‘Gumbo Ya-Ya’ Receives Mixed Eastern Reviews

East Coast critical appraisal of UC Irvine dance professor Donald McKayle’s “Gumbo Ya-Ya” ballet, which had its official premiere in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, ranged from praise to thumbs down.

The work, commissioned by and danced at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was performed by the San Francisco Ballet, which previewed the piece in San Francisco in February, also to mixed reviews.

In Washington, New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff gave the most sanguine assessment of this allegory of human reaction to catastrophe. The high point of choreographer McKayle’s “colorful message-ballet,” Kisselgoff wrote, is its “strong contrast” between robotic urban and primeval forest vignettes.

“One feels the same motivational core that is at the heart of McKayle’s classics like ‘Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder.’ ”

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Alan M. Kriegsman of the Washington Post wrote that the work “is abundant in movement invention, in a rich stew of blended idioms.” However, he found that its “narrative and metaphoric aspects never become clear.”

The Washington Times’ Octavio Roca pulled no punches, describing the piece as a “turkey,” an “entertaining hack work at best,” an “awful . . . jumbled” ballet in which “cliche followed cliche.” The original score, by UCI music professor James Newton, “was retrograde but attractive,” according to Roca.