DANCE REVIEW : New Works, Old Difficulties for Ballet Pacifica

The young man sitting behind me Saturday night at the Ballet Pacifica performance at Laguna Playhouse was surprised that he could hear the clomp of toe shoes.

“I guess the dancers just can’t control their legs that well,” he said in a puzzled tone. Indeed. It may be a new season for Ballet Pacifica, but their old problems persist.

The women dance as though they think ballet is about being rigidly dainty: holding the arms just so, curving the wrists and fingers in a parody of elegance, keeping the torso ramrod straight and smiling a lot. The legs just come along for the ride. The men appear to have little notion of body alignment, precise positions or the need to harmonize their movements with the other dancers. No one moves with the freedom and fluidity that permits a personal interpretation of musical phrasing.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the two premieres by longtime company choreographer Kathy Kahn and former Joffrey Ballet dancer Carl Corry is that they were relatively brief. Kahn’s “Rustic Concerto” is a seven-part piece for 12 dancers in peasant garb that attempts to keep up with several works by Vivaldi. Larded with pirouettes, effortful lifts and variations that consist of reversing movements rather than reworking them creatively, the piece is just hack work. A cutesy pose for four women at the conclusion of the second section was variety-show material.

Corry’s “The Beauty of One Divides” was accompanied by live musicians--guitarists Gregory Coleman and John Schneiderman, and harpsichordist Martha Lewis--playing sacred music by Bach, Mozart, John Hughes, R.H. Prichard and G. Young. Alas, the dancers looked so rushed and jerky that they might just as well have been moving to a tape’s inflexible tempos.

Garnished with gimmicky mood lighting devised by the choreographer, the piece is full of insufficiently developed phrases. In the “Deep River” section, Janine Paulsen and Lee Wigand ever-so-briefly dance cheek-to-cheek in a pool of light. Before we’ve fallen under their retro-style romantic spell, he hauls her up into what becomes an overhead carry, and the spell is broken. (It’s also unclear what this passage has to do with the religious theme of the piece.)

In any case, even so simple a movement as flinging up the arms in exultation (in the “God of Grace and God of Glory” section) eludes the company, whose lack of whole-body follow-through makes the gesture look like vapid cheerleading rather than an expression of fervor.

The program concluded with artistic director Molly Lynch’s “Characters” from 1986, a breezy, aerobic piece for a pack of dancers who run and jete and sometimes pause for bits of would-be whimsical stage business.