BALLET REVIEW : San Francisco Sculpts Dated Soviet Kitsch : Dance: Leonid Yakobson’s ‘Rodin’ turns out to be a set of amorous duets in which statues come to life and strike banal poses.

The Soviets considered Leonid Yakobson (a.k.a. Jakobson or, if you will, Jacobson) a maverick. As a choreographer--and presumably in other ways as well--he chose not to follow party lines.

Born in 1904, he might have become a genuine innovator like his illustrious Leningrad colleague, George Balanchine. Yakobson fell victim, however, to a system that invariably championed bland eclecticism in the service of so-called Soviet realism.

At the time of his death in 1975, his relatively unconventional choreography for the original version of “Spartacus” had been superseded by the popular revisionism of Yuri Grigorovich. No one cared to remember Yakobson’s contribution to the world premiere of “The Golden Age.”

In his final years, he concentrated on the creation of miniatures for the not-too-prestigious Leningrad State Ballet. He remained tragically isolated from the stimulation of Western modernism.

If American audiences know his work at all, it must be through Mikhail Baryshnikov, who used to favor a bravura character study called “Vestris.” Yakobson had created it for him back in 1969.

This season, Helgi Tomasson, director of the San Francisco Ballet, made a valiant--and frustrating--effort to enhance Yakobson’s international reputation. He asked Irina Yakobson, the choreographer’s widow and now a much valued coach and teacher, to stage the U.S. premiere of Yakobson’s “Rodin” for the company.

This set of laboriously amorous, quasi-sculptural duets accompanied by sugar-coated Debussy may have seemed daring in 1958 at the conservative Kirov. Natalia Makarova, who participated in the first performance, wrote glowingly of the experience in her autobiography.

The suite must have seemed downright shocking in 1970, when Yakobson added two strident sections utilizing music by Alban Berg. To the innocent Soviet sensibilities of the period, both sight and sound suggested dangerous yet eminently delicious decadence.

In the cool American light of 1990, alas, “Rodin” looks dated, even silly. Michael Smuin’s “Eternal Idol,” a similar exercise in erotic kitsch, has come and, mercifully, gone. Comparable ventures by such pop icons as Maurice Bejart and Gerald Arpino have blunted the common perspective.

One can appreciate the canny precision with which Yakobson asked his dancers to plaster and drape their bodies against each other. One can applaud the stylized passion, not to mention the ingenuity of the athletic tangles and the artsy poses. Still, one has to regret the poverty of the dance vocabulary employed here, and cringe at the basic banality of invention.

“Rodin” recalls nothing so much as Margo Sappington’s once-notorious nude ballet in “Oh! Calcutta!” Unlike their Broadway counterparts, however, Yakobson’s lovers are burdened with flesh-colored body stockings.

They are burdened further by Yakobson’s naive perversion of his musical sources. The Hallmark Card renditions of Debussy’s greatest hits are hard to endure. But disaster beckons with the misappropriation of Berg’s “Praludium” (from the Three Orchestral Pieces) and third “Wozzeck” interlude. Harmonic dissonance, Yakobson apparently reasoned, must translate as all-purpose violence.

The five San Francisco couples--Elizabeth Loscavio and Edward Ellison, Katita Waldo and Jais Zinoun, Evelyn Cisneros and Anthony Randazzo, Galina Alexandrova and Mikko Nissinen, Wendy Van Dyck and Jim Sohm--flung themselves into the challenge on Tuesday as if lives, not to mention artistic principles, were at stake. Jean-Louis LeRoux did what could be done in the well-staffed pit.

The triple bill opened with an old San Francisco specialty: Lew Christensen’s attractive if gimmicky send-up of neo-classical maneuvers, “Il Distratto.” The evening closed with a new San Francisco speciality: Tomasson’s gracefully sprawling ode to Balanchine and the Baroque, “Handel--A Celebration.”

The dancing was splendid.