A FIVE-PART BEJART BALLET SAMPLER

At last, choreography! After two programs of disjointed, lugubrious dance-theater spectacles plus unwieldly suites drawn from full-evening works, Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the 20th Century brought something new to Royce Hall, UCLA, on Wednesday: five pieces reflecting a concern with dance issues, dance structure, dance craftsmanship.

For once, themes arose from movement rather than being arbitrarily imposed. In the Surrealist ritual “Le Marteau sans Maitre” (1973), for example, the inflexible shackling of dance steps to the brief phrases of Pierre Boulez’s score proved the initial statement of determinism, the ballet’s subject.

This concept soon flowered in sequences where a lone woman and then six men were manipulated by hooded, black-clad figures resembling Bunraku puppeteers. These instruments of fate forced into a final, sardonic mating dance the coolly virtuosic Lynne Charles (mistress of fiendishly tricky, anti-academic footwork) and Marc Hwang (with a face like the young Nijinsky’s and a talent for galvanic torso spasms). The ballet ended with them encased in a cocoon; so much for modern romance.

Charles returned for an even nastier love duet, Bejart’s outrageous “Mephisto Waltz” (1979), in which she was revived from the dead by a hotly demonic Gil Roman and then swept away to the appropriately feverish score by Liszt.

Besides reviving horror-film cliches, this delirious charade reminded us of the original erotic charge of waltzing--here transformed into a kinky S&M; nightmare where the lustful male literally wields life and death power over his frail partner. And it splendidly highlighted Charles’ deft dramatic abilities along with the blazing, bad-boy charisma of Roman.

“Isadora” (1976) and “L’Impromptu” (1986) each showcased female dancing--not normally a priority for Bejart. All but wrecked by the Expressionist overkill of its opening image--Marcia Haydee strangled by a scarf stretching halfway across the stage--”Isadora” survived due to Haydee’s remarkable versatility, authority and invincible star power.

“L’Impromptu” (to Liszt’s variations on Verdi) contrasted formula ballet bravura with idiosyncratic shrugs and preening gestures that seemed intended to underline ballet’s artificiality. This feeble idea didn’t sustain it through its many formal permutations, but Grazia Galante’s wholehearted conviction and the technical skill of her colleagues kept interest alive.

Galante also lent her radiance to the principal female role in “Ce que l’Amour me Dit” (1974), an archetypally Bejartian dance drama based on ideas expressed in the last three movements of Mahler’s Third Symphony. With Jorge Donn deeply soulful and impassioned in the central role, the ballet depicted an odyssey through realms of experience to a plateau of mystical, metaphysical transcendence.

The memorable vision of human love embodied with great feeling by Donn and the corps unfortunately clashed with major lapses of taste--a Tadzian angel of deliverance, for instance, in an odd peekaboo unitard.

Indeed, the men’s costuming had an uncanny way of growing revealing just when the choreography became opaque and the cutout briefs in the last sequence achieved something like end-of-the-line minimalism. Only Pilobolus dancers go further--in public anyway.