BalletMet Proves It’s on a Fast Track

As the big four classical companies suffer crises of leadership or funding, the real action in American ballet happens in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami. Not only do regional companies in these cities nurture major choreographers who remain largely unseen in New York, they now often seem to produce the most artful revivals.

Columbus, Ohio, may not belong among the regional elite just yet, but the current tour of that city’s BalletMet represents a major bid in that direction. Simultaneously developing his audiences and his dancers, director John McFall brought to the San Diego Civic Theater on Thursday a program that managed to be daring in three or four different ways.

For starters, Balanchine’s formal, plotless “Divertimento No. 15” represents one of the more sublime achievements of 20th-Century classicism--so just doing it with very young principals (plus even younger company apprentices in the minicorps) would have been a gamble. But McFall took a bigger risk: integrating into this ensemble ballet the star power of veteran prima Cynthia Gregory.

Now 45, Gregory left American Ballet Theatre last season after more than a quarter century with that company. And her experience showed in “Divertimento No. 15” through subtle shadings of position and phrasing that her colleagues couldn’t match.

Otherwise, however, she danced in the same style and at the same level of steady, unforced energy. Her performance always reflected the elegance and serenity of its Mozart accompaniment, but there was something more: a freshness to the interpretive details that paralleled the sense of discovery by the young people around her.

Among the other leads Thursday, dancing of the sweetest delicacy came from Andrea Hodge (disarmingly springy jumps produced from very soft legwork in the first solo) and Donna Patzius (fleet, beautifully sculpted poses in the third).

Elizabeth Zengara neatly dispatched the fiery kicks of the fourth variation. Christine Cox looked promising if labored in the second, and the generally suave Armando Luna dangerously uneven in the only male solo.

Some of the same majesty that Gregory brought to her “Divertimento” solo also informed her performance of the “Corsaire” pas de deux opposite National Ballet of Canada guest Serge Lavoie. Here, however, her aristocratic restraint seemed odd--as if she wanted to be dancing Princess Aurora instead.

Lavoie flexed, glowered and pumped out turning leaps galore. Gregory achieved some miraculous suspensions ornamented with gorgeous, willowy arms. But the kinetic heat and partnering rapport that inspire audiences to tear their programs into confetti (a Gregory tradition at ABT) just weren’t there.

Without Gregory, BalletMet ventured two vehicles astutely scaled to its abilities: Lynn Taylor-Corbett’s familiar “Great Galloping Gottschalk” (originally created for the up-and-coming young lions of ABT) and James Kudelka’s “There, Below,” choreographed for BalletMet two years ago.

Like the “Corsaire” duet, “Gottschalk” needed a stronger rhythmic pulse than the uncredited taped accompaniment provided, but in Anastasia Glimidakis and Peter Means it boasted dancers of such lyric fluency and charm that their pas de deux became one of the evening’s highlights.

Zengara also impressively interpreted the lovelorn solo. Unfortunately, the male competition duet that used to belong to Danilo Radojevic and Johan Renvall at ABT looked drastically simplified for lesser mortals (Richard McLeod and David Stover).

Danced on a black, smoky stage under red light, “There, Below” used Vaughan Williams’ familiar “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” to suggest the isolation of young people threatened by approaching war.

Five couples danced duets--essentially the same, developing theme passed along from each couple and varied through their different physicalities. The vocabulary fused academic ballet and gymnastics, with a kind of protective huddle emerging as the key motif.

This vision of a woman standing on pointe, with one foot drawn up--her partner supporting, embracing, encircling her--evolved into a statement about living in a time of danger--a statement the 10 BalletMet dancers conveyed with uniform intensity and authority.

As always, Kudelka’s choreography proved perfectly tailored to the specific qualities of his host-company. Indeed, as an expression of the generation that danced it, “There, Below” represented exactly the kind of repertory that BalletMet needs to make 1992 become the Year of Columbus in more ways than one.