NEW REGIME : TOMASSON’S CLASSIER S.F. BALLET

The performance by the San Francisco Ballet at Royce Hall on Saturday looked, on the surface at least, like a nice, somewhat bland, eminently good-natured survey of hand-me-down Balanchiniana.

It was more than that, though. In many ways, it represented an act of artistic exorcism.

When last we saw this company, it contributed what must have been the most vulgar dance event of the Olympic Arts Festival: an incoherent vaudeville show that would have given glitz a bad name even in Las Vegas. The artistic director listed at the time was Michael Smuin, a man of unbridled imagination, ultra-mod inclinations and dubious taste. Now, Smuin is listed as principal guest choreographer. On July 1 he was succeeded as artistic director by Helgi Tomasson, an Icelandic prince trained by the Royal Danes and crowned by the New York City Ballet.

The transition from Smuin to Tomasson has been fraught with political acrimony and personal recrimination. Now the smoke is beginning to settle, and one can see some welcome signs of change. After three months, the changes cannot be very dramatic. It is pretty clear, however, that Tomasson wants to abandon show-biz piffle and place a new stress on classical purity. He didn’t sit, and dance, at Mr. B.’s feet all those years for nothing.

It can be no coincidence that the introductory program that Tomasson chose to open the three-performance stand at UCLA offered none of his own choreography. For his calling card, he preferred to look back--cautiously and with admiration.

He looked back at two pieces by an honored Balanchine associate, Lew Christensen, who long served as paterfamilias of the San Francisco Ballet and who died last year. Tomasson also looked back at two popular staples from the New York City Ballet repertory: “In the Night,” Jerome Robbins’ romantic duets in the manner of “Dances at a Gathering”; and “Western Symphony,” the master’s gutsy vision of a neoclassic hoedown.

Tomasson has made a few personnel changes in his company, and more, do doubt, can be expected. At the moment, technical brilliance and purity of style remain elusive. The spirits, however, seem emphatically willing.

Christensen’s “Sinfonia,” which opened the festivities, harks back to 1959, a time when the sight of forward-crouching, finger-snapping, head-bobbing ballerinas seemed terribly mod. It also was a time when dainty balletic ritual had not yet become an intimate friend of acrobatic manipulation.

Christensen did not invent such maneuvers, of course, but he adapted them with knowing fluidity. He also made witty use of a Boccherini score that provided useful formal patterns to offset the abstract rituals.

The rather gingerly performance on this occasion focused on the sprightly Jamie Zimmerman, the fleet Kristine Peary and the willowy Kathleen Mitchell. Clarity and eagerness seem to be their greatest virtues now.

“Norwegian Moods” (1976) found Christensen cranking out a lightweight, virtuoso pas de deux to the piquant music of Stravinsky. It was dispatched here with gentle charm by Cynthia Drayer and with cheeky bravado by Julian Montaner.

“In the Night” (1970) may suggest recycled Robbins, with its rhapsodic interplay of Chopin nocturnes and vaguely suppressed eroticism. Its success depends to a great degree, upon the elegant abandon of the three couples involved, and upon their ability to enact undefined dramas.

The San Francisco version looked a bit timid. Wendy Van Dyck and Antonio Lopez danced the first duet correctly, but missed the innocent rapture defined in New York by Kay Mazzo and Anthony Blum. Laurie Cowden and Alexander Topciy worked hard--too hard--to convey the grandiose passions of the second pas de deux, minimizing the magic of the famous moment when he holds her upside down as her quivering legs execute tiny physical trills. Perhaps Violette Verdy and Peter Martins set an impossible standard. By the same possibly unfair comparative token, Nancy Dickson and Tom Ruud could hardly efface memories of Patricia McBride and Francisco Moncion, but they did bring splendid melodramatic strokes of their own to the third encounter. In the pit, Roy Bogas played straitjacket-Chopin on a tinny-sounding piano.

“Western Symphony” (1954) found the entire company relaxed, gutsy and obviously happy to stomp terra firma. Paul Russell flashed and thundered his way through the solos of the second cowboy with irresistible nonchalance, and Evelyn Cisneros made the most of the sassy and sultry saloon-girl cliches. All the central dancers strummed and strutted and bagatelled with cornball panache. Even with the third section missing, in accordance with Balanchine’s second thoughts of the early 1960s, this was a boffo-socko finale.

Denis de Coteau conducted the sometimes recalcitrant orchestra masterfully.