MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : SANTA BARBARA BALLET AT OXY

Eight members of Santa Barbara Ballet labored hard and charmlessly in a program of home-grown choreography Saturday in Thorne Hall at Occidental College.

Almost all of six of the dances put emphasis upon bravura technical skills, which none of the dancers have mastered, or upon sophisticated characterization, which they also lack.

The egregiously named new ballet, “Baroccoco,” choreographed by company artistic director Tamara Usher, for example, mixed classical style with modern distortions, as it shifted back and forth with disconcerting indifference to the individual musical styles of Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. (Pianist William Bourne provided the fluent, live accompaniment.)

Similarly, “Celebration!” (choreographed by Vicente Nebrada to a taped, cavalierish mix of Handel’s “Water Music” and “Music for the Royal Fireworks”) featured pas de deuxs with flashy (and dangerously executed) lifts, as well as variations that served only to expose the dancers’ uneven technical development.

“Nat” (by David Gallagher, to three songs by Nat King Cole) and “Tardes de Sombra,” (choreographed by dancer Gary McKenzie to guitar music and a reading of Lorca’s “Lament on the Death of a Bullfighter”), on the other hand, relied on projecting a dramatic character: in the first, a threadbare imitation of the Baryshnikov role in “Sinatra Suite”; in the second, a doomed matador who embodies every cliche in the book. In both, McKenzie danced conscientiously but effortfully.

The most successful work of the evening, “A Lover’s Tale,” (choreographed by Marc Bogaerts to two movements of Grieg’s Piano Concerto), however, was precisely the one in which technique mattered the least because McKenzie, Shirin Keyani and Roger Whorle were asked to achieved their effects through parody of the style.