DANCE REVIEW : Bright Debut for the Houston Ballet : ‘Company B’ a Wry Look at WWII Nostalgia

In the good old days--which, in retrospect, may not have been all that good--American ballet existed in two basic places: New York and Out of Town.

New York meant Balanchine. It also meant American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey. The latter two may have spent a lot of time on the road, but Manhattan remained home base. It represented Establishment approval, security, snob appeal and glamour.

For better or worse, New York was where the action came from. Also the money. Attention had to be paid.

Out of Town meant well-intentioned little companies that functioned like farm clubs at best, provincial objects of wishful thinking at worst. If nothing else, they kept the kiddies busy and the mommies happy on both sides of the proscenium at “Nutcracker” time.

Forget all that. At Lincoln Center these days, Balanchine has become a phantom of the ballet. American Ballet Theatre finds itself in the midst of artistic as well as fiscal upheaval, and the brave little Joffrey--bereft of Robert Joffrey’s stabilizing leadership--may be teetering on the brink of disaster.

Meanwhile, exciting, daring, encouraging, sensible things are happening away from the Great White Way. Ballet is doing very nicely, thank you, in San Francisco, in Boston, in Houston. . . .

Houston?

Yes. Emphatically Houston.

The city enjoys a distinguished history of support for the arts. It has a splendid opera company, a major symphony orchestra, excellent museums. It also has a ballet company that--under the quiet leadership of British choreographer Ben Stevenson--is earning respect and admiration far beyond the deep heart of Texas.

Wednesday night, the Houston Ballet made its first visit to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, until recently the exclusive playground of the bicoastal Joffrey. It was an auspicious debut.

Southern California has seen the company before. The Houstonians brought “Coppelia” and “Giselle” to Ambassador Auditorium in 1980; a mixed bill plus Stevenson’s ambitious “Peer Gynt” to Pasadena Civic Auditorium in 1981. During the intervening decade, however, the company has experienced extraordinary gains in breadth, refinement and sophistication.

Houston, which trains most of its own dancers, now commands talent in depth. Stevenson’s charges perform a remarkably eclectic repertory with an intriguing combination of all-American brashness and fine English decorum. The company doesn’t import stars, but it seems on the verge of making a few of its own. Most extraordinary in these difficult times, it doesn’t even seem to be suffering a cash-flow problem.

For his calling-card at the Music Center, Stevenson chose something old, something borrowed and something new. Nothing blue.

Bowing to the great god Balanchine, he opened the festivities with the neoclassical symmetry and faintly romantic abstraction of “Serenade” (1934). The all-important women of the corps looked properly willowy in their long white tutus, and they moved through the intricate challenge with sharp attack, clarity of focus and easy precision.

Among the principals, Lauren Anderson attended neatly to the bravura of the first movement, and Kristine Richmond conveyed appropriate serenity as her lyrical counterpart. Janie Parker, the senior ballerina, attended nobly to the muted pathos of the forsaken heroine of the final movement, a somewhat unyielding back notwithstanding.

This was an informed, well-schooled performance. Nevertheless, it dealt more in prose than poetry. Perhaps the dancers took too many cues from the pit, where Stewart Kershaw and a locally recruited orchestra offered a loud, fast and rough reading of Tchaikovsky’s hum-along score.

The centerpiece of the program was “Ghost Dances,” a grim quasi-political parable by Houston’s resident choreographer, Christopher Bruce. Created for Ballet Rambert and performed at UCLA by that company in 1982, it deals in a series of easy, primitive effects.

A matched trio of death figures stalk the stage in grotesque quasi-expressionist gloom, claiming a motley array of innocent victims in the picturesque process. A virtuosic cast chugs, stretches, tangles, struggles and, of course, falls to the mock-innocent strains of South American folk songs prerecorded by Inti-Illimani.

Oppression is evil. Death is cold. The message is clear. In this case, alas, the messenger is banal.

The choreographer designed his own darkly exotic backcloth, and Belinda Scarlett provided quaint Everyman costumes. The Houstonians actually danced as if lives were at stake, and the star-studded, non-capacity audience howled, whistled and yipped its approval.

The main attraction of the evening was Paul Taylor’s “Company B,” which had been hailed by some critics as a deathless masterpiece at its Kennedy Center premiere a year ago. One doesn’t have to validate the extravagance of that assessment to appreciate the poignant wit and wisdom of Taylor’s deceptively sprightly invention.

“Company B” refers to the workplace of the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Remember him?

Taylor’s focus here is World War II, the giddy era of bobby socks, jitterbugs, absent lovers, cheerful sacrifices and patriotic cliches. The soundtrack consists of nine delirious hits by the Andrews Sisters. The 13 energetic participants--deftly dressed by Santo Loquasto in stylized period mufti--shimmy and shake, wiggle and giggle, moon and spoon in engaging combinations and permutations.

On the surface, it all looks like good, clean, breathless, nostalgic fun. But surfaces can be deceiving, especially with Paul Taylor.

“When something seems a little too happy,” he told Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times last October, “I just kind of stick a knife in.”

The knife, in this instance, involves the cruelties of war. For every image of exuberance, Taylor finds an underlying air of desperation, a sudden shaft of pain, a shattering blitz of irony.

Near the end of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” one of the happy-go-lucky celebrants suddenly collapses in feverish agony. While an ecstatic couple does a caricature of the “Pennsylvania Polka,” dazed men march off to war in eerie slow motion upstage. “Tico-Tico” starts out as a fun exercise, ends in physical disorder. “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” finds a lovelorn girl bemoaning the loss of her boyfriend to military duty--and to another person (a boy). The Latin charms of “Rum and Coca-Cola” are contradicted by visions of rape and prostitution. And at the climax of his frenetic boogie-woogie, the bugle boy drops dead.

And so it jives.

Taylor knows how to focus and integrate subtexts, and he knows how to reinterpret both sociology and history. “Company B” is as clever as it is bitter, as subtle as it is splashy, as rousing as it is disturbing.

The Houston ensemble dazzles without making a big deal of it. The discipline is tight, the focus acute.

At the end, the dancers shared their cheers with two surprise guests from the audience: Maxene and Patti, the surviving Andrews sisters. Everyone seemed understandably moved.

Numerous companies, incidentally, are climbing on the “Company B” bandwagon. The showpiece enters the repertory next season of both the San Francisco Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. Paul Taylor’s own company will take it on tour, with stops scheduled at UCLA, Palm Springs, Costa Mesa and--who knows?--maybe even San Diego (San Diego doesn’t seem to know).

The Houston Ballet completes its season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center with performances of “The Sleeping Beauty” tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2. Tickets available through Ticketmaster and the box office, (213) 480-3232 or 740-2000.