DANCE REVIEW : S.F. Ballet Brings Tetley’s ‘Tagore’ to San Diego

Having twice awakened its fascinating though hardly fantastic “Sleeping Beauty” at the Civic Theater, the San Francisco Ballet turned to mixed-repertory business last weekend. It wasn’t business as usual.

The centerpiece on the triple bill, warmly applauded by a surprisingly small audience on Saturday night, turned out to be a company premiere: Glen Tetley’s “Tagore.” First performed by the National Ballet of Canada in 1989, it gives Helgi Tomasson’s versatile dancers an effective opportunity to fuse classical bravura with modernist contortion.

The 50-minute mock-Indian show--that’s the right noun--looks terrific. The San Franciscans, clad in ethnic white, dance Tetley’s complex set pieces with easy allure, stylish point and brilliant technique. Christopher Stowell exults in feverish brio. Katita Waldo and Antonio Castilla make the most of extended lyrical indulgence. Ashley Wheater exudes manly strength, first in an exotic duet with Shannon Lilly, then in an erotic duet with Sabina Alleman.

John Macfarlane’s clever set defines an abstract temple space, a mottled backdrop suggesting a rake to infinity. The stage pictures are dramatically, flexibly illuminated by Jennifer Tipton.

The show sounds terrific too. Denis de Coteau conducts Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Lyric Symphony”--a magnificent study in romantic decay and sensuous yearning--with neatly defined, arching pathos. The recently constituted International Symphony Orchestra of Tijuana plays the post-Mahlerian score with astonishing aplomb. The soloists--soprano Francine Lancaster and baritone Gary Relyea--sing with such security and such ecstatic sensitivity that one doubly regrets the grotesque distortion of pit microphones.

The only major disappointment involves the choreography. That, of course, is a rather crucial only .

Tetley seems to work against the dynamic of the music. He creates agitation--often for its own busy sake--where Zemlinsky enforces repose. His movement vocabulary, whether old-fashioned balletic or newfangled expressive, seems predicated on tired cliches.

Most damaging, he trivializes the mystical love poems of Rabindranath Tagore. Tetley’s gestures are too conventional, too pat and too pretty to accommodate the profoundly eloquent sentiment that inspired Zemlinsky in 1926.

The San Diego audience was provided with Tagore’s own English translations of the original Bengali texts. The seven songs were sung, of course, in German translations. A little explanatory annotation regarding the symbolist sentiment might have been useful.

The otherwise familiar program opened with “Rodin.” This, you may recall, is a set of five neo-Soviet duets by the late Leonid Yakobson (a.k.a. Jacobson) in which pairs of dancers wearing flesh-colored tights pretend to be statues that come to life in order to strike amorous poses.

Familiarity with this quaint kitsch-postcard exercise has not exactly bred affection. Still, one had to admire the suavity and apparent conviction of an extraordinary cast dominated on Saturday by Elizabeth Loscavio, Lawrence Pech, Evelyn Cisneros, Galina Alexandrova and Andre Reyes. One also had to shudder once more at the naive perversion of two stark interludes from Berg’s “Wozzeck” in tandem with a lot of Debussy goo.

Fortunately, the evening ended with “Handel--a Celebration.” In this context, Helgi Tomasson’s sweet neo-Balanchine suite looked exceptionally sophisticated and marvelously responsive to the musical source.

Bruce Sanson, a welcome guest from the Royal Ballet in London, revealed a piquant sense of whimsy partnering four mini-ballerinas in the sixth variation, and a noble legato partnering Elizabeth Loscavio in the ultimate “Largo” episode. Mikko Nissinen and Andre Reyes brought the house down, as they inevitably must, in Tomasson’s duet for well-matched flying imps.

Tomasson may go for Baroque in predictable ways, but his good, inventive manners sidestep the traps of banality. He sustains automatic glitter with quiet charm.