Robinson dancers need a challenge

The Robinson Ballet Company stepped into spring over the weekend with its annual dance exposition, this year called “A Festival of Motion” and performed Friday and Saturday in Peakes Auditorium at Bangor High School. There were bursts of innovative charm, and much of the rest of the two-hour program was devoted to traditional-style dance.

That’s the backbone of dance schools and companies, for sure. And Robinson always does a fine job in the form. Jean-Marie Aubert’s “Jeux D’Enfants,” with music by Bizet, was an antic-filled story about a schoolmistress (Dale Robertson) who is teased and taunted by her students. It was the kind of piece where the girls prance and turn their noses up and the boys pull their pigtails and cause all sorts of problems. And everybody smiled throughout.

Andrei Bossov’s “Classical Symphony,” with music by Prokofiev, also told of a teacher (Sarah Stoodley) whose one lively student (played alternate nights by Dinah Grossman and Stevie Dunham) dreams up a prince and ballerina while in class.

It might have been enough to have these two pieces as the longer works because, as warming as it is to see daughters and nieces and sons and cousins and grandkids in longer pieces such as “Fiesta” (about the arrival of a gypsy in a peasant village) and “Faust Divertissement” (a forest fantasy depicting Faust’s introduction to a Dionysian land), you can’t help but wish for more unconventional numbers that show off the range of this company’s talent.

“Don Quixote Pas De Deux,” danced with marvelous Latin flair by Maureen Lynch and Alexander Zendzian, was the perfect antidote. As was “A Blast From the Past,” choreographed by Robinson’s resident pop-dance diva, Kelly Holyoke. In a roundup of dances from the 1940s to the 1990s, Holyoke got the whole troupe shaking its booty to live accompaniment by the ever-hip Eastern Standard Trio.

The Brunswick-based juggling troupe, blink, performed its award-winning “Dysfunction,” which included juggling, acrobatics and a whole lot of existential interaction between company members Fritz Grobe and Morty Hansen.

It wouldn’t be spring in Bangor without Robinson’s annual concert. Because the group is such a fixture of local cultural affairs, it’s tempting to want to see the able, hard-working dancers move more aggressively in some new, less recital-based directions with pieces that not only challenge and show off the dancers, but also challenge and delight the audience even more.