DANCE REVIEW : Oakland Ballet Brings ‘Biches’ to Cocteau Fest

Life can really be a biche for the Oakland Ballet sometimes.

Originally, the company planned to bring to the Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival at UC Irvine on Friday a major event: the United States premiere of the long-lost, newly reconstructed “Le Train Bleu,” a landmark 1924 ballet with a Cocteau scenario. However, legal conflicts with the estate of choreographer Bronislava Nijinska forced the substitution of “Les Biches,” a more familiar 1924 ballet with a small Cocteau connection.

Moreover, since “Les Biches” is no longer in the Oakland Ballet’s active repertory, the audience at the Fine Arts Village Theatre on Friday had to make do with excerpts (essentially the second half of the work) on a program loaded with bits and pieces.

All four choreographers represented were crucial to the evolution of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes--from Mikhail Fokine, whose “Prince Igor” (a k a “Polovtsian Dances”) put the company on the map in 1909, to George Balanchine, who extended its reforms after Diaghilev’s death.

All four works also defined character and social class in novel, distinctly non-classical ways, reminding us of a rich dance tradition now largely ignored in an era that overprizes academic style.

Both “Les Biches” (1924, music by Poulenc) and the “Hand of Fate” pas de deux from Balanchine’s “Cotillon” (1932, music by Chabrier) dissected high-society mating rituals. Elegant and cold, each fused classical steps and a distorted plastique, with Nijinska opting for mordant social satire and Balanchine choosing severe formal abstraction.

Endlessly fingering her string of pearls, Susan Taylor proved suitably brittle as the Hostess in “Les Biches” and Patti Owen capably danced the sexually ambiguous role of the page-boyish lady in blue. In the moody duet from “Cotillon” (a work the Joffrey Ballet has recently reconstructed in toto and will soon dance locally), Joy Gim had a seductive stretch as well as all the steely control the choreography required. Ron Thiele partnered her expertly as her alternately fascinated and horrified prey.

More mongrel than Mongol, the worn, faded, unevenly danced Oakland “Prince Igor” (music by Borodin) did convey some suggestion of the ballet’s fabled dynamism and its influences on “Le Sacre du Printemps,” a later work also depicting primitive tribal relationships. Unfortunately, Thiele simply didn’t have the power or pliancy for the jumps-with-backbendsthat defined the role of Warrior-Chief.

The most polished dancing on the program came in the showpieces for mechanical dolls from Leonide Massine’s frothy “La Boutique Fantasque” (1919, music by Rossini as arranged by Respighi). Especially accomplished: Jennifer Demko and Alan Villareal in the same sly, mock-raunchy poodle pas de deux that the moral guardians of Ambassador College had insisted the company delete from its Pasadena performances in 1981. Life can really be a biche for the Oakland Ballet sometimes. . . .