DANCE REVIEW : Dance Theatre of Harlem Offers ‘Othello’

John Butler’s “Othello” is lurid, hard-sell junk: a one-act story ballet that reduces its literary source to drivel and its dancers to pawns.

This is surely no place for Virginia Johnson, a lyric-dramatic dancer of great refinement--but there she was, at Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Thursday, squandering her artistry on the new Dance Theatre of Harlem production as if Butler’s sleazy 1978 vehicle might be worthy of her talents.

Fat chance. Butler reconceives Shakespeare as a crude display of lifts: Othello lifting Desdemona (under blue light), then lifting Iago (under red light) and eventually, after Iago lifts him , strangling Desdemona in mid-lift (under lavender light)--all to Dvorak’s concert overture.

When the dancers are momentarily freed from hoisting or being hoisted, there’s still scarcely any dancing for them. Desdemona’s big solo is mostly hands-on-heart, hands-on-throat, hands-reaching-out: bald gestural rhetoric disconnected from any dance impulse. Johnson does what she can.

In a ballet requiring nothing but his muscle power, Hugues Magen manages to give Othello glints of soul, and Tyrone Brooks exudes feline menace as Iago, the “other woman” role in this triangle. David LaMarche conducts capably.

Equally unconventional, but more intriguing: Royston Maldoom’s “Doina,” with the Harlem woman wearing hooded, mesh body-stockings as they define sculptural shapes in place against a green Rose window. Pan pipes and organ tones (on tape) enhance the sense of exotic, cloistered ritual. Later on, a pas de deux (for the limpid Yvonne Hall and the powerful Eddie J. Shellman) becomes something of a spatial and emotional invasion--though Maldoom never develops the contrasts between quasi-sacred corps and his implicitly profane soloists.

Beyond these novelties, this second Harlem program of the season remains wholly familiar. John Taras’ “Firebird” again finds Stephanie Dabney mesmerizing the multitudes by darting her head, fluttering her hands and skimming the stage in majestic bourrees. The noble Ronald Perry and gracious Lorraine Graves are each highly accomplished in other leading roles. Milton Rosenstock leads a taut, atmospheric account of Stravinsky’s score.

In contrast, Hindemith’s music for “The Four Temperaments” sounds awfully feeble under LaMarche. However, Balanchine’s choreography receives the usual scrupulous Harlem treatment, with Christina Johnson superbly vanquishing the technical hazards of the third theme and Gregory Jackson exceptionally promising if uneven in the Melancholic variation.

Other sections are, perhaps, less ideally cast, but this performance has too much warmth and style for any regrets. After 20 years, Dance Theatre of Harlem may still be addicted to trashy dance-drama, but it continues to dance Balanchine with love and care. That, always, is something to celebrate.