DANCE REVIEW : A San Francisco Ballet Celebration

On stage at the War Memorial Opera House, the faces are familiar, the partnership and affiliation brand new.

Sabina Allemann of National Ballet of Canada and Robert Hill of American Ballet Theatre are dancing together for the first time as principals with San Francisco Ballet, bringing their cool, almost analytical expertise to a conventionally swoony pas de deux from artistic director Helgi Tomasson’s new neoclassic showpiece “Handel--A Celebration.”

One of the most beautiful women in all ballet, Allemann displays her lyric gifts with graciousness and tact, while the tall, perfectly proportioned Hill betrays no suggestion of strain in the difficult, slow lifts and other physical challenges of the role.

But “Handel--A Celebration” is a company vehicle, not a star turn, and, significantly, Allemann and Hill don’t eclipse the high achievement of their colleagues: the steely authority of Ludmila Lopukhova (from the Kirov Ballet), for example. Or the dreamy elegance of Pascale Leroy (from Ballet de Marseille), dancing with the warm, coltish Lawrence Pech (another Ballet Theatre refugee). Or the tiny, delicate Elizabeth Loscavio, a home-grown Wunderkind emerging as the discovery of the season. . . .

Less than four years after he took over the company after the ouster of Michael Smuin, Tomasson has created an ensemble that matches any in North America for sheer refinement. However, his emphasis on the extended line, heightened buoyancy and calibrated smoothness of classical dancing is energized by a repertory that, this season, focuses to a great extent on the Americanization of ballet.

Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” (1942); Jerome Robbins’ “Interplay” (1945); Lew Christensen’s “Sinfonia” (1959); Peter Martins’ “Calcium Light Night” (1977), and even Jiri Kylian’s “Forgotten Land” (1981) adopt from the vernacular movement and modern dance of our culture exciting ideas about rhythm, attack, gestural expression and energy.

So, while watching San Francisco Ballet dance these works over the weekend, you saw a concept evolve of a freer, looser, more contemporary classicism--one that can again be tested and hold its own against the neoclassic purity of George Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations” (1947), “Pas de Trois” (1955) and “Ballo della Regina” (1978).

Although its staging of “Rodeo” is inferior to the Joffrey’s--softened and often smeared except in the square-dance interlude--Denis de Coteau and the exemplary SFB orchestra give the classic Copland score maximum freshness and urgency. Looking like Elizabeth Taylor in “Giant,” Allemann as the Cowgirl dances strongly but makes the most preposterously glamorous wallflower in history. However, Pech is sensational as the Champion Roper--lithe, dashing, charismatic but never self-conscious.

These same qualities are those that Robbins built into the group vocabulary of “Interplay,” a work (to music by Morton Gould) that prefigures the youth-dancing of “N.Y. Export, Op. Jazz” and “West Side Story” but in the most open, innocent and hopeful manner. Just out of her teens, Loscavio proved an ideal centerpiece: the child-woman totally fearless and absorbed in the moment.

“Sinfonia” also depicts this sense of playful, assertive adolescence--and even includes the identical finger-snapping accents. But here the Boccherini accompaniment reduces such colloquialisms to flippant novelties in a breezy but essentially conservative neoclassic suite. The airy lightness of SFB style is especially radiant in this trifle; indeed, the placement and ease of the male corps make such company veterans as David McNaughton (dancing with Lopukhova in Tomasson’s hard-sell “Bizet Pas de Deux” on the same program) look undertrained or slovenly in comparison.

The intricate technical inversions and displacements of “Calcium Light Night” attempt to match the eerie collage of effects in the Charles Ives accompaniment, just as the bold, headlong surge of energy in “Forgotten Land” seeks to physicalize the force and flow of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. Balanchine’s innovations with Webern and Stravinsky form the key antecedents of Martins’, while American modern dance is clearly the matrix for Kylian’s creation.

These two unorthodox pieces received the most powerful dancing of the weekend: the magisterial assurance of Christopher Boatwright and the brilliant, methodically self-effacing Tracy-Kai Maier in “Calcium Light Night” and, in “Forgotten Land,” the passionate, scrupulous contributions of Evelyn Cisneros and her colleagues.

Cisneros also joined Karin Averty and Anthony Randazzo in “Pas de Trois” (music by Glinka) and alone surmounted its nonstop technical rigors. Again, as in their performance of “Theme and Variations” (music by Tchaikovsky), Averty’s dancing looked promising but oddly detached and generalized, as well as musically foursquare. Randazzo once more partnered her skillfully, but for all his charm and polish, he simply lacked the stamina to go the distance. So far, only a nice try.

However, in “Ballo della Regina” (music by Verdi), San Francisco Ballet triumphantly mastered a tailor-made New York City Ballet showcase--with Loscavio rocketing through the high-velocity Merill Ashley role with a particular delight in its dismayingly intricate needlepoint- pointe work. And, opposite her, Andre Reyes proved a new king of the air: Who else flies this weightlessly or effortlessly?

Some of Tomasson’s major risks this season remain under wraps. But he has already confirmed his hold on his dancers and his public with programs suggesting that the distinction between “regional” and “national” companies no longer has any meaning whatsoever.