Cleo Parker Robinson

Artistic director Clifford Breland, associate Denise Ji-Ahnte, special projects head Pamela Lydon Heard and their colleagues have many reasons to be proud of the nine-dancer contemporary ensemble they've built over the last eight years in Riverside: Bre Dance Theatre.

A disease shut down Cleo Parker Robinson's kidneys and caused a heart attack when she was 10. Doctors said she would never have a normal childhood. Cleo didn't listen. "I learned this thing about will," she said. "I was an overachiever because I had been given the gift of life." Already engrossed by her love of dancing, Robinson started down a path that would lead to successes beyond her wildest dreams, including the creation of a world-famous modern dance company.

Like a bubbly camp counselor, Cleo Parker Robinson welcomed a roomful of delegates to the third annual International Conference of Black Dance Companies last weekend. As dance pioneer Katherine Dunham sat regally nearby, Robinson (host of the event) invited the dancers, choreographers, administrators and journalists to stand and introduce themselves.

Artistic director Clifford Breland, associate Denise Ji-Ahnte, special projects head Pamela Lydon Heard and their colleagues have many reasons to be proud of the nine-dancer contemporary ensemble they've built over the last eight years in Riverside: Bre Dance Theatre.

A disease shut down Cleo Parker Robinson's kidneys and caused a heart attack when she was 10. Doctors said she would never have a normal childhood. Cleo didn't listen. "I learned this thing about will," she said. "I was an overachiever because I had been given the gift of life." Already engrossed by her love of dancing, Robinson started down a path that would lead to successes beyond her wildest dreams, including the creation of a world-famous modern dance company.

UC Irvine dance professor Donald McKayle's newest dance, "Ring-a-levio," will have its West Coast premiere at 8 p.m. on Thursday at Los Angeles' Japan America Theatre. The piece was performed for the first time last week in Denver by that city's Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theater, which will restage it in L.A. during the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century festival. It will be repeated May 8.

The works of four African-American choreographers and the theme of stereotypes will be featured when the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century IV program returns to Los Angeles for performances Thursday through Saturday. Friday's show will be the Los Angeles premiere of choreographer Donald Byrd's "The Minstrel Show," with an encore Saturday afternoon. It satirizes stereotypes through specialty dances, stunts, jokes, skits and music.

Right now, the Joseph Allen Decker Dance Company is a work in progress -- and perhaps Decker has chosen the wrong city for its home base. In its debut at the Ivar Theatre on Friday, the company opened with a three-part Bob Fosse tribute that lacked the choreographic detail and technical exactitude that define Fosse style and was so abundantly in evidence a few weeks ago in "Chicago" down the street at the Pantages.

Dom and Saachiko Magwili's 1940s holiday musical "A Jive Bomber's Christmas" serves up humor, songs, dance and holiday festivities in an unexpected setting: a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans. * "A Jive Bomber's Christmas," Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St. Today-Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $14. (213) 625-0414.

Long on talk, short on action, a Cal State L.A. program Saturday by Denver's Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company honored the achievements of UC Irvine's Donald McKayle, widely respected as a choreographer for Broadway, films and modern dance companies and as an inspiration for generations of dance students.

Like a bubbly camp counselor, Cleo Parker Robinson welcomed a roomful of delegates to the third annual International Conference of Black Dance Companies last weekend. As dance pioneer Katherine Dunham sat regally nearby, Robinson (host of the event) invited the dancers, choreographers, administrators and journalists to stand and introduce themselves.

Like a detached anthropologist, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide coolly captures the desolate, rural roads of the Deep South in "Flatlands," an exhibition of platinum/palladium prints opening Saturday at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography. Traveling for three weeks with writer Robert Tejada, Iturbide composed a haunting travelogue of images as she captured the lifeless landscapes of the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and Cajun Country. * "Graciela Iturbide: Flatlands."

As a three-hour celebration of African American identity, "Free to Dance" has important stories to tell and lessons to teach Sunday on the PBS "Dance in America" series. However the high ambitions of this American Dance Festival project are often undercut by painfully limited notions of American diversity and peculiar distortions of dance history.