BALLET REVIEW : BalletMet Wins New Fans With County Debut

BalletMet, which performed Sunday afternoon at McKinney Theatre on the Saddleback College campus, is the kind of regional dance company that wins people over to ballet. The 22 dancers are lithe, fleet and personable, and they seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves. The repertory is essentially contemporary, stressing humor, lyricism and an athletic ease.

For its first Orange County appearance, the Ohio-based company left the Balanchine and Paul Taylor at home and chose not to offer a new James Kudelka work that’s on the program elsewhere on the three-week West Coast tour.

Instead, we got a taste of the style of company artistic director John McFall in “Beyond Midnight”; “Shinju,” a 15-year-old exercise in balleticized Japanese ritual drama by McFall’s mentor, former San Francisco Ballet artistic director Michael Smuin, and the good-humored, if long-winded, antics of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Great Galloping Gottschalk,” to the Latin-flavored music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

McFall’s piece, danced to Gabriel Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 1, does have its charms. Among them are the white turn-of-the-century style dresses for the women (the handiwork of Victoria Gyorfi, a former San Francisco Ballet dancer), which make all the languorous turns and lifts look especially lovely.

The steps take full advantage of the upper-body pliancy of the 10 dancers, as well as their ability to look into each others’ eyes and suggest that something romantic is actually transpiring. But all the melting fluidity in the world can’t make up for a lack of structure and development.

By the third movement, McFall seemed to have run out of ideas. A startlingly misplaced gymnastics sequence (a woman dragged downstage by two men suddenly vaults up over their shoulders) suggested the well of inspiration was very dry indeed.

The woman--tiny, quicksilver Catherine Yoshimura--was a delight, however. Rapturously romantic and soft-edged in “Beyond Midnight,” she was an impish sprite in “Gottschalk,” a human barnacle clinging for dear life to one man in a whirling circle of dancers. One wonders what she would have done with the sweetly stoic geisha in “Shinju.”

Paige Fulleton navigated the role’s small vocabulary of shyly angled movements (feet flex, knees bend, the head tilts) with great delicacy and control but without conveying much intensity of feeling. Todd Woffinden, her stolid samurai hunk, lacked the power and toughness that would be second nature to a professional warrior.

The sinister aura of the stern bit players surrounding the doomed lovers was also in need of weightier, darker notes.

The striking visual effects (by Willa Kim) and the spare, suitably exotic music (by Paul Chihara) still weave a persuasive spell around this essentially hokey piece. The double suicides--Romeo and Juliet meet Bonnie and Clyde--come complete with writhing bodies and leaping red ribbons of blood.

“Gottschalk” was a breezy send-off, with the right-on-the-mark comedic timing of Michael Cornell and Daren Savage, the warmly romantic playfulness of Elizabeth Zengara and Armando Luna, and the pertly audience-conscious clowning of Anastasia Glimidakis, Patti Owen and Andrea Hodge.