DANCE REVIEW : L.A. Loss of Joffrey Is S.F. Gain : The company brings Prince work and seven other premieres and revivals to the Bay Area after giving up its season in Southern California.

Prince’s “The Question of U” blasts through the loudspeakers at the War Memorial Opera House as Philip Gardner kneels in front of Jodie Gates and then sinks backward on the floor, looking up expectantly, as she slowly inserts her scarlet toe-shoe deep in his mouth. Welcome to in-your-face ballet, A.D. 1992.

Alas, this partnering innovation proves the only memorable achievement of the new Peter Pucci pas de deux from an uncompleted section of a planned full-evening Prince ballet called “Billboards.” However, it manages to set the seal on a provocative Joffrey Ballet season that should have been seen in Los Angeles from May 8 through June 7 but was canceled in the wake of the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney G. King police brutality trial.

All of the eight premieres and revivals scheduled for Los Angeles were danced during the July 2-12 San Francisco engagement, with the nine-minute Pucci-Prince excerpt featured on both the opening and closing programs. Unfortunately, Pucci’s emphasis on pumping, grabbing and nuzzling the lower torso scarcely matched the more varied eroticism of Prince’s own “Cream” video--but at least Pucci got Gates out of the Romantic tutus she wore through much of the season as well as helping nudge Gardner into deserved prominence.

Both of them reappeared (with other partners) in the revival of artistic director Gerald Arpino’s bicentennial extravaganza “Drums, Dreams and Banjos,” set to Peter Link’s arrangement of songs by Stephen Foster.

Alternately bare and overdecorated, the ballet featured opening and closing segments evoking vaudeville and a central divertissement in the style of a Civil War musical comedy, such as “Bloomer Girl.” Gates, Gardner, Deborah Dawn and Pascal Benichou all danced faultlessly, but only Beatriz Rodriguez somehow escaped the soggy solemnity and forced cheer afflicting the performance.

Rodriguez’s finest achievement, however, came in the company’s newly acquired “Garden of Villandry,” a 1979 trio to music by Schubert that has been danced in Southern California both by American Ballet Theatre and by its choreographers: Martha Clarke, Felix Blaska and Robby Barnett.

The intense, stylish Gardner also danced strongly in this assignment, wearing spectacles that made him look partly like the young Igor Stravinsky and partly like Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent. Hotly pursuing Rodriguez while coolly ignoring an equally ardent rival, Tyler Walters, he helped focus the ballet on the conflict between stuffy Edwardian manners and basic human drives. In turn, Rodriguez made her character’s seeming “feminine” indecision into an exquisite power play: the caprice of a woman delighted to keep her suitors locked in an eternal triangle.

Rodriguez also brought a sense of occasion to the brief, undeveloped pas de deux titled “Structure” that served as a teaser for the more satisfying octet “Light Field,” both works choreographed by Laura Dean to music by Glenn Branca.

Dean’s movement patterns no longer grow organically from integral concepts; instead, she cuts from one motif to another with the nervousness of a music-video director. But her use of space can still seem wondrous and in “Light Field,” the dancers in their loose, gleaming party clothes appeared to be retracing ancient, planetary orbits during their sustained formal surges across the stage.

The big curiosity of the season, and its major hit, turned out to be “Les Presages,” an all-but-lost 1933 work that reminds us how far Leonide Massine’s talent extended beyond his caractere comedies that survive in the international repertory.

Set to Tchaikovksy’s Fifth Symphony, the ballet was created for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the same year that Hitler came to power. By no coincidence, the final section shows us a dancer identified as The Hero being raised high by the crowd as he solemnly leads them in a fascist salute. And what’s that emblem on his chest? A melted swastika, perhaps?

No, Massine wasn’t glorifying Nazism but capturing the incredible energy and expectation of a historic and dangerous moment. The title of his ballet translates as The Portents, and his ballet teems with allegorical conflict: Action versus Temptation, Passion versus Fate, individual Frivolity overwhelmed by mass Destiny.

Massine expressed these conflicts by creating complex relationships between solo and group movement (with groups often subdivided) and by the combination of classical legwork and a gestural style influenced by German Expressionist theater. Above all, he used the resources of a large, star-laden ballet company to depict not the world of the imagination but the Zeitgeist --and that makes “Les Presages” both remarkable for its time and enormously compelling in ours.

Restaged by Tatiana Leskova and Nelly Laport, the ballet is danced against a bold, turbulent abstract canvas by Andre Masson, with costumes adapted (and often simplified) by John David Ridge from Masson’s originals.

The most conventionally balletic sections involve the Frivolity divertissement for the fleet, refined Tina LeBlanc as well as the Passion pas de deux for the pliant, dynamic Valerie Madonia and the Joffrey’s well-tempered cavalier, Daniel Baudendistel.

Fate, however, becomes a grotesque virtuoso role--half Bluebird, half Golem--that Harald Ewe Kern shapes into a triumphant personal showcase. A gamble both financially and artistically, the revived “Les Presages” represents prime Joffrey derring-do: novel and exciting for audiences plus important in restoring the reputation of one of the most influential choreographers of his time.

Two essays in balletic multiculturalism rounded out the season novelties, none too impressively. Angelenos may remember Alonzo King’s solo “Prayer” from the first “Black Choreographers” festival, where it created a stir by endowing the academic ballet vocabulary with a literally Afrocentric impetus. It was exactly this sense of an energized center--of an articulate lower torso--that the Joffrey performance by Pascal Benichou couldn’t recapture.

Dancing to recorded Muslim chants punctuated by silence, Benichou gloried in the solo’s dramatic tension and sinewy arm manipulation. However the choreography here looked like a slinky, exotic, neo-Bejart showpiece without the visionary interplay between idioms that had formerly distinguished it.

As if his Prince choreography wasn’t sufficient to nail him, Peter Pucci also created “Moon of the Falling Leaves” for the season, using a richly textured recorded score by Brent Michael Davids that incorporated spoken American Indian storytelling.

Although text and music touched on traditional Mohican lore, the ballet itself resembled nothing so much as a ‘90s male sensitivity training session: four guys wearing red paint on their faces and buckskin fringe on their pants grimly working through exercises designed to promote trust, group identity and bonding. Lots of billowing smoke and dramatic pools of light as in the Prince duet--but no deep-throat pointe -work this time. Instead, Pucci substituted endless fist-clenching, arm-pumping, ritualized combat and other joyless celebrations of manhood.

The dancers endured this and other ordeals of the season (among them many works familiar to Los Angeles audiences) without compromising their professionalism, although, as usual, the Joffrey finds itself in transition, with classical paragon Tina LeBlanc leaving at the end of the season to join San Francisco Ballet and dramatic firebrand Peter Narbutas already gone.

However, at least one of the company’s recent disappointments seems to be working to its advantage: With the Joffrey dumped as a Music Center resident company at the beginning of the Center’s 1991 fiscal crisis, conservative L.A. priorities no longer restrict the intrinsic Joffrey sense of adventure. At the Pavilion, the company appeared increasingly under pressure to deliver backdated, full-evening classics a la Ballet Theatre--the only kind of dance the Music Center has ever known how to sell.

But this has always been a contemporary company, a demi- caractere company, a youth-oriented, nose-thumbing, try-anything company--although, paradoxically, it has always danced the ballets of Frederick Ashton with greater surety than any other company in North America.

With all the rough edges occasioned by a shorter rehearsal period and an unexpected layoff this year, the San Francisco season supplied the inimitable Joffrey experience, even if it put poor Philip Gardner at risk for Toxic Capezio Syndrome. Ballet in Los Angeles is going to prove insufferably stodgy until this company returns in the repertory it was born to dance.