LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : ARMITAGE BALLET IN DEBUT

Karole Armitage, a thoughtful modernist who can boast Merce Cunningham training and secondhand-Balanchine indoctrination, used to be celebrated as the princess of punk. Or reviled as such.

Now, after a fashionable fashion, she has gone straight. Relatively pure ballet is her thing.

The unblushing Los Angeles Festival brochure hails her as “one of the most influential dance artists in the world.” It also describes her rise to prominence as “dizzying.”

Actually, some observers may have a little trouble discerning all that international influence. Perhaps some of us aren’t dizzy enough.

The Fitzpatrick hype-organ promised a “new evening-length ballet” Thursday at the Doolittle Theatre. That sounded exciting.

The work in question, “The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler,” was indeed reasonably new. It was created early in 1986. But it hardly filled the evening.

None of this would have mattered much, had the trendy dancer-choreographer and her company of eight really stretched aesthetic consciousnesses. No one would have complained if Armitage had astounded us with original ideas, or drastically increased the communal adrenaline rate.

Alas, it didn’t happen. One had to admire her orderly approach to an eclectic, essentially traditional vocabulary. One could appreciate the way she made each of her pieces speak with classical propriety that gradually gave way to well-contained but distinctly jazzy funk. One could applaud her willingness to juxtapose vastly dissimilar sights and dissimilar sounds, not to mention her ability to quote wittily from her erstwhile masters.

Still, admiration for her work seldom rose to unbridled enthusiasm. For all its mod posturing, Armitage’s repertory just seemed a bit too cool, too self-conscious, too dry, too diffuse, too monochromatic. . . .

In “Tarnished Angels,” the picturesque little exercise that opened the program, the chief source of interest at first seemed to be the surface contrast between the dance, the decors and the music. Eventually, however, the wild juxtapositions began to seem arbitrary rather than provocative.

David Salle, Armitage’s apparent muse and chief scenic collaborator, provided a whimsical--we think it was whimsical--backdrop devoted to detailed portraits of fish.

Christian Lacroix, the French couturier , designed costumes that teetered between the tutu-chic and the commedia dell’arte cute.

For her brashly syncopated score, Armitage chose the gospel of “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” according to Charles Mingus.

Amid this collage of contradictory expressive impulses, Armitage sent her poker-faced troupe through a series of conventional tippy-toe paces that had to go slightly askew. Tall, sleek and insinuatingly sullen, she also took a central role that, surprisingly, demanded more personality than pizazz.

Here, as elsewhere in the program, the most compelling of the hard-working dancers seemed to be the willowy, marvelously wily Nora Kimball, a new recruit from American Ballet Theatre. Baryshnikov’s loss obviously is Armitage’s gain.

“The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler” turned out to be a similar but more ambitious collection of clashes.

The title invokes the legacy of a jazz saxophone virtuoso of the ‘60s. His music takes anachronistic turns, however, with the comic monologues of Lord Buckley (including a jive version of Marc Antony’s funeral oration), with the glittery texture of Webern’s Five Pieces, with the piquant strains of Japanese folk music courtesy of Yo-Yo Ma, with jazz by Ayler’s brother Don and with the pristine string-quartet explorations of Stravinsky.

Rolling on this musical patchwork quilt, Salle dresses the dancers in unitards plus pop accessories ranging from dark glasses to dog-faced T-shirts to skirts hiding light bulbs. Pictures of light bulbs echo on one back-cloth. An all-seeing eye recurs on curtain and scrim. We are sure it means something.

The dancers traipsed about this deliberately diffuse milieu with speedy refinement and athletic panache, as needed. Their duets were delicately calculated, the ensembles organic in dynamic as well as spatial growth.

In the final analysis, however, one sensed limitations in movement language. The brash array of musical and scenic elements could not disguise the narrow range of kinetic ideas. Armitage’s dance relied here on repetition when one wanted development. It merely unwound when one needed a climax.

The choreographer recently reduced this two-act ramble, incidentally, to a three-part suite called “Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin’ Daddies.” In this case, less may have been more.

In any case, Armitage does give good titles.