DANCE REVIEWS : Winnipeg Ballet at Royce Hall

As it had the previous evening in Claremont, Royal Winnipeg Ballet of Canada danced masterworks associated with other companies on its program Friday at Royce Hall, UCLA. But it also introduced choreography of its own: two pieces by Mark Godden, the company’s first resident dance maker.

Ambitious, capricious and much too impatient to bother with developing his best ideas and discarding the worst, Godden produced an extraordinary effect on the company. Where the 10-member cast for Balanchine’s neoclassic showpiece “Allegro Brillante” looked ill-assorted in height and proportions, Godden fused most of them (plus a few others) into a perfectly matched ensemble for his “Angels in the Architecture.”

This 1992 creation evoked a Shaker community as much through imaginative sculptural and gestural manipulation of brooms and chairs as the big, bold group movement. Moreover, it dared pry Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” loose from the imperishable Martha Graham images virtually engraved on the notes. Godden is clearly fearless, in a hurry and very, very talented.

In “La Princesse et Le Soldat,” he appropriated portions of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” to showcase the slinky, deadpan Gino di Marco and the spectacularly pliant Suzanne Rubio. Highly American in its throwaway humor, it capitalized on a sense of spontaneity--exactly what was missing Friday in the repeat performance of the “Esmeralda” pas de deux and in the key partnership of “Allegro Brillante.”

More reliable technically than she had been in Claremont, Evelyn Hart still appeared terminally estranged from her “Esmeralda” partner, Alexei Ratmanski. And although Francia Russell’s staging of “Allegro Brillante” received a generally spirited performance, the powerful but unyielding prima (Laura Graham) pretty much left her cautious, glazed cavalier (Zhang Wei-Qiang) out in the cold.

Ironically, mismatched couples define the structure and theme of Antony Tudor’s dance drama, “Jardin aux Lilas,” but here the Canadians worked together expertly to give Airi Hynninen’s staging a sense of urgency and shared loss.

Certainly Caroline Gruber and John Kaminsky as the engaged couple missed much of the complexity of their characters no less than Zhang Wei-Qiang and Elizabeth Olds as their ex-lovers. But the integrity and impact of the ballet survived because of them, despite a ruinous setting by Desmond Heeley that resembled one of those vulgar paintings on black velvet sold to tourists.

Earl Stafford’s small-but-valiant company orchestra sounded plausible in everything except the “Brillante” Tchaikovsky and the “Jardin” Chausson. No further company performances in the Southland are scheduled this season.