DANCE REVIEW : Royal Winnipeg Ballet Returns to Southland

Now in its 53rd season, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of Canada remains driven by insatiable eclecticism.

Currently on a three-week U.S. tour of mostly one-night stands, it arrived at Bridges Auditorium in Claremont on Thursday with a typically daunting array of stylistic challenges.

The Southland last saw the company at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, when it served primarily as a backdrop for ballerina Evelyn Hart. In 1993, Hart appears as “Resident Guest Artist” but her star power no longer creates a total eclipse. Indeed, on Thursday neither Hart nor former Kiev Ballet principal Alexei Ratmanski could redeem Vaganova’s hopelessly shoddy “Esmeralda” pas de deux (music by Pugni).

Ratmanski flew through elaborate turning combinations with remarkable ease but for all her authority, Hart didn’t always display optimum security.

Despite major lapses, Danish classicism emerged more respectably in a suite mostly from the last act of Bournonville’s “Napoli” but with his “Flower Festival” pas de deux interpolated midway through. Originally staged by Kirsten Ralov, the “Napoli” pas de six looked carefully coached and palpably stylish, especially the sunny, idiomatic performances by Michel Faigaux and Jennifer Alexander.

Unfortunately, both Caroline Gruber and Zhang Wei-Qiang made their “Flower Festival” partnership seem like hard labor and the “Napoli” tarantella suffered from being danced by isolated couples on an empty stage: no onlookers, no sense of a party in which the dancers compete with one another.

In contrast, the square dance from De Mille’s “Rodeo” had exactly the right spirit of joyous community interplay, and Terry Orr’s staging sustained this feeling so strongly throughout the three scenes that it ultimately didn’t matter if the backdrops needed repainting or if Earl Stafford’s orchestra sounded overtaxed by the fabled Copland score.

Elizabeth Olds offered a detailed and invigorating portrayal of the Cowgirl, with John Kaminski reveling in the eccentricities of the Champion Roper. Shawn Hounsell underplayed the Head Wrangler to near-invisibility--but he redeemed himself as the victim in Kylian’s “Stoolgame,” the program’s biggest risk and its most indelible achievement.

Choreographed in 1974 to electronic music by Arne Nordheim, it evolves from a striking cluster of bodies on a tabletop into a stark ritual for seven dancers wielding footstools. In a bitter depiction of hatred for the dispossessed, Kylian not only individualized a victim but a vicious lead-oppressor (Gino Di Marco) and a comforter (Amy Brogan) without the courage to go the distance.

Staged by Hans Knill, the piece required full-out commitment from the cast to a punishing modern-dance vocabulary accented with inventive gymnastics. But the young Canadians not only met every test the work provided, they took it into another dimension--making you think about the deadly power games going on in Cambodia, in what used to be Yugoslavia and in parts of Los Angeles as well.