Dancers Cover Up for Tour of U.S.

Les Ballets Africains is making the issue of the women dancing topless moot this tour. They will be covered up at each stop.

“The U.S. is the only country in the world where this becomes an issue,” said tour manager Vince Paul, who added, “I’m an American. That’s the deal with our country, the caveman approach that the United States has about some things. It’s only in the U.S. In Europe, no.

“In previous U.S. tours,” he added, “most presenters didn’t care. It was those few exceptions that did care that kind of ruined one little aspect of our authenticity. . . . But it’s not really a subject any of us like to talk about. It insults our intelligence.”

The women danced topless in some pieces during the 1991 tour, which stopped at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. But that program was a suite of regional dances, not a full-length dance-drama such as “Silo: The Path of Life.”

“We won’t dance topless because the story doesn’t mean that,” said company artistic director Italo Zambo. “Guinea (dance) is not the striptease. If we show women (dancing topless), that is because as the national dance company, we are supposed to show the reality of what happens there. Anyway, this story doesn’t mean that.”

Before the company’s policy was clear on this tour, however, the local presenters had lined up to exercise their option to have the women cover up.

“We’re playing it on the safe side,” said Dean Corey, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, which is sponsoring the stop at the Performing Arts Center. “The idea is to make sure that people enjoy this as much as possible, although I don’t know if there would be any controversy.”

Janet Oetinger, director the arts and lectures program at UC Santa Barbara, where the company dances tonight, had planned to take the other choice.

“Being in a university environment, we can be a little different from a community place,” she said. “I might look at it differently if I were doing a matinee for families, with a lot of children.”