Dance : Nureyev Performs ‘Overcoat’ in San Jose

Ballet is the celebration of the human body at its most vital. Its language is couched in terms of strength and limberness, which, like it or not, are the virtues of youth. Rudolf Nureyev, who as a young man was ballet’s most daring and extravagant star, challenged this truth Friday night with the U.S. premiere of Flemming Flindt’s “The Overcoat.”

Dominating the opening of San Jose Cleveland Ballet’s California season--the two-city company will dance “Coppelia” here next weekend--Flindt’s 1989 ballet was designed to match the 52-year-old Nureyev’s current abilities, but, despite the choreographer’s good intentions, he failed to contrive a style flattering to his star.

Instead of utilizing Nureyev’s limitations to create a down-and-out character, Flindt either laughed at his hero or pretended he was a prince in disguise.

Loosely based on Nicolai Gogol’s bitter short story of the same name, “The Overcoat” tells of Akaky, a humble copyist in imperial Russia whose overcoat is so threadbare that his tailor refuses to mend it. The impoverished bureaucrat skimps and saves until the new coat becomes a symbolic reward for a lifetime of emptiness and self-denial.

Sumptuously designed by Beni Montresor, the ballet moved easily from the vast library in which Akaky works to his bare hovel of a room to the luxurious ballroom in which he unveils his new possession. For music, Flindt followed John Cranko’s lead and knitted together several of Dmitri Shostakovich’s more accessible excerpts, drawn mainly from the composer’s movie scores.

The role of Akaky ought to have given Flindt and Nureyev varied opportunities for character development and pathos, but instead Flindt insisted on viewing the clerk’s predicament from the outside.

Dressed Charlie Chaplin-style, in tight jacket and baggy pants, Nureyev played the copyist mainly for laughs. Perhaps to cover for Nureyev’s now-stiff and unyielding body, Flindt filled his ballet with extraneous props. Besides the overcoat, there was a long scarf in which Akaky is wrapped for no reason at all, a recurring umbrella worthy of an English gentleman, and a tea set that the dancer spends most of his central solo assembling onstage.

When he is not laughing at Akaky, Flindt could think of nothing more than recapitulating heroic steps from Petipa’s time. Most probably he was here following Nureyev’s specifications.

But Nureyev’s turns are now wildly unsteady, his leaps barely get him into the air, and his leg gets maybe a foot off the floor in arabesque. The grand circle of leaps that once climaxed so many of his variations was here little more than a carefully calculated walk.

Of course, every once in a while, the master shone through in the perfect alignment of his arms and legs in relation to his torso, but even these chance revelations barely outlasted the first 10 minutes of the ballet’s increasingly labored 1 1/2 hours.

Except for the effortless elan of Karen Gabay and Raymond Rodriguez as the French couple and a zestful Marcia Haydee imitation by Pamela Reyman, the San Jose Cleveland dancers served mainly as a backdrop to Nureyev’s embarrassment.