DANCE REVIEW : Paris Opera Ballet Ensemble at Cerritos

The dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet may be superbly trained in elegance of placement and refinement of execution. But, helas, they’ve clearly never learned to survive on the road.

On Friday--only the second night of an American tour by the 17-member Paris Opera Ballet Ensemble--the injury of a mid-ranked soloist forced two showpieces to be dropped from the program at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and a group work to be presented with one dancer less than its choreographer intended.

Ticketholders paid up to $65 apiece to view the result: three works danced with genuine mastery and five others suffering greatly from either technical strain or insufficient rehearsal.

If the pas de six from Bournonville’s “Napoli” looked just as hopelessly ragged on Friday as in its previous performance, Jacques Garnier’s trio “Aunis” reveled in ensemble unanimity. Using folk steps and folk songs, Garnier fashioned a breezy, buoyant tribute to brotherly love that displayed the skill and charm of Bertrand Belem, Jeremie Belingard and Christophe Duquenne at optimum effectiveness.

In contrast, a duet from Roland Petit’s “Notre Dame de Paris” dragged Isabelle Guerin and Kader Belarbi into the depths of woozy kitsch, but they somehow rose to a performance of great conviction. Accompanied by quasi-classical drivel by Maurice Jarre, the magnetic Belarbi lavished intensity on the stop-and-go gestural grotesquerie of Quasimodo.

Cast as a showgirl-Esmeralda, Guerin made every cliche luminous and polished trash until it looked like treasure. Nearly as resourceful: Charles Jude in a fine repeat performance of Ella Jarowzevitch’s solo “Pierrot Lunaire.”

With its fusion of athleticism and sentimentality, Ben Stevenson’s “Three Preludes” pas de deux (to Rachmaninoff) has become a durable quasi-contemporary vehicle in the international repertory. Unfortunately, the performance Friday by Elisabeth Platel and Laurent Novis remained prosaic and strangely formal, as if the dancers hadn’t yet been introduced. Platel commanded more than enough glamour, feeling and technique, but Novis made the partnering look like penal servitude, and nothing ever happened between them.

Novis had seemed similarly overburdened as a porteur in another duet on the previous program, so it was a relief and a delight to find him cutting loose with some of the sharpest dancing on view in William Forsythe’s much imitated but still startling “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.”

Forsythe created this challenging theme-and-variations ensemble piece in 1987 for the Paris Opera Ballet, using a propulsive thump-and-whoosh score by Thom Willems. The title refers to two tiny, hanging gilded cherries (missing in Cerritos) intended to parody the grandiose opulence of the Paris Opera. Otherwise, the ballet is anything but Parisian in style: danced on a bare, open stage with stark overhead lighting.

Radically updating classical syntax, Forsythe evoked the continuous, anonymous surge of crowd motion in public spaces. But out of deliberately proletarian walking sequences, daring tests of academic technique emerged--with the women’s drastic balances on pointe becoming something of a motif in the choreography.

With one dancer missing from the cast, the Cerritos Parisians could offer only an approximation--technically soft and rhythmically flabby compared to what San Francisco Ballet and Forsythe’s own Frankfurt Ballet have achieved. Still, enough of the work’s fierce energy and intricate partnering gambits survived to make it the choreographic high point of this very mixed bill.

Spotty performances of excerpts from “Giselle” and “Don Quixote” completed the program, with taped music accompanying all the ballets--even works requiring only a single piano. Anton Dolin’s version of “Le Pas de Quatre” and Rudolf Nureyev’s version of the last-act “Sleeping Beauty” pas de deux were scheduled but dropped.

Also on the roster but missing: 1994 Varna silver medalist Emmanuel Thibault (quoted at length in a company preview in the Jan. 1 Calendar).