BALLET REVIEW : ABT Takes Safe Walk on the Eclectic Side in Orange County

This isn’t a good time for ballet in the United States.

The Joffrey, reeling from administrative as well as financial instability, has been evicted by the Music Center and thus has lost its bicoastal status. The once enterprising, now desperate Pennsylvania Ballet is about to hang up its collective toe shoes.

The living isn’t exactly easy with American Ballet Theatre, either. An impatient board of directors threatened to disband the company earlier this year during a wage dispute. Although that crisis was averted, the repertory and casting now show dispiriting signs of fiscal constraint.

Opening its annual two-week stint at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, Ballet Theatre seemed more concerned with cost containment than with any quest for artistic adventure. No new ballets enliven the repertory this season, and no new dancers spark the roster. The ever-eclectic repertory suggests that Jane Hermann is allowing her once enterprising company to look backward and take no chances.

Museum pieces do, of course, have their honored place in the scheme of balletic things. A fine line, however, separates caution and stagnation in the arts, and Ballet Theatre seems to be teetering on that line.

At least it is teetering with competence. The dancers may not be enjoying the stimulation--or enduring the pressure--imposed on them in the Baryshnikov era. Still, they are performing, for the most part, with graceful savoir-faire and stylistic flexibility.

The rather pat inaugural program here paid dutiful homage to the great god Balanchine. Then it revived an all-American classic by Agnes de Mille, and finally borrowed a bit of conservative flash by Jiri Kylian to send everyone home cheering.

In totality, this really wasn’t a great night for cheering--or for dancing. But things could have been worse.

They also could have been better. If Balanchine’s fragile “Ballet Imperial” (1941) is to make its wonted impact, it must be performed with elegance nonchalantly muting the essential virtuosity. It must convincingly add glittery neo-classic accents to noble Russian quotations.

Ballet Theatre went through the motions on Tuesday as if this were a tough classroom exercise. Susan Jaffe assumed the dramatic ballerina attitudes with blank precision. Amanda McKerrow projected the lyrical ballerina contrasts with bland authority. Ricardo Bustamante served as neat, all-purpose cavalier.

The hard-working women of the corps made the suave choreography look ragged. Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s ancient decors once again made the fanciful evocation of Czarist Petersburg look tacky.

The temperature rose with De Mille’s “Fall River Legend,” created in 1948 but not danced locally by the company for a decade. This sparse exploration of the Lizzie Borden saga may look a bit slick and pretty in the sordid light of 1991. If performed with genuine commitment, however, it retains its psychological urgency and theatrical flair.

The commitment in this performance seemed unanimous, even if the central casting proved less than ideal. Cynthia Gregory, now listed as a guest artist with her alma mater, danced the agonies of the central ax-murderer with tortured strength and a fine command of the numbed nuance. Unfortunately, her innate grandeur tended to negate dramatic sympathy in this complex challenge. One found it hard to think of this cool and powerful Lizzie as anyone’s victim.

Georgina Parkinson, tautly formidable yet carefully restrained, nearly exorcised the specter of Lucia Chase as the nasty Stepmother. (One would still like to see what this undervalued artist, former ballerina of the Royal Ballet, might do if cast as the protagonist.) Victor Barbee defined the impotent ardor of the Pastor impeccably, and Kevin O’Day sketched the Father’s passivity with statuesque dignity.

Oliver Smith’s original skeletal set remains a problem. It stubbornly invokes some wide-open space deep in the heart of Texas rather than a stifling place in Victorian New England.

Kylian’s “Sinfonietta,” much applauded when introduced by the Netherlands Dance Theater at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion back in 1980, is a sure-fire hit. It makes sensitive use of Janacek’s affecting score, yet assumes its folksy airs with showy sophistication. Although the effects, whether languid or frenzied, tend toward the obvious, that makes them no less affecting.

The piece exults--choreographically and musically--in leaping brass fanfares, in romantic dissonances and carefully plotted flights of alienation that usually cast the woman as odd body out. In 25 fast-moving minutes, Kylian creates a rhapsodic network of passionate duets and tangled trios, culminating in his trademark march upstage to the cyclorama, a signal either of unison triumph or poetic retreat.

Basically a team effort, “Sinfonietta” provided a splendid showcase for the muscular speed of the the ABT men, not to mention the heroic suavity of the women. Alessandra Ferri commanded special attention in the feverish fifth movement, exultantly seconded and supported by Wes Chapman and Jeremy Collins.

Walter Nobbe’s vaguely bucolic backdrop and abstract costumes duplicated the Netherlands models. So did Joop Caboort’s atmospheric lighting. The staging was credited to Roslyn Anderson, an enlightened alumnus of Kylian’s Amsterdam ensemble.

Measured by usual ballet standards, the musical values were high all night. Michael Boriskin was the appreciative piano soloist with members of the Pacific Symphony under Emil de Cou in Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto, as appropriated by Balanchine. Jack Everly conducted the remainder of the program with elan that never precluded sympathy for the dancers.