and Voices in Motion. However, on Thursday the 14-member company presented its first full-evening program at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, with performances scheduled through the weekend. Mission accomplished: The company can keep an audience happy for a full evening.

The three-part work-in-progress “Life’s a Bench” uses the same piece of furniture for its three episodes: a robotic rat-race septet with a clever political punch line that’ll have to be revised after November; an uneventful drag trio with not much on its mind beyond displaying the guys’ legs and their proficiency in heels; a promising double duet about the power of touch and how to deal with it. Men checking one another out has become a fixture of KIN choreography and here, for once, the idea holds center stage.

Homosexuality turns up often enough in the KIN repertory that even those pieces in which it’s absent gain an intriguing sexual tension. That tension certainly helps the confused, strangely gutless “Listen to the Rhythm” (1995), which depicts racism as rural turf-war: crackers in overalls playing at stylized jazz-dance combat over a picket fence. Not nearly nasty enough, not by half.

Much better: the irrepressible boyishness, sensational drill-team maneuvers and dawning sense of betrayal in the quasi-military “Stomp” (1992), the company’s best-known showpiece. And though the ambiguous prologue of “Viewer Discretion” (1996) fails to connect with the delirious bathroom humor later on, the Fullers deserve points for developing a genuine dance impulse from perhaps the unlikeliest subject you could imagine: guys sitting on toilets reading the newspaper. However, the manhandling of Calendar has got to stop; is nothing sacred?

Nearly all the KIN men perform with fabulous, loose-limbed expertise and, as always, the company sports the best haircuts in Los Angeles dance.

* KIN dances at 8:30 p.m. tonight and Sunday at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Tickets: $12. (213) 660-8587.