DANCE REVIEW : Some Russian Flavor for California Ballet

Until recently, American audiences had to endure Soviet choreography as the price for seeing Soviet dancers. No longer. In this unprecedented era of cultural exchange, Bolshoi dancers have danced Balanchine as guests with New York City Ballet, and Muscovite Stanislav Issaev has graced “The Nutcracker” of the California Ballet Company in San Diego.

On Saturday, however, the Soviets dropped the other toe shoe. At a California Ballet 20th Anniversary gala in the Civic Theatre, a Bolshoi star of the 1970s introduced a work made for this regional American company, a work as Russian as the Bolshoi itself in its use of hard-sell male virtuosity to put over an ambitious, downbeat premise.

Reportedly adapted from his dance film “Mtsyri” of 10 years ago, Mikhail Lavrovsky’s “The Novice” featured a tattered young hero bedeviled by monks, shadowed by masked figures in black and ultimately (after a lyric dream of escape to a mountain glade peopled by ballerinas) executed on a cross. A huge, wooden cross--backlit.

The music was an anguished, eclectic score (on tape) by David Toradze, the original inspiration a 19th-Century poem by Mikhail Lermontov and the theme, obviously, “a symbolic cry for freedom,” in Lavrovsky’s words. He clearly had this ballet in him a long time--perhaps longer than he knew, since style, structure and imagery strongly resembled “Paganini,” a lurid Bolshoi staple by his father, Leonid Lavrovsky.

But “Paganini” had more genuine movement characterization. Here the most blatant showpiece fodder--the high-velocity jumping/turning combinations that win international contests--ended in sudden clenched collapses to the floor or in soulful gestures of reaching out: crude signals of Something Serious.

Guest artist Daniel Meja executed everything brilliantly, but “The Novice” was just one more example of the Bolshoi Syndrome, the Big Lie of Soviet choreography: a notion that overstuffing any plot synopsis with bravura technique yields an artistic statement, a work of dance expression.

American dance audiences know better. They have had access to generations of ballet and modern dance masterworks that created meaning from the inside. Lavrovsky is not untalented, but he is still working in a corrupt, state-enforced style. What he thinks he’s saying in “The Novice” remains unsaid--except in pantomime and program notes. His responsibility in this new period of artistic freedom is much greater than he imagines.

Lavrovsky’s Expressionist charade formed the centerpiece of an otherwise celebratory five-part program. California Ballet director Maxine Mahon contributed “Just for Fun,” a fluid ensemble piece that inventively reflected the suave Stravinsky accompaniment until midway through when it grew arch and jokey.

Associate director Charles Bennett provided “For Flora, With Love” (music mostly by Johann Strauss), honoring Flora Downs Jennings, matriarch of ballet in San Diego (and also Maxine Mahon’s mother). The waltzing couples here included Jennings, Mahon and other company officials, all gracefully integrated with the dancers.

Bennett also staged “Night and Day,” a valiant, doomed attempt at matching the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. While the great Cole Porter adagio from “The Gay Divorcee” was projected (dimly) on a scrim, former California Ballet principals Marlene Jones-Wallace and Douglas Hevenor mirrored Fred and Ginger nearby, demonstrating remarkable skill and discipline--but also showing why the greatest dancing is inimitable.

However, Jones-Wallace and Hevenor earned the evening’s biggest ovation with another nostalgic reprise of a specialty duet: Bennett’s gymnastic “Albinoni Adagio,” choreographed for them in 1974. Hevenor no longer has a dancer’s body but his partnering strength remained remarkable on Saturday, and Jones-Wallace still coiled and uncoiled majestically. All evening, Louis Campiglia drew cohesive playing from the unidentified orchestra.