AT THE PANTAGES : MOISEYEV COMPANY RETURNS AFTER 12 YEARS

Alternately triumphant and disastrous, sophisticated and gross, the Moiseyev Dance Company performance Tuesday at the Pantages Theatre raised a lot of eyebrows.

Whenever members of the 50-year-old Soviet company (on its first U.S. tour in 12 years) danced formal suites adapted from Russian folk sources, the exceptional discipline, energy and style they embodied yielded spectacular results.

In Igor Moiseyev’s opening “Summer” suite, for instance, the precision of both timing and position in unison passages, the explosive yet effortless solos, the intricate crisscrossed lines merging suddenly in whirling double-circle formations and the chains of dancers forming living curtains across the stage provided a dazzling display of large-scale savoir-faire.

There was more: a mesmerizing Kalmuk trio with convulsive torso shivers and startling broken-ankle legwork; state-of-the-art drop kicks and turning jumps in the “Polyanka” suite; lyrical women’s round dances leading to a volcanic Moldavian Zhok for a cast of 27.

This was the Moiseyev company that dance aficionados remember and love--despite the evidence that the choreographer has often theatricalized and distorted his ethnic source materials nearly beyond recognition.

Significantly, however, Moiseyev’s current company couldn’t bring off his most celebrated character-dance showpieces. His familiar, condescending comic “Old City Quadrille” (bourgeois types in mock-competitive sorties on the dance floor) was anemically executed Tuesday, the characterizations crude and without conviction.

Similarly, his dramatic evocation of World War II freedom fighters, “Partisans” (figures in long black robes skimming the floor as if on horseback) lacked the weight and authority that helped make it a classic. Clearly the new generation of Moiseyev dancers can superbly respond to technical demands, but the company’s expressive powers are no longer remarkable.

And even technique couldn’t save “At the Skating Rink,” a recent Moiseyev creation without folkoric pretensions that retraced the path of Frederick Ashton’s 1937 ballet “Les Patineurs.”

Seldom conveying the fluidity of moving on ice, the basic skating sequences remained curiously slow, labored, repetitive: endless passages of slide-the-front-foot, lift-the-back-foot.

A boy who turns like a dervish, dancers forming a sled, comic sprawls, falling snow, fouettes glaces --these ideas that Ashton realized in a light, elegant style here looked dull and obvious, sustained chiefly through flashy gymnastic stunts and special effects (including soloists who could spin endlessly on some kind of ball-bearing contraptions in their shoes).

Even worse: “Night on Bald Mountain,” which began with spirited, virtuosic Ukrainian peasant dances to traditional music, descended to coarse drunken comic mime and then sank even further when furry, pig-faced demons carrying pitchforks and long-haired, broom-wielding demonettes in what looked like cloven ballet slippers began cavorting through inane, generalized lurch-and-stagger dance-charades set against menacing passages from Mussorgsky’s score.

Midway through, though, the “Night” music abruptly stopped and Moiseyev’s vulgar, unmusical little pastiche hit bottom. To a drum track, the infernal participants in his witches’ sabbath began performing the shimmy, jitterbug and other pop dances that Moiseyev reportedly observed in a Moscow discotheque.

Think about it: rhythm dances, most of them products of black American culture, being parodied as the work of the devil. Isn’t this a message of our own radical right unexpectedly redelivered from Russia--with lifts?

Minus this sequence, “Night on Bald Mountain” represented merely a pseudo-primitive gloss on the Bolshoi Ballet’s beloved, cornball “Walpurgisnacht.” Adding it raises nasty questions about prejudice and propaganda that even the company’s obligatory and mechanical hands-across-the-sea finale, the Virginia Reel, couldn’t begin to resolve.

THEATER OF CONFRONTATION: Dividing their attention between TV news crews and first-nighters outside the Pantages, some 60 street picketers delivered their protests against Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration but never disrupted the performance itself. Not taking any chances, security personnel remained in place throughout the theater (with four of them conspicuously flanking the stage) during the evening.