ABT’s Version of Tale Is a Possible Dream : * Ballet: In O.C., the title role doesn’t dance and the characters are unfamiliar. Is Cervantes’ work a mystery?

When American Ballet Theatre announced the four major roles in “Don Quixote,” running through Sunday, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, even people who knew the novel well were puzzled at the unfamiliar names.

Dancers were assigned to portray Kitri and Basil. Others are dancing the roles of Mercedes and Espada.

Who?

Where was Sancho Panza? Where was Dulcinea?

Where was Don Quixote?

Don’t fret. It’s just the mixed-up world of 19th-Century story ballet.

Actually, although one of the earliest dance versions based on Cervantes’ novel dates from 1743, few of the more than 80 productions since have cast the title character as a dancing role.

After all, Cervantes describes Don Quixote as a man “close on to 50.” Who could expect someone of that age to execute airy entrechats , springy pas de chat and other virtuoso ballets steps?

So in these dance versions, Don Quixote provides a framework for a fairly traditional kind of ballet plot.

In ABT’s version, Kitri, the daughter of an innkeeper, is in love with a poor barber, Basil, but her father wants her to marry the rich nobleman Gamache. How the young lovers triumph and marry, with a bit of assistance from the crazed Man of La Mancha, forms the plot of the ballet.

This story actually is drawn from the novel, but if you don’t remember it, don’t feel bad. Cervantes’ novel runs more than a half-million words.

“Don Quixote” as a ballet has always been incredibly popular in Russia, but it was little known in the West until the Bolshoi Ballet brought a full-length three-act (and a prologue) version to this country in 1966.

“It is one of the most vividly colorful and happy ballets in the repertory,” said Vladimir Vasiliev, the ex-Bolshoi principal dancer who choreographed the ABT production now at the Center. “But it has not been danced much outside of Russia because it requires a lot of character dancing.

“That is what differs between the Russian dance companies and the dance companies of the West,” he added, speaking through a translator in an interview from his home in Moscow. “Russian dance companies have the character dancers. They have the training and the style necessary for these roles that no country has outside of Russia.”

In fact, Vasiliev was concerned whether the ABT dancers “would be able to do all the character roles which the ballet demanded.”

But after working with the dancers, Vasiliev believes that “while I can’t say that ABT does it perfectly, it comes closer than any troupe in America to giving the feel of the characters. . . .

“The fact that (Mikhail) Baryshnikov was with the company, and also that Russian teachers have been with the company for a long time, (has) very strongly influenced what ABT is today,” he said.

Actually, Vasiliev was drafted by ABT to stage a replacement production for one Baryshnikov created for the company in 1978. (That production had the give-away secondary title of “Kitri’s Wedding.”) But when Baryshnikov angrily departed the company in 1989, he took all his choreography with him. Vasiliev’s version uses the same sets and costumes created for the earlier production.

“I feel that my version has more dancing in it and is more active and more dramatic than the previous version,” Vasiliev said. “Baryshnikov excluded several scenes that had been in the previous Bolshoi productions. I changed some things back and added some new things.”

The new elements include Vasiliev’s merging of several characters into a single pair of secondary lovers--the street dancer Mercedes and the toreador Espada. These two dance considerably more than in previous “Don Quixotes.” In fact, he said, they become more nearly equal to Kitri and Basil, the heroine and hero.

His compressing different roles into one can create a problem for the dancer doing the role, however.

“Mercedes has a whole lot more dancing in Vasiliev’s production, which gives her more opportunities to develop a character,” said Christine Dunham, who has danced Mercedes in both versions and will appear in the role Saturday night.

“I’m still searching to find out where I want to take this character,” Dunham said. “Is she a different person (in each act) or the same person? But basically I like having more opportunities to dance because they bring more rewards.”

Vasiliev’s overall view of the ballet is different than Baryshnikov’s as well, said Cynthia Harvey, who dances Kitri on Saturday afternoon.

“Mr. Vasiliev really didn’t want it to be a humorous ballet, per se,” said Harvey. “In Basil’s fake suicide scene, for instance, he told Wes Chapman (who dances opposite her on Saturday), ‘Don’t mock this, don’t make it jokey,’ which is how Misha staged it. It was always tongue-in cheek.

“Vasiliev wants it to look serious, as if Basil wants to kill himself because Kitri is going off with Gamache, even though she really isn’t.”

Harvey said that “the most difficult thing about Kitri’s role is to have a way of pacing it. Act I has to have a high energy level. You have to set your character from the beginning.”

Susan Jaffe, who dances Kitri on Saturday night, agrees that the role is “really hard stamina-wise. You have to keep up major energy for three acts. There’s a lot more of the original score (by Ludwig Minkus). Misha did a shorter, sort of condensed version, and Vasiliev used all of the music.

“But I love dancing the role of Kitri,” Jaffe said. “She’s really a fiery character.”

Although the core story remains the same, change in the ballet has become inevitable, according to Vasiliev, if only because so little of Marius Petipa’s 1869 original choreography still exists.

Petipa himself changed the ballet for a St. Petersburg audience in 1871. That version was redone by Alexander Gorsky in 1900. Fyodor Lopoukhov reworked that production in 1923, and since then other Russian choreographers have made further alterations, adding dances and changing steps.

“When I came to the (Bolshoi) theater in the 1950s, already a lot had been changed, and I changed a lot in my version,” Vasiliev said.

Many changes came about because male dancers have become ever more technically adept. In fact, Vasiliev refers to this age as “the time of the revolution in male dancing.

“The paradox is that the technical revolution in male dancing has not come about because of new (ballets),” he said. “It’s come about from new young dancers striving in class to perfect and go beyond what had been done previously in the old roles.”

Vasiliev is not dismayed at the changes, however.

“Live theater just changes in and of itself, with the people, with the times,” he said. “Unlike a picture hanging in a museum or a gallery, which you can clean but which doesn’t change, theater is a living material. And living material changes every day.”

* American Ballet Theatre dances “Don Quixote” tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $14 to $48. Through Sunday. Information: (714) 556-2787.