DANCE REVIEW : Ballet of Los Angeles at USC

It’s always edifying when life catches up with hype. For three years now, a company calling itself Ballet of Los Angeles has toured far and wide--but it never danced here, never in or near L.A., until Sunday.

Since this 11-member, hit-and-run group doesn’t remotely qualify as a resident company, its program in Bing Theater, USC, counted less as a homecoming than a chance to see what artistic director John Clifford has been doing since his Los Angeles Ballet folded six years ago.

Faking it, apparently. Both of the “new” Clifford ballets on the program represented desperately incoherent and unmusical attempts to re-animate his own cliches. Predictably, Clifford filled his quasi-lyrical “Songs of a Wayfarer” with cornball emoting, ugly lifts and crude bravura (paced faster than the Mahler accompaniment and so increasingly irrelevant to it). Seems like old times. . . .

Surprisingly, however, this bankrupt exercise served as a vehicle for major artists: the charismatic Antonio Lopez (formerly with San Francisco Ballet), the accomplished Leslie Carothers (formerly with the Joffrey) and, especially, the unforgettable New York City Ballet principal Allegra Kent.

Estranged from the youthful couples hectically surging around her, Kent (now 53) gathered the music to her like a telepathic subtext and made Clifford’s choreography almost beside the point.

Stuck with a hopeless solo (turns terminating awkwardly in sliding splits, over and over), Lopez muted his distinctively passionate style and emerged like the typically emasculated Clifford dancer--at best a bland cavalier. But Carothers danced with exceptional daring, always compelling--even in Clifford’s unwatchable, quasi-comic “Rio Bar and Grill.”

Set to Milhaud’s “Boeuf sur le Toit,” this month-old diversion featured Carothers and Lopez parodying their own past performances in, respectively, Gerald Arpino’s “Round of Angels” and Michael Smuin’s “A Song for Dead Warriors,” along with Courtland Weaver smirking his way through the kind of impish inanities that used to be Reid Olson’s property at Los Angeles Ballet.

Unfortunately, LAB veteran Nancy Davis looked well past her top form in the standard kick-and-pose routines that Clifford recycled for her, and the company as a whole didn’t exactly freshen the usual Clifford jokes about men dancing accidentally with one another. Last season, in another “new” work, Clifford assigned these same partnering gags to visiting Soviets; with him, shtick is eternal--only the names of his dancers, ballets and companies ever change.

As usual, borrowed Balanchine masterworks allowed Clifford’s company and audience some respite from the onslaught of arbitrary, discontinuous effects. Both “Apollo” and “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” suffered from deafening, distorted taped accompaniments, and, of course, “Apollo” was seen in the truncated version mandated by Balanchine in 1980.

Some of the corruptions of Clifford-dancing infected the portrayals by Davis (Polyhymnia), Diane Dickson (Calliope) and David MacGillivray (Apollo): chopped-up phrases, clenched adagio execution and a tendency to hide behind a role rather than be revealed through it. However, MacGillivray worked very conscientiously at the ballet’s unorthodox plastique and is undoubtedly promising--while Carothers danced Terpsichore with such freedom and deep understanding that you could see how leaving Arpino for Clifford just might be something more for her than jumping from the frying pan into the volcano.

“Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” belonged to guest artists from New York City Ballet who had previously danced for Clifford in Los Angeles--Damian Woetzel (an LAB principal during its final seasons) and Darci Kistler (a member of Los Angeles Junior Ballet who briefly joined Clifford’s company as an apprentice in 1978).

Woetzel capitalized on energy and speed--especially in turns--but Kistler emphasized a serene exactitude: allegro virtuosity reconceived in terms of adagio flow. No hurry, no pretense, just classical dancing of ravishing elegance and generosity.