Party Guests With Jazzy Moves and Political Leanings

By ROSLYN SULCAS

Dre.dance has a lot going for it. Since one of its artistic directors is Taye Diggs — yes, the one on ABC’s “Private Practice” — there’s a certain glamour attached to the enterprise. The company has fine dancers. And in concert programs shown over the last few years, it has offered unpretentious and generally well-made work.

In “the people,” performed at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Saturday night, Mr. Diggs and his co-artistic director, Andrew Palermo, try something different. An hourlong show with a political theme, with a score commissioned from the jazz composer Rob Reddy , it’s both less successful than dre.dance previous ventures and more intriguing.

Although the program says that the work uses a party setting, “the people” feels nonnarrative; the dancers move through ensemble pieces and smaller groupings in front of Mr. Reddy and his musicians in recurrent, stylized movements: jazzy hip swivels, feet pivoting and hands crossing and gesturing in front of the face.

The solos and duos — frequently overlaid by snippets of recorded political texts by Eleanor Roosevelt, President Ronald Reagan, Senator Barack Obama and others — are more nuanced and resonant, sensitive responses to the idiosyncratic rhythms and instrument pairings of Mr. Reddy’s score.

But there is much that feels extraneous: the dancer who offers puzzling bits of speech, the repetitive-movement vocabulary, the ironic bits of ballet, the sluggishly paced final section. “The people” is a 30-minute dance trapped in an hourlong body; Mr. Diggs and Mr. Palermo are surely capable of setting it free.