BALLET REVIEW : Harlem Dances in Fagan’s ‘Footsteps’

The Dance Theatre of Harlem used to be a hot ticket in Pasadena. The company--invariably gutsy and vital, even when it was less than perfectly polished--always attracted the usual ballet aficionados in large numbers.

It also appealed to a broad ethnic audience, an unabashedly enthusiastic and justifiably proud audience that normally tends to avoid local events involving toe shoes and tutus.

A particular performance may have stumbled between easy show-biz effects and complex classical exercises, but it didn’t matter. The crowd always responded with a lot of appreciative gasping, punctuated with hooting and hollering.

Something seems to have changed. Monday night, Arthur Mitchell’s itinerant ensemble returned, courtesy of the Ambassador Foundation, and it looked as if two-thirds of the 3,000 seats in the Civic Auditorium were empty. Those who did come, moreover, seemed only mildly, not wildly, entertained.

The repertory chosen for this year’s tour may help explain the public indifference. Harlem keeps sending us the same basic, easy-to-digest fare. Perhaps the masses are tiring of the fluttering “Firebird,” the hand-me-down Balanchine and the Creole “Giselle” that loses so much in translation.

For openers this time, Harlem repeated Billy Wilson’s “Concerto in F,” an ode to cosmopolitan Gershwin and a jazzy, spiffy, brassy exercise in balletic banality.

The fleet Christina Johnson was partnered by the muscular Eddie J. Shellman in the snazzy Allegro. Carol Crawford, James Goree and Hugues Magen did some nice, languid, athletic intermingling in the Andante. The entire ensemble brought push-button Broadway pizazz to the finale. The dancers easily outshone the choreography. David LaMarche was the tasteful piano soloist in the pit.

To close the program, Mitchell turned once again to John Taras’ wondrous “Firebird” production of 1982.

Stephanie Dabney, shimmering calmly and quivering strongly in the title role, repeated her predictable tour de force , with Donald Williams as the ardent would-be prince. The exotic charms of Geoffrey Holder’s decors have literally begun to fade, however, and Scott Schilk’s subtle lighting scheme has gone primitive.

The only novelty of the evening, and of the weeklong season, came with “Footprints Dressed in Red,” one of those trendy modern-dance-on-point numbers that try desperately to make graceful dancers look ungainly and to make complicated maneuvers look easy.

Garth Fagan, celebrated director of the Bucket Dance Theatre in Rochester, turned to a Jimi Hendrix song for title for this sometimes intriguing, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes pretentious exercise. The most arresting and most fashionable impulse, however, would seem to be the incessantly noodling, doodling and tinkling score: John Adams’ “Grand Pianola Music.”

Given this a modified-minimalist sound track, Fagan toyed with the hypnotic effect of repetition, with the possibility of linear permutation within a rhythmic straitjacket. The accent is on step and gesture, not on expansive phrasing. The potentially unifying concept of abstract development is all but ignored.

The hard-working, occasionally virtuosic dancers strike commanding poses, usually with legs impossibly extended. Then they turn and/or tangle. They model interesting, billowing, quasi-unisex costumes by Giovanna Ferragamo that drape only the arm on one side and only the leg on the other.

There are hints of Fagan’s Afro-Caribbean background here, coexisting with classical balances and lifts. There also are suggestions here and there of padding.

The corps weaves mysterious, energetic, inelegant patterns around the principals. Acrobatic stunts fuse with distorted arabesques. Finicky movements compete with grandiose statements. After a while, sustaining focus becomes a problem.

Finally, blissfully, the rat-a-tat music comes to a cadence. Undaunted, a lonely man comes out for a last bravura turn, in silence. Then he throws the crowd a quizzical glance, strides off, and the curtain falls. The last part is the best part.

The large cast--six soloists, eight demi-soloists plus corps--did not always muster the wonted degree of unison suavity. Still, one had to admire the exceptional febrile control of Virginia Johnson and the macho finesse of Donald Williams.

Although Adams’ score was regurgitated on tape, Leslie Dunner conducted a deft 31-piece orchestra for the Gershwin and Stravinsky ballets. The sound of that small ensemble, not incidentally, was distorted by microphones and compromised--artificially sweetened, if you will--by a synthesizer. Under such compromising circumstances, one wondered why the management didn’t just opt for the usual horrors of canned music.