Artistic Director’s Creative Differences : Spanish National Ballet Brings Slightly Changed ‘Three-Cornered Hat’ to Arts Center

Leonide Massine’s comic ballet “The Three-Cornered Hat” is an other of those enduring works that emerged from the creative ferment of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Created in 1919, the work was a collaboration between Massine, composer Manuel de Falla and painter Pablo Picasso, who created the sets and costumes.

In addition to those names, the original production included Tamara Karsavina, Nijinsky’s partner in “Le Spectre de la Rose” as well as the creator of other major Fokine roles, who danced the Miller’s Wife, opposite Massine as the Miller.

The Spanish National Ballet will dance the work, in a version after Massine by company artistic director Jose Antonio, in an engagement that opens tonight and runs through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

But one important name is missing from the list of luminaries who usually receive credit for the ballet: Felix Fernandez Garcia, without whom the work could never have been created, at least in the version we know. That Garcia’s role often has gone unacknowledged may be because the dancer who helped inspire the work never got to dance it.

A brilliant young Spanish dancer, Garcia earned his living as a printer but dazzled everyone who saw him improvise his soulful dances. Massine had met Garcia in his travels. He learned the farruca , a popular flamenco dance, from him and introduced him to the legendary Diaghilev. Always on the lookout for new talent, Diaghilev quickly assessed the man’s potential and brought him into the company.

With the idea of creating a new Spanish-flavored ballet, Diaghilev, Massine, Garcia and Falla set out on a tour of Spain to soak up as much of the country’s culture as they could. They stopped at Toledo, Seville, Cordova, Granada and other cities, sight-seeing and always, of course, observing the local dancers with wonder. Garcia opened artistic vistas and continued to dazzle.

All of this would go into the making of “The Three-Cornered Hat” which premiered in 1919 in London. Falla, a shy man Stravinsky described as “modest and withdraw as an oyster,” had already written incidental music for a one-act mimed farce by Gregorio Martinez Sierra, entitled “El Corregidor y la Molinera.” That, in turn, had been based on Juan Ruiz Alarcon’s 19th-Century novel “El Sombrero de tres picos.”

Drawn to the score, Diaghilev and Massine asked the composer to expand the work and re-score it for a larger orchestra. Falla agreed.

Garcia naturally expected to be made the star of the new ballet. But it turned out that his greatest strength--his improvisatory genius--proved an insurmountable obstacle to casting him in a ballet that would be repeated in essentially the same way night after night. He simply could not dance to a set piece of music. It was too confining.

Attempts to teach him even one solo, a Tarantella, planned for another work, proved futile and made him increasingly distraught.

Massine gave him a metronome to help him learn how to keep time. Garcia became obsessed with the device, carrying it everywhere, even into restaurants where he would set it to various speeds and chew his food in time to the beats. Such behavior promptly got him confined to his hotel room for meals.

Things got steadily, disturbingly worse.

After exhibiting some aberrant behavior following a rehearsal, Garcia simply disappeared. Police found him later “doing a demented dance on the altar steps of a South London church,” Lydia Sokolova, one of Diaghilev’s famous ballerinas, wrote in her memoirs, “Dancing for Diaghilev.”

He was certified insane and was committed to an asylum in England, where he died in 1941.

“It must have been too much for him to see Leonide, who was not even a Spaniard, dancing what was to all intents and purposes his own farruca, “ wrote Sokolova. “Felix’s reason was the price fate demanded for the creation of a masterpiece.”

The plot of “The Three-Cornered Hat” concerns a miller and his beautiful wife, who unfortunately catches the eye of the lecherous local governor, or corregidor . (The ballet took its title from the three-cornered hat the governor wears as a symbol of his position). He falsely arrests the miller so he can pursue the wife. But she resists him and in the end, the miller and the villagers get their revenge.

Antonio’s version was commissioned in 1986 by Maria de Avila, who was then artistic director of the company. (Antonio will leave the company at the end of December, according to a Center spokesman.) The current sets and costumes follow Picasso’s original designs.

Antonio expanded the role of the corps de ballet and made the character of the governor more sympathetic because “I think it’s a very grotesque role in the original,” Antonio said in a recent phone interview from Madrid.

“The Corregidor is an old man, but he resists being old,” Antonio, 41, said. “He has a young heart and he’s in love with this woman.”

He also has made what he calls “just small changes” in the choreography. “For a Spanish dancer, it’s not a very deep work in the sense of our style,” Antonio said. “It’s very important choreography for the historical repertoire. But I think Falla’s music needs this version with a different feeling and different vocabulary.”

* The Spanish National Ballet will dance Massine’s “The Three-Cornered Hat” and other repertory, tonight through Saturday at 8, with 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $14. to $48. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).