DANCE REVIEW : ABT, Graham Unite for Gala at Met

In an unusual joint gala, Thursday, American Ballet Theatre and the Martha Graham Dance Company combined to present an evening at the Metropolitan Opera House benefiting the training adjuncts that feed dancers into their companies.

The event opened with 37 Graham schoolchildren ages 8 to 10, enthusiastically executing simple floor work, then crossing the stage in runs and leaps.

The movement became twistier and more exultant for teen-agers in Nile green unitards, and then the select members of the Martha Graham Ensemble, in black and white, declared their identities more fiercely with characteristic contractions, gestures of thrusting and pushing away and snaking arms and legs.

Without a break, the program slid into the choral pomposity of “Ritual to the Sun,” from Graham’s 1981 “Acts of Light.” The excellent Julian Littleford and Maxine Sherman--whose dancing has become distressingly quirky--led 17 dancers through the vigorous routine.

Neat in execution, but not at all docile in manner, eight polite teen-agers from ABT’s school put their hearts into dancing a waltz, mazurka and Krakoviak against a background of white curtains, a terrace and evening sky. Then the same set filled with a flood of dancers for a dizzying “Fete Polonaise,” the final movement of George Balanchine’s “Bouree Fantasque,” led by Cheryl Yeager and John Gardner.

All that was introduction. The meat of the program was in the two Graham masterpieces from the 1940s that followed, “Night Journey” (1947) and “Appalachian Spring” (1944), with casts that mingled, to a small degree, dancers from both companies.

Mikhail Baryshnikov danced the role of Oedipus in “Night Journey” (one of the juiciest male roles in the Graham oeuvre ) with such riveting ferocity that he altered the usual focus of the piece. His character is fully achieved just in the domineering way he sets his foot over Jocasta, or flings his cape around her shoulders to claim her as his property.

But the whole work was performed with deep understanding--from Donlin Foreman’s gloomy, stick-thumping, blind seer, to the frantic Priestess (Thea Nerissa Barnes) and her six cohorts, to the wracked Jocasta of Terese Capucilli.

Capucilli isn’t always as simple as she might be, but I doubt if it’s her fault. Most Graham roles have been tarted up and exaggerated in recent years, as if the-powers-that-be fear that unless everything is blatant, the audience won’t get it. The only real distraction was the Isamu Noguchi set that, somehow, has been turned into a cheap imitation of itself.

In the noble “Appalachian Spring,” Martine van Hamel dances the Pioneering Woman with more graciousness and infinitely less sternness than anyone in recent years. The presiding spirit of the opening frontier, she’s less a survivor of the hard past than a welcoming, though slightly distant, hostess.

With his light, whirling leaps and sharp knee-slaps, Ricardo Bustamante (of ABT) danced the Husbandman with a happy rightness of feeling. Just the way he ran his hand tenderly over the house wall on his entrance was so completely expressive of his expectant relationship to his new home. But his presence wasn’t yet as defined sculpturally as the other leading dancers.

Steve Rooks, as the Revivalist, was brisk and comic with his bouncing little flock of groupies and particularly fine in the hellfire solo. But Christine Dakin as the Bride was fresh and recticent. The dynamic fluidity of Dakin’s performance was a revelation, particularly in the long solo where she giddily turns from girl to woman and back again at a rocketing pace.

The ABT/Graham gala came about, indirectly, as a result of a discussion Graham had with Baryshnikov over a year ago regarding the possibility of ABT performing her “Diversion of Angels.” That event will take place next season and will be the first time that Graham choreography enters the regular repertory of a classical company.

Baryshnikov performed “El Penitente” with her company last year and danced the Husbandman in “Appalachian Spring” at a gala in the fall of 1987. Rudolf Nureyev essayed a whole range of Graham roles.

“Diversion of Angels” has an airiness and brightness of surface that may facilitate its adoption by ABT. But, in general, Graham’s greatest works--more emphatically muscular than ballet, rooted more deeply in a flexible use of the torso, and marked by the formal brutality of flexed feet and stiffly cupped hands--would seem less amenable to performance by a ballet company.

The evidence of the gala, however, bodes well for the “Diversion of Angels” project. If ABT puts its resources at the service of that work with the commitment shown at this gala, both Graham’s art and ABT will be well served.