ICE DANCERS TORVILL, DEAN AT FORUM

Olympic gold medalists and world champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were recently quoted in these pages about wanting their current touring ice-dance program (seen Friday at the Inglewood Forum) to be considered “a dance show.”

To this end, they and their associates (including Australian ballet choreographer Graeme Murphy) adapted for skating nearly all the familiar (if disreputable) subgenres in contemporary dance: the artsy symphonic ballet (“The Planets”), the cutesie mock-nostalgia ballet (“Tango”), the Angst -ridden Mahler-lieder ballet (“The Last Song”), the pious-unto-death ecclesiastical ballet (“Heaven”), the sex-and-violence-in-leather rock ballet (“Hell”) and more.

Though their pseudo-Hindu “Song of India” suite (with music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Rodgers and Hart) certainly didn’t look any sillier than Gerald Arpino’s curry-flavored “Light Rain” for the Joffrey Ballet, the borrowed pretensions of this kind of repertory often forced Torvill and Dean into feigning a grandiose glamour foreign to their performing personalities.

Both obviously think like dancers. Where their talented colleagues (Gary Beacom in “Tuxedo Junction” or Lea Ann Miller and William Fauver in “Torro”) established a dance premise but soon abandoned it for predictable, hard-sell tricks, Torvill and Dean sustained every concept and found ways to showcase virtuosity without breaking the movement flow.

Dean repeatedly proved himself a brilliant partner--able to manage impossible traveling-lifts without marring his elegance of bearing. A patineur noble , up there with such exemplary cavaliers as Anthony Dowell and Peter Martins. Sadly, many of Torvill’s costumes foreshortened her already problematic line as a dancer and made her limb-action matter far less than Dean’s. But her skating technique, of course, matched his perfectly.