DANCE REVIEW : Hard-Sell Georgians at the Pantages

What happens when you take the heart out of folk dance? What’s left besides hard-sell athletic prowess and exotic costuming?

The Georgian State Dance Company has clearly been on the road too long. At a time when many national minorities in the Soviet Union are demanding recognition and even autonomy--when ethnic identity is worth fighting for--this 75-member company from Tbilisi seems to have lost touch with its unique cultural heritage.

Time after time in their performance at the Pantages Theatre on Tuesday, the Georgians executed steps and defined poses as if by rote, with no suggestion of the feelings or experiences these movements were originally intended to convey.

This detachment sometimes passed for noble Georgian pride, but most often undercut whatever mood or context was allowed to color the dances.

The sure-fire Georgian specialties that other companies have adopted--women in floor-length gowns gliding smoothly through formal groupings, for instance--had no poetry, no shared breath or pulse, just as some of the men’s bold display dances had only a hyped-up pacing in place of real spirit.

Only in the virtuosic competition dances that ended each half of the program did the dancers consistently offer more than anonymous proficiency--and even here the large corps of onlookers clapped along dutifully.

For all its technical expertise, this was a company utterly lacking the communal solidarity and commitment that made the performances here a few months ago by the Virsky Ukrainian State Dance Company so thrilling. After those evenings at the Pantages, we knew what it meant to be Ukrainian. But what’s a Georgian?

In pursuit of showmanship, director/choreographer Tenghiz Sukhishvili reduced the ancient riches of Georgian culture to a cheap tourist souvenir. The dances themselves were abbreviated for maximum variety--at the cost of purpose and coherence. The costuming suffered from the decorative glitz imposed by Simon Virsaladze (a designer who has also disfigured the Bolshoi Ballet) and the women’s makeup was heightened to something fulsome and demeaning.

There may not have been anything as ghastly on the program as the skating ballet and devil dances brought on the last Moiseyev tour, but the approach betrayed the same curious alienation from genuine folk resources.

Audiences who come expecting only Slavic stunts may not notice the emptiness and may feel satisfied by the spectacular array of squat kicks, knee drops, sword fights, angular jumps and powerhouse turns--especially when performed by the four fabulous company children.

Others, though, will leave alarmed by a folk dance program with practically no value as folklore and even less as an expression of national spirit.