DANCE REVIEW : McKayle’s ‘Gumbo’ Premieres

The first program this week by the San Francisco Ballet concentrated on plotless musical visualizations. The second, which included the world premiere of Donald McKayle’s “Gumbo Ya-Ya,” Thursday at the War Memorial Opera House, was devoted to rituals of community.

The actual world premiere of “Gumbo” (which means: everybody talk at once) was supposed to have happened at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, which commissioned the work. But a strike there prevented that from happening. The Kennedy Center would prefer that the world regard the San Francisco performance as a mere preview, but a premiere is a premiere is a premiere. Washington will see it in May.

In comparison to David Bintley’s gesture-obsessed “The ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy” and Redha’s fetishistic “La Pavane Rouge,” which bracketed it on the program, McKayle’s “Gumbo” was sweet and easy to accept, if rather simplistically feel-good and didactic.

The message is that humankind in a state of nature is more authentic and free and blissfully, harmoniously happy than when living in an urban environment, among skyscrapers that suggest the Big Apple. Ah, no argument there.

A couple of things helped to make this Romantic vision palatable. A. Christina Giannini’s slinkly colorful costumes and stylized scenic designs evoked no specific time or place or ethnic group, and so the three-part ballet (“Gathering,” “Safe Harbor” and “Migration”) unfolded as a kind of parable or fairy tale. No real history had to intrude.

Secondly, McKayle, a professor of dance at UC Irvine as well as a Tony Award nominee and respected modern dance choreographer, crafted kinetic, evocative movements that suited his varying purposes deftly, if not with great depth. He made the company look springy, versatile and alert.

Additionally, Yuri Zhukov brought charisma to the role of the shaman figure; Eric Hoisington and Muriel Maffre danced the convoluted central pas de deux skillfully.

Flutist James Newton, who also teaches at UCI, composed the original taped score, which contained generalized, moody washes of sound punctuated by drum beats, bird calls and his own flute solos.

Bintley’s decorative “ ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy” looked like at least 33 ways of holding one arm in the air, until it became a kind of salute or statement of membership in a group. The gesture perhaps deserves near-permanent retirement.

Michael McGraw was the fluent piano soloist. Emil de Cou conducted the Liszt orchestration of Schubert’s piano original in primary colors.

Redha’s seemingly endless “Pavane Rouge” (to a taped collage) had something to do with ritual ceremony, social relations and sex among a community of red- and black-clad figures sometimes holding black umbrellas who spend their lives wandering to quasi-religious music amid five Corinthian-crowned pillars.

It showed the company at its youthfully alluring best and proved the dancers could arch their backs and maintain clear shapes until the cows come home. But the pretentiousness of the dance was risible.