BALLET REVIEW : A Double-Header in ABT Finale

Alessandra Ferri faced a daunting double debut on Sunday, the final day of the American Ballet Theatre engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. In the afternoon, she danced Odette in David Blair’s staging of Act II of “Swan Lake” for the first time and, in the evening, took over the Lizzie Borden role in Agnes de Mille’s “Fall River Legend.”

Of course, Ferri had impersonated the Swan Queen in other productions. The traditional British style of Blair’s version, however, called from her a performance of regal authority and technical sheen, with emotional values largely subordinated to sculptural refinement and musicality.

Sympathetically partnered by Wes Chapman, Ferri displayed flashes of individuality at the beginning of the great adagio (especially in her strong assertion of Odette’s pride) and, later, with a dramatic plunge into arabesque in the allegro solo.

But her interpretation still seemed strangely muted. It was as if this Odette never quite believed in the reality of her predicament--or her Prince.

In contrast, Ferri’s portrayal of the Accused in “Fall River Legend” achieved a startling specificity and sense of involvement, with her pinched face and clenched hands in the opening scene revealing the character’s agonizing tension.

This unsparingly repressed Lizzie belonged to the ax very, very early in the story. Drawn to it, obsessed by it, she fled into romance with the Pastor as if into desperate denial--and she clearly proved too much for him to handle long before the Stepmother interfered.

The murders came from no sudden impulse, no lapse of sanity. By the end of the church social, Ferri’s Lizzie seemed to be already planning the event--her heartbreak forgotten in the countdown to bloodshed that she (and we) now accepted as inevitable.

Ferri’s ability to pull us inside the mind of this tormented character made this a great performance. And it will become greater still when Ferri brings the dream scene into sharper focus and clarifies or reshapes a few other puzzling or out-of-scale moments. A triumphant first attempt, closer to the definitive than anyone dared hope.

Besides Ferri’s two challenges, Sunday provided a double-header for Guillaume Graffin: leading roles in Twyla Tharp’s “Brief Fling” at the matinee and Kenneth Macmillan’s “Concerto” at night.

Joining Cynthia Harvey as Tharp’s aristocrats-in-blue, Graffin sometimes lacked the speed of his predecessors but compensated with virile, exultant attacks and fine partnering. Harvey, too, lagged occasionally and sometimes minimized the distinctions between genres built into her role, but met Tharp’s technical hazards capably.

In “Concerto,” both Graffin and Amanda McKerrow were dancing the adagio for the first time--and their inexperience showed in his effortful partnering and her generally unsuccessful attempts to appear oblivious to it. A smoother performance of the same choreography came in the afternoon, when the rapport between Jeremy Collins and Susan Jaffe yielded ardent, seamless lyricism.