Dance : New Faces in Royal Ballet Triple Bill

Lots of new faces graced the cast at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday, when the Royal Ballet repeated its stimulating program devoted to three masters of contemporary British choreography. Only two of the faces, however, were visible beyond a fleeting glance.

The recognizable visages belonged to Viviana Durante and Tetsuya Kumakawa, who took over the central duties in Frederick Ashton’s neoclassical “Scenes de Ballet.”

The obscure newcomers peopled--or, if you will, animaled--David Bintley’s “ ‘Still Life’ at the Penguin Cafe,” where their innocent features were masked until the final coup de theatre by beaks, horns, zebra stripes, monkey wool and other furry decorations.

Everyone performed with stylish bravura. Ashton’s abstract exercises, which fuse Petipa formality with Stravinsky modernism, proved a more grateful challenge for the hard-working dancers, however, than Bintley’s satirical anthropomorphic postures.

Durante--who was assigned four major roles in three consecutive days--is, luckily, a young dancer of extraordinary strength. Tiny, fleet, crisp in phrasing and quietly charming in demeanor, she made the central role in “Scenes de Ballet” seem a quintessential ingenue assignment. Such past paragons as Margot Fonteyn and Antoinette Sibley defined the challenge in terms of lofty ballerina grandeur, but Durante’s muted glitter created its own compulsion.

She was eagerly and neatly partnered by Kumakawa, a secondary soloist in a role previously associated with such elegant heroes as Michael Somes and Anthony Dowell. He knocked off multiple entrechats with frenzied ease, leaped as if his life were at stake and lifted the ballerina with some signs of strain. He is obviously promising, though his special talents may eventually make him more useful as a caractere specialist than danseur noble .

The revival of Ashton’s study in geometric abstraction, which dates back to 1948, continues to fascinate. The time may have come, however, to discard Andre Beaurepaire’s fussy viaduct set and prim teatime tutus in favor of the bare stage and practice clothes used in 1968 for a production in West Berlin.

The new inhabitants of Bintley’s quaint “Penguin” menagerie looked, waddled, pranced, jerked, strutted, pounced and bounced much as their splendid predecessors had the night before.

Jonathan Burrows, succeeding Peter Abegglen, twitched with pathetic sweetness as the endangered Texas kangaroo rat. Fiona Brockway returned to skip on tippy-toe through the adorable intrigues of a hog-nosed skunk flea caught somehow in a raucous Morris Dance. Michael Nunn was just as sinuously heroic as Ashley Page had been as the terminal Southern Cape zebra who keeps company with zombie-esque fashion models. Simon Rice kicked and wiggled con brio as the Brazilian woolly monkey, whose climactic duties had been previously assumed here by Stephen Jeffries (a dancing hero last seen in Los Angeles a dozen years ago as the agonized crown prince in MacMillan’s “Mayerling”).

Anthony Twiner again took vital control of the insistent, new-wavy songs that Simon Jeffes contributed to Bintley’s bright cartoon with a dark ecological message.

The quasi-Chekhovian centerpiece of the triple bill was “Winter Dreams,” Kenneth MacMillan’s ultra-theatrical distillation of “Three Sisters.” It served, once again, as a poignant tour de force for Darcey Bussell as the radiant Masha, Irek Mukhamedov as the turbulent Vershinen and Anthony Dowell as the tortured Kulygin. Viviana Durante, who hardly had time to recomb her hair after “Scenes de Ballet,” repeated her insinuating characterization of Irina.

Incidental intelligence:

* The 3,000-seat hall has been sold out for all performances of “Swan Lake.” Attendance figures have been gratifyingly high for the triple bill too, but Orange County audiences, like audiences everywhere these days, prefer the old full-length story ballets to anything fragmented or new. Never underestimate the abiding box-office attraction of Tchaikovsky’s tragic fowl.

* Something really should be done about the fancy and expensive souvenir programs hawked in the lobby. This one, like the book produced by the same American management for the Bolshoi Opera in New York, abounds in misspelled names, omits crucial background information and fails to identify most of the artists depicted in performance illustrations.