Dance Review : Joffrey Returns With a Revival

In 1933--the same year that Hitler came to power--Leonide Massine created the first of his controversial, groundbreaking symphonic ballets for the starriest company of its time, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.

In the conservative world of high culture, it was daring to move Tchaikovsky’s weighty Fifth Symphony from the concert hall to the ballet stage. It was also daring to incorporate stylizations of the Nazi swastika and salute in the costume and movement design for a dance showpiece. Most of all, it was daring to depict the energies fueling the rise of fascism at that very moment in an allegorical work titled “Les Presages” (The Portents). Portents of what?

At the very end of the ballet, Massine showed society united under the leadership of a figure called the Hero. Critics and audiences of the time interpreted that ending as a return to law and order following a threat of chaos. After all, the portrayals of social turmoil and the danger of war had finished and the character representing evil destiny was destroyed. The future was definitely under control.

However, 59 years later, when the Joffrey Ballet mounted a triumphant reconstruction of “Les Presages,” we all knew better. We knew exactly what the ascension of Massine’s Hero in the ballet’s final image would portend or presage. And it wasn’t law and order. To us, “Les Presages” is a vision of Europe on the brink of cataclysm, a work conveying the Zeitgeist of a dangerous time when the performing arts were expected to get at the bottom of things.

Ironically, social turmoil in the form of the 1992 Los Angeles riots caused the Joffrey to cancel its scheduled premiere of “Les Presages” at the Wiltern Theatre. But local audiences finally got a look at this all-but-lost masterwork on Tuesday, when the company returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a seven-performance engagement.

As staged by Tatiana Leskova (assisted by Nelly Laport), “Les Presages” speaks as compellingly about the fascism now consuming Bosnia as it did about Europe’s capitulation to Nazism a generation ago.

Supervised by Campbell Baird and John David Ridge, the somewhat simplified re-creation of Andre Masson’s original set and costumes enforces a restless asymmetry bristling with graphic warnings. Dominated by a threatening mask, the backdrop alone features tongues of fire, shooting stars, falling planets and plenty of storm clouds.

Divided into nearly as many components, Massine’s corps is first glimpsed at the sides and back of the stage in intense, bravura passages that reveal a split body: The dancers’ legs do classical steps but their upper torsos and arms belong to the Expressionist dance-theater of the ‘30s.

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This dramatic physical opposition and the dynamic alternation of group activities help generate tremendous force long before symbolic figures come to dominate the ballet. In his autobiography, Massine writes about his interest in the “contrasted blending of rounded and angular forms,” a concept highlighted in an early solo danced strongly by Beatriz Rodriguez.

Threatened by Fate (an uneven Gregory Russell), the love between the characters danced by the majestic Valerie Madonia and the ardent Daniel Baudendistel barely manages to survive--and, before long, Baudendistel is wearing what looks like a melted swastika on his chest. He becomes the Hero, rising above everyone, arm raised, palm out.

Looking rushed and overtaxed, Rita Martinez impersonates a desperately glamorous character named Frivolity in a conventionally decorative divertissement --the ballet’s most dated segment. However, Massine’s layering of action-units in the finale is absolutely inspired and the sense of people driven into a new, crueler reality emerges with enormous power.

Allen Lewis conducts an uncredited abridgment of Tchaikovsky’s score with great surety, and Thomas Skelton’s lighting contributes to the lushness of this latest example of the Joffrey’s service to 20th-Century dance archeology.

Familiar to local audiences, the rest of the opening program offered no comparable revelations. Martha Clarke, Felix Blaska and Robby Barnett created “The Garden of Villandry” in 1979 and have performed it here, as has American Ballet Theatre.

The Joffrey has been dancing it for two years. On Tuesday, a passionate Pascal Benichou and a curiously glum Tom Mossbrucker were the endlessly hopeful suitors, Beatriz Rodriguez the subtly manipulative target of their wooing dance.

However, long before Benichou and Mossbrucker linked arms to form a human swing for Rodriguez, the generalized flow of images proved far less compelling than the music being played at the upper right of the stage by Stanley Babin, Kenneth Yerke and Ernest Ehrhardt.

To close the program, a newly energized Mossbrucker and the coolly virtuosic Jodie Gates led the company in Gerald Arpino’s plotless 1981 diversion “Light Rain.”

As usual, the relentlessly shimmering fingers, upside-down splits, pumping hips and nonchalant technical display had the audience on its feet screaming for more.

* Joffrey Ballet, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Fri., 8 p.m. and Sat., 2 p.m. (“Les Patineurs,” “Return to a Strange Land,” “A Tri-Fling,” “Les Presages”); Wed. - Thurs., and Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m. (“Billboards”). $15-$55. (213) 480-3232.