By Rita Felciano

WITH AN ENTHUSIASTIC crowd and a good mix of community and professional performers, the opening night (Nov. 18, Palace of Fine Arts) of the fourth annual San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest got off to a roaring start. But then, how could it not? Put a hundred or so dancers onstage whose every fiber of their bodies proclaims "I love what I'm doing," and you have the audience in your hand.

The festival's format hasn't changed much since its Theater Artaud days. Opening with an informal circle – which looked more communal on Artaud's smaller, nonproscenium stage – the program always features student and adult performers. This year was no exception. These are excellently trained, committed artists whether they call themselves professional or not. It was just as satisfying to watch the tightly synchronized moves of the 30-plus, multigenerational City Shock as it was the robot-inspired, smoothly professional duet by Mop Top Music and Movement's Buddha Stretch and Tweetie from New York.

The challenge for the DanceFest is to take what's essentially a social dance form and put it onstage. It's happened before, of course. Witness the Ethnic Dance Festival. Ballet was born in drawing rooms, capoeira – one of hip-hop's ancestors – in the slave quarters of Brazil.

Besides the sheer fun of watching six-year-olds share the stage with "oldsters," shall we say, in their 30s, the festival is an opportunity to see how hip-hop is adapting to its new home, the theater. It may have started in the South Bronx, and quickly co-opted by commercial interests, but hip-hop has also become a malleable language with a distinct physical vocabulary – low-to-the-ground postures and such specific moves as spinning, robotics, popping, freezes, waves, rocking, and swipes.

Opening the evening's two halves were two masters who focused attention on the heart of hip-hop as the expression of a disenfranchised people. Hip-hop was born, after all, as a way of competing that didn't involve killing your opponent. Rennie Harris, whose Puremovement company will appear at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in early February, choreographed the thoughtful The Day Before Hip Hop for the Oakland-based Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. Central to the work, which featured the large ensemble flowingly divided into subgroups, were two figures in white. Rhummanee Hang, a tiny performer, delivered a fervent anti-Bush poem, recalling hip-hop as having arisen from poor folks' hurting hearts and heads. At the end, she gently "awakened" a little boy who until then had quietly been sitting in a yoga position downstage center. Hip-hop was born.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who called himself the last of the evening's performers who was born before hip-hop, traveled his passionate Mad at the Club solo around the stage's perimeter, as if trying to hold at bay the forces of misogyny and commercialism that threaten the art form.

Theatricalizing hip-hop can be as relatively simple as finding an idea around which to build dance routines. Culture Shock excavated a popular dance literature theme, the mechanical doll. With a dancing master asleep in his chair, the dolls came to life, at first as robots and then more and more as human beings. It seemed like the dancers had come up with their own costumes. They looked like revelers at a Halloween party where you could meet Superman, Dorothy's friend the Scarecrow, a mop-head soldier, a hula dancer, a butterfly, and a few carhops who ended up in bloomers. This simple costuming device had the advantage of individualizing the dancers in the large unison choreography, which studios still seem to favor.

DanceFest founder Micaya's SoulForce company, fabulously dressed in individualized black-and-white club attire for Testimony, was notable for its spurts of text and its wide-ranging musical choices. It included flute music and tracks from artists such as Stevie Wonder. At one point, one of the soloists melted into the ground, uncannily recalling the much abused puppet Petrouchka. Micaya's smartly sophisticated choreography particularly highlighted individuality within a community. The cameo by Zulu Gremlin, however, contributed very little.

Chain Reaction, an all-Asian male ensemble, might never have heard of the martial-type black fraternity dancing popular for many years, but their orderly stepping patterns and slo-mo moves, to jazz-inflected music, spoke of discipline and cooperation.

The Flavor Group's Capoeiristas and B-Boys – A Tribute to the Circle paired three spectacular b-boys and one b-girl in a friendly competition with local capoeira dancers. In terms of the audience's sympathy, the hip-hop dancers won the game.

The most splendidly theatrical ensemble, New Style Motherlode, with its Lightyears, closed this long but most enjoyable look at where hip-hop is heading. With a Caribbean carnival queen, Balinese umbrellas, and sari-inspired costumes, this was dancing that was sexy, comedic, athletic, and ... global.