Moscow Troupe Doesn’t Believe in Tears : Dance: Stranded in L.A., the Moscow Dance Theatre has put together two programs this month . . . and is looking for more bookings.

At first glance, in their uniform of shimmery dark leggings and white T-shirts, they might have been vintage California girls working out in the rec room at an apartment complex near Burbank. Too hot to be on the tennis court where they usually practice.

But not five minutes into the exercise, there were Tatiana Tichina, 20, of Novosibirsk in Siberia, and Svetlana Merkousheva, 18, of Tula, the town in Russia where Tolstoy was born, ever so easily placing long right legs high above their upswept ponytails, looking as if they were about to climb the back wall. Around the room 14 others from such cities as Riga, Tashkent and Moscow were doing the same. Soon the members of Moscow Dance Theatre, who combine ballet, modern dance and gymnastics in their work, were rolling themselves into tiny balls as if they had no arms, legs or heads--just backs.

Beginning Friday, 18 female members of the troupe and their sole male partner, Ilya Reznik, an actor with steel-gray hair and piercing blue eyes, will be at the Orpheum Theatre downtown performing “Fantasm.” The 90-minute piece was choreographed by Olga Morozawa, head coach of the Soviet Gymnastics Olympic Team (1986-1990), and written and narrated by Reznik, who plays Rasputin, the Russian monk who as the sinister adviser to the last czarina helped provoke the Russian Revolution.

The company will be at the Orpheum through Aug. 15 and then perform at the Theatre East in El Cajon on Aug. 21.

After that, it’s up in the air. Still they have come a long way in the three months they have been in Southern California.

For one thing, they’re still here--thanks to the company’s ingenuity and the help of Los Angeles’ Russian and Armenian communities, an unidentified Moscow entrepreneur who heard of their plight and San Diego computer analyst/Russian emigre Vladislav (Steven) Zubkis whose Siberian mother-in-law trained several of the dance-gymnasts.

The troupe was to have been in the United States a year, on a full-scale tour that would begin in Los Angeles and take it to New York with first-class hotels and large theaters. According to director Anatoli Ioda, that’s what the dancers were promised last summer in Moscow by the promoter, a German businessman.

After all, this was a company that had played a half-dozen times in the Kremlin before audiences of 6,000.

But on May 18, after seven performances playing to half-empty houses at a 500-seat theater in Torrance, the company was left stranded. The dancers hadn’t had a regular meal since the night before, they had no place to sleep, and their luggage was held hostage until the promoter paid the downtown hotel where they were staying--$5,000 of a $10,000 bill. It looked as if the dancers would have to go home.

But they couldn’t do that.

“When I was sitting in the lobby on the suitcases,” said Tichina through lawyer-translator Mary Stearns, “I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. We all had dreams, our plans. I was so ashamed. We came here to work.”

“I had a dream of being in New York, having flowers, being famous, and that night it looked like that dream was crushed,” said Elena Zolotareva, at 23 the senior female member of the troupe. “That night I could not go home, having accomplished nothing.”

“Back home we had such plans,” echoed Merkousheva. “We were ecstatic, going to America . . .”

However, Ioda, general director of the Riga Concert Assn., had already taken action. On May 14, sensing that the tour was going sour, Ioda looked for a lawyer in the “Russian Yellow Pages.” Stearns, who learned Russian from her mother and grandparents, answered.

On the night of May 18, she and her partner James Clemons footed the bill for another night’s lodging.

Ioda, who is married to choreographer Morozawa, said that after a meeting with the promoter May 19 in Torrance they never saw him again. He left, taking with him their promotions book, thick with photographs and history.

With the ethnic communities involved primarily through Frank Oglachian, producer of a Russian TV program, the company was put up at a Hollywood motel for several nights, and then housed in various apartments and fed at community restaurants. Two months ago, with the help of the Moscow businessman, they were put up in their present apartment complex near Burbank. Through Alla Svirsky, executive director of the Los Angeles School of Gymnastics in Culver City, they got rehearsal space.

In mid-June Oglachian also arranged a performance at Fairfax High School in the heart of the Russian community. Among those in attendance was Zubkis, who is now working on setting up further bookings. “I saw a wonderful performance,” he said, “very light, very entertaining, and I made the decision to help them.”