DANCE REVIEW : AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE IN TUDOR’S ‘DIM LUSTRE’

From the reactive anguish of “Dark Elegies” (1937) to the nostalgic flirtations of “The Leaves Are Fading” (1975), many of Antony Tudor’s most enduring ballets have explored the weight of memory: the link between past experience and the states of feeling that shape his characters’ lives.

Introduced locally on a three-part program Tuesday in Shrine Auditorium, the 1985 American Ballet Theatre revival of Tudor’s “Dim Lustre” (1943) reminds us of how brilliantly Tudor used time both as subject and raw material--restructuring conventional narrative continuity for maximum insight and economy.

Set in a glittering ballroom, the one-act ballet is a dance-drama in disguise--a suite of formal group dances during which a relationship disintegrates. We are shown a resume of the romantic backgrounds of the leading couple (Susan Jaffe and Kevin McKenzie). We watch timelines intersect and overlap and glimpse processes of self-examination (presented as passages of mirror-synchrony). Yet the whirlwind social dances and the overheated ardor of Richard Strauss’ “Burleske” surge onward.

Because of the way the characters’ incidental perceptions--a touch on the shoulder, the scent of perfume--launch meditative flashbacks, “Dim Lustre” has been compared to Proust.

In truth, it owes as much to the Dickens of “A Christmas Carol” and the Wilder of “Our Town” for the way its leading couple is dropped, unwillingly, into the past--reexperiencing everything with hindsight, but without being able to change the outcome.

Tudor wants both his leading couple and the audience to recognize the current (ballroom) romance as a conditioned response: an acting out of feelings generated long ago. So if the characters in the flashbacks seem more vivid to us than the leading couple--or even if the reality of the present begins to appear just as much an illusion as the memory of a vanished past--the ballet makes its point about sentimental self-deception and Tudor’s luster remains undimmed.

Tudor has been quoted recently in these pages as being critical of the lighting for the current revival and, indeed, David K. H. Elliott’s abrupt blackouts Tuesday did disrupt the transitions and invited ruinous divertissement- applause at the end of the memory episodes.

Designed for the original production, Motley’s ornate costumes for the women also caused problems: At the conclusion of turns, the gowns’ bulk and weight seemed to pull several dancers off balance.

If inevitably the performances lacked the legendary heat and flair that Nora Kaye, Hugh Laing, Muriel Bentley, John Kriza, Janet Reed, Rosella Hightower, Michael Kidd and Tudor himself are said to have brought to the ballet 43 years ago, the 1986 cast makes “Dim Lustre” a living experience--not a museum piece, footnote to dance history or sentimental homage.

McKenzie deftly mined the flashbacks for character facets and emerged as more complex and sympathetic than Jaffe, who remained superglamorous in every time zone--and, of course, super-refined as a dancer. Amanda McKerrow and Johan Renvall adroitly embodied the couple’s past lovers in innocence, but their former lovers in experience were rather pallidly danced by Anna Spelman and Clark Tippet.

Paul Connelly conducted a propulsive account of the score, with Paul Bogas capably attending to the driving piano solos.

The evening began with an uncredited revision of the second act of “Swan Lake,” a hodgepodge in which the original pantomime appeared in one scene but was excised in another; Lev Ivanov’s vintage choreography survived in such passages as Odette’s variations and much of the pas de deux but was replaced elsewhere with Soviet-era ensembles and supplemented by two new solos devised by and for a superstar Siegfried.

None too prepossessing in their technical demands, those solos found Mikhail Baryshnikov offering an object lesson in purity of style and nobility of bearing. For his Odette he chose Bonnie Moore. Just 21 and just promoted from the corps de ballet, she proved carefully coached, notably supple, remarkably conscientious, but technically feeble and emotionally vacant.

The stylistic distortions imposed on Moore in the name of classicism--the flapping wing-arms well past the point when Odette should be all-woman, for instance--served to make Cynthia Harvey’s dancing in Balanchine’s neo-classic “Theme and Variations,” which closed the program, look bracing in its authenticity, redemptive in its freedom from mannerism.

This season, Harvey has begun to understand how to put a personal signature on this ballet. In the past, she seemed satisfied with merely reflecting the formal and technical wonders of “Theme and Variations.” On Tuesday, suavely partnered by Ross Stretton, she at last brilliantly projected them.