DANCE REVIEW : Lyon Opera Ballet Presents a Dollhouse ‘Cinderella’

With its three-story dollhouse setting and radically stylized puppet-motion, the 1985 Maguy Marin interpretation of “Cinderella” brought the Lyon Opera Ballet immediate international recognition.

Here was a version at once uncompromisingly contemporary yet weirdly nostalgic, peopled by antique ceramic doll-characters who re-enacted the classic fairy tale with an emphasis on childlike wonder and nightmarish cruelty.

Besides serving as the calling card for both the Lyon Opera Ballet’s 1987 U.S. debut in New York City and, later the same year, its engagement at the Los Angeles Festival, Marin’s “Cinderella” also reached a wide audience in a full-length television version.

This weekend it turned up at San Diego Civic Theatre, the second stop on the French company’s seven-city American tour.

Happily, it remains a theatrical triumph, brilliant in its manipulation of mood, narrative and stage space--an achievement way, way beyond the inept, strangely misogynist Mikhail Baryshnikov “Cinderella” for American Ballet Theatre or the smug, bloated Hollywood-style “Cinderella” by Rudolf Nureyev for Paris Opera Ballet.

However, it shares with these inferior versions a preference for production values over choreography. Indeed, every time Marin calls a halt to her pithy, inventive doll-mime and spectacular stage effects to launch a sustained dance sequence, her “Cinderella” nearly falls apart.

Such passages as the Spanish and Arabian solos during the Prince’s travels and, more crucially, the lovers’ duet at the ball find Marin at a loss for movement ideas, for steps, for dance-rhythm. The results prove worse than feeble, more like helpless.

This isn’t “Cinderella” seen “with children’s eyes” (Marin’s description of her approach) and it certainly isn’t “Cinderella” seen with a choreographer’s eyes.

It’s a definition of an artist skilled at creating powerful imagery and states of feeling rather than movement to music--a conclusion reinforced by the Marin pieces presented by her own modern-dance ensemble at the 1987 L.A. Festival.

Like Baryshnikov and Nureyev, Marin uses the rich, moody Prokoviev score, but she cuts far more than they dared and then inserts long stretches of amplified baby gurgles and other nursery sounds credited to Jean Schwartz.

The concept may be musically barbarous-- exactly why major composers stayed away from ballet for so long--but it allows Marin to avoid most of the lyrical and classical challenges for which she is so ill-suited and, instead, to emphasize her strengths.

In any case, the masks by Monique Luyton and padded costumes by Monserrat Casanova impose physical restrictions on the Lyon dancers that scarcely permit displays of conventional classicism. Most of the other tour cities provide opportunities for the company members to dance short pieces by American choreographers, but San Diego audiences had to be content with appreciating their spirit and talent for knockabout pantomime.

Partnered suavely by Bernard Espinasse as the Prince, Francoise Joullie exulted in every unorthodox hazard of the Cinderella role--whether repeatedly sprawling on the floor in the satirically anti-ballet dancing lesson or tumbling down the palace stairs in slow motion when the clock struck midnight. She even managed to give the mostly seated morning-after solo emotional eloquence and a genuine choreographic flow.

Nathalie Delassis made a mysterious, space-age Godmother and Chantal Requena the nastiest of Stepmothers (in the final scene, she sits on Cinderella to prevent the Prince from seeing her).

John Spradbery’s lighting made Casanova’s set a world of infinite charm and menace, with such moments as Cinderella’s entrance at the ball (through double doors on the middle floor of the dollhouse) turned into stunning demonstrations of theater wizardry.

Who needs dancing when you’ve got billowing smoke, a neon door frame, Christmas-tree lights all over Cinderella’s dress and the Prince’s crown--plus rotating mirrors so you can see the lovers’ meeting from every angle?