DANCE REVIEW : The Youthful Appeal of Italy’s Aterballetto

Aterballetto has been compared to the Joffrey Ballet, and it’s easy to see why. The Italian company’s performance in Spreckels Theater was bursting with youthful buoyancy, lyric ease and signs of personalities in the making. Aterballetto even seems to have its own Gerald Arpino in artistic director Amedeo Amodio.

Amodio’s work--which seems designed to show off the company’s good points without really stretching the dancers--dominated the evening Wednesday. In “Ricercare a Nove Movimenti,” to three concertos by Vivaldi, he stresses the light, airy jumps the men are so good at and the speed and fluidity of the women.

He grafts onto the garden variety of contemporary lyric ballet some folksy do-si-do partnering and heel-and-toe steps, thigh slaps, shoulder shrugs and snatches of lovers’ by-play. It’s all amiable and aimless, with a frustratingly unmotivated solo for hotshot Alessandro Molin (to the Largo movement from the Concerto in C for piccolo).

In the aimlessness department, “A Sud di Mozart” (South of Mozart) took top honors. The perplexing score, crafted by Eugenio Bennato and Carlo d’Angio, includes a scrap of “Zauberflote” as well as passages of lilting, drum-accompanied chanting.

A lonely fellow in white (Giuseppe Della Monico) is bemused by a flock of women in white dresses who do soulful backbends and extensions. Then he’s overcome by the sight of dancers toting a group of 18th-Century cardboard figures playing musical instruments. There’s a spot of entertainment from a couple of commedia dell’arte characters and a ludicrous finale featuring the entire company dashing about and thwacking tambourines without bells.

The program note says this hodgepodge represents Mozart’s teen-aged impression of Italy. If so, his princely patrons must have put something in the wine. Amodio’s version of “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun,” reviewed earlier, had a new faun in Federico Betti, who lacked Molin’s intensity.

The real dazzler was William Forsythe’s “Love Songs” (to pop songs by Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick), which is also in the Joffrey’s repertory.

Some of the dancers are still getting the hang of it--like Sveva Berti, who kept retreating from the passionate crests of the movement. But Denis Bragatto’s solo in “You Are All I Need to Get By” was superb--all whiplash phrasing and bitter edge--and Paola Bami found the combination of manic drive and exultation in “I Got Love.”

The 20-member company’s repertory includes works by Massine, Tudor, Petit, MacMillan, Balanchine and Ailey--a mix that also invites comparisons with the Joffrey. Too bad we didn’t get a sampler.