DANCE REVIEW : UNEXPECTED FROM BEJART BALLET

Expect the unexpected from Maurice Bejart. Two years ago his brilliant Ballet of the 20th Century offered American audiences an evening-length choreographic retrospective and a mixed program that each emphasized fluid, relatively classical dance values. No longer.

On its current tour (which reaches Royce Hall, UCLA, on Saturday), the Belgian company has brought a repertory steeped in Expressionist dance-theater traditions--a repertory built upon startling juxtapositions of imagery and daring movement discontinuities.

This time, then, the inevitable controversy surrounding Bejart will probably center as much on choreographic/theatrical form as expressive (a.k.a. sexual) content.

In the Spreckels Theatre on Wednesday, two uneven, phantasmagoric company vehicles included tableaux so bald and cliche-ridden they all but courted “oh, brother!” derision.

The nightmarish Spanish Civil War sequence from the quasi-biographical “Malraux,” for instance, showed suffering hero/witness Jorge Donn crucified on an airplane propeller. And the visionary “Light” featured agonized earth-mother Grazia Galante endlessly cradling a giant egg.

However, both of these works also provided spectacular dancing opportunities from time to time--notably several exultant martial solos for the fiery Serge Campardon and an intricate, unorthodox pas de deux for the sensitive Donn and the steely Lynne Charles in “Malraux,” plus highly demanding and astute solos showcasing the artistry of Donn, Galante, Charles and Michel Gascard in “Light.”

Even when overwhelmed or undercut by the staging conceits, this remained a terrific company: just as indecently alluring and nearly as fierce as ever but also scrupulous about executing Bejart’s eccentric collage of dance idioms.

Perhaps the most revealing work on the Wednesday program was the one not scheduled for the UCLA season: “Sonate a Trois,” a 20-minute dance drama from 1957 based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Sartre’s play, you may recall, taught us that “Hell is other people” and damnation a room in which three strangers prey upon one another, world without end.

Set to Bartok’s driving Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the spare and often strikingly Tudor-esque Bejart adaptation reduced the confict to sexual competition and made the male (Campardon) into an oddly passive victim of female exploitation (embodied by willowy Katarzyna Gdaniec in a crimson gown). It also left the moments of lesbian seduction far more understated than his celebrated (a.k.a. notorious) depictions of male homosexuality in later ballets.

This unexpected reticence left Florence Faure’s role minimally defined, but in fact she gave the most artful performance, projecting a brooding intelligence more original and compelling than her colleagues’ conventional emoting.

Conscientious and totally free of Expressionistic frissons-- but seldom distinguished or even persuasive--”Sonate a Trois” demonstrated Bejart’s limitations in the realm of literary/psychological story-ballet just as his more recent setting of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto (on the last tour) demonstrated his limitations in the realm of formal music-visualization.

Obviously his true metier lies elsewhere--in externalizing the dizzying overlay of myth and history, eternal processes and specific cultural contexts that shape contemporary perception. It is this sensibility that his dancers are about to unleash on Los Angeles balletomanes. With a vengeance.