Music and Dance Reviews : New ABT ‘Bayadere’ Cast in Costa Mesa

Although 19th-Century ballet heroes are inevitably torn between an available female and an unattainable ideal of womanhood, the men who portray them all-too-often downplay emotion in favor of princely manners and noble understatement.

Not Julio Bocca. Cast as Solor, a warrior who never fights, Bocca brought to the Wednesday performance of the American Ballet Theatre “La Bayadere” resources of temperament to match his sterling technique. From his first entrance, gesturing proudly toward a huge stuffed tiger he has supposedly killed, Bocca established a high-voltage authority that reached its peak in the Wedding scene with this Solor trapped in a tragic delirium by the ghost of his former love.

Bocca’s intensity also informed his bravura dancing--particularly the end of the “Shades” coda, a passage he terminated on one knee with a backbend so deep that the top of his head touched the floor. If the audience at the Orange County Performing Arts Center didn’t love him already for his soaring jumps, immaculate turns and ardent partnering, they capitulated then.

Amanda McKerrow had danced Gamzatti in this production since 1984, but Wednesday she moved into the role of Nikiya, stylizing the suffering of the character (those “weeping” solos redefined in terms of maximum pliancy) but meeting the technical challenges faultlessly. Throughout, the purity of her placement and, especially, her adoption of a high “Soviet” back made her resemble that Kirov-trained paragon of Bolshoi classicism, Ludmila Semenyaka. Now, if she would only emulate Semenyaka’s expressivity . . . .

Cynthia Harvey made a sympathetic, if unduly ladylike Gamzatti, her dancing always secure and often sumptuous--though not forceful enough in the naked virtuosity of the Garden coda to end the sequence with its intended exclamation point. Similarly, the mime confrontation with Nikiya looked carefully executed but too subdued (on both sides) to be satisfying as antique melodrama.

Johan Renvall danced the Bronze Idol with spectacular smoothness, all his power perfectly modulated, and Gil Boggs jumped splendidly (between fits of picturesque cowering) as the Head Fakir. Christina Fagundes injured her ankle early in her solo as the Second Shadow, so Leslie Browne (dynamic in the first solo) and Lucette Katerndahl (slightly mechanical in the third) danced in the coda without her.