COMMENTARY : A Case of the Ballet Blahs : ‘UNited We Dance’ showcased a world of new choreography--and its disappointments: too little originality, too few stars.

It looked like a terrific idea on paper. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter, Helgi Tomasson and the San Francisco Ballet were putting on an international festival. “UNited We Dance,” they called it.

Tomasson stipulated that his dancing guests had to bring short new works by native choreographers. Stress new .

Most of the entries actually turned out to be world premieres. Some, no doubt, will turn out to be world dernieres.

Tomasson also stipulated that the works had to be small in scale. It wasn’t that he objected to grandeur. It was merely a matter of fiscal responsibility.

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Undeterred, choreographers and dancers came from five continents. Thirteen companies, including the host ensemble, performed 16 vehicles in three bills spanning seven performances between May 9 and 13. The War Memorial Opera House, the premises at which the U.N. Charter had been signed in 1945, was a busy place. The critical eyes of the ballet world, both professional and amateur, focused on San Francisco.

Before the curtain could rise on the first program, Mayor Frank M. Jordan volunteered a judgment. In a flight of adjectival hyperbole, he promised the audience that the festival would be “very, very wonderful and very unique.”

As the perverse fates would have it, the festival was neither.

It wasn’t wonderful, because the choreography, for the most part, wasn’t wonderful.

It wasn’t unique, because most of the inspirations on display turned out to be secondhand inspirations.

The festival, as constituted, was certainly unprecedented. But the festival products, as executed, looked all too familiar.

The level of dancing was high. That wasn’t the problem. Technical standards were almost uniformly impressive.

Dancers dance well en pointe in Shanghai these days, and they dance well en pointe in Copenhagen. The broadened vocabulary that fuses modernism and classicism in various strenuous ways has become lingua franca in many disparate places too. Athleticism is alive and well, in its elegantly brutal way, on stages from Caracas to Leipzig.

The basic problem in San Francisco wasn’t how anyone danced. It was what everyone danced.

Where are the great choreographers of our time? Are there any great choreographers in our time? “UNited We Dance” didn’t suggest the answers we wanted.

And here’s another question: Where are the great dance personalities of our time? They weren’t in San Francisco either.

Insiders at the opera house acknowledge that Tomasson had some problems getting the companies and the repertory he most wanted. In any enterprise as ambitious as this, there have to be compromises. But did there have to be so many disappointments?

I n our day, said the superannuat ed diva of “Sunset Boulevard,” we had faces. There weren’t many faces to illuminate the choreography that prevailed in “UNited We Dance.”

The one notable exception aroused attention, moreover, for the wrong reason. The most famous name on the agenda belonged to Alicia Alonso. Well into her 70s, virtually blind and now unable to do much onstage beyond smile, she created delirium merely by showing up.

Clearly, the audience was starved for a dominant personality and, perhaps, for an icon. Alonso delivered the goods.

She didn’t do it--couldn’t do it--as a dancer. It hardly would have been realistic to expect anything like that. But she did do it as a force of nature and as a tangible link to better times.

Alberto Mendez had concocted a sad little piece in which Alonso, stiff, tentative and frail, was surrounded by two generations of younger artists from her Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Accompanied by recordings of suitably nostalgic piano tunes by Ernesto Lecuona, the women provided a certain scenic ambience. More important, the men served as super- porteurs for their precious prima ballerina assoluta.

They moved her from spot to spot, guided her from position to position, carefully. They held her and lifted her, gently. They placed her in a chair, deferentially. They knelt before her, reverentially.

The miniballet--it was called “After the Sunset”--didn’t make a lot of terpsichorean sense. It didn’t represent high art. It couldn’t have pleased anyone who wanted to remember Alonso in her fabulous prime, or even in her fabulous twilight. But it did serve as a poignant, symbolic testament to the magnetism of one dauntless individual. In context, that was revealing.

P erhaps ballet doesn’t need stars anymore. Perhaps the public is being conditioned to think that competence, efficiency and energy are enough. The possibility gives one pause.

Aterballetto, a gutsy company from Italy, inadvertently demonstrated the proposition that stellar attractions are now expendable. Alessandro Molin, the leading danseur, was to have taken the central role in an exercise in muscular primitivism by Amedeo Amodio called “Dialetti.” When Molin injured himself during a late rehearsal, however, it was decided that the show could go on without him. Resorting to some enlightened improvisation, the ensemble simply turned the septet into a sextet.

It is difficult to say that “Dialetti” would have been better if Molin had taken part. But it is certain that the focus would have been different. And it must be significant that no one seemed to care. The coverage in the New York Times didn’t even acknowledge Molin’s absence.

Choreographers are likely to serve as stars themselves these days. As such they may supplant the dancers in the audience’s affections.

The San Francisco audience bestowed a stomping, screaming curtain-call ovation on Mark Morris, whose “Pacific” was one of three pieces offered by the host company. A complex, essentially subdued ritual that sensitively invoked mystical India to music of Lou Harrison, it didn’t showcase the iconoclastic attitudes that have made Morris famous. Also infamous. It steadfastly refused to rise to the wonted visceral climaxes.

Though startling at first, Morris’ subtle fusion of academic abstraction with dervish ceremonial served Harrison with sweet compulsion. In the process, “Pacific” reminded viewers that original thinking is still possible within the confines of ballet.

We didn’t see many other traces of original thinking.

Christopher Bruce of the Rambert Ballet came close with a trifle called “Meeting Point.” It toyed sweetly with the games played by shifty diplomats. Kurt Jooss’ “Green Table” served as its cynical point of departure.

John Alleyne of Ballet British Columbia came close (though not as close) with a trifle called “Can you believe she actually said.” It toyed sweetly with the travails of being a dancer in a hostile environment. The incongruous music of Mozart, juxtaposed with the quirky jerks of Twyla Tharp, served as the deconstructed point of departure.

The rest had little to do with novelty. This, essentially, was a festival of hand-me-down thoughts and hand-me-down maneuvers. A little bit of this, and a little bit of that.

San Francisco imported tragic socialist-realism from Shanghai, melodramatic mime from Moscow. We saw neo-Bournonville from Copenhagen and neo-Balanchine from San Francisco. There was a Bejartesque beat-up-the-women bolero from Caracas and a natives-are-restless ersatz -”Sacre” from Australia.

The catalogue was diverse literally to a fault. Tokyo sent narrative-ritual naivete. Leipzig sent a sculptural torture-the-ballerina-on-high trio, plus a quasi-modern setting (very literal) that gilded the second movement lily of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The bourree exercises invoked tired shades of John Neumeier.

Even the San Franciscans stumbled when they introduced their own mawkish version of what we now reluctantly call victim art. In a manipulative ode to people with AIDS, Tomasson mustered a platitudinous pas de deux for Sabina Allemann and Eric Hoisington. The music by Kristopher Jon Anthony (who, the program magazine told us, died of complications from AIDS) was performed by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (which, according to official background materials, has lost more than 150 members to AIDS through the years).

The intentions were lofty throughout. So, alas, were the pretensions.

U nited, they danced, danced, danced in San Francisco. United, they didn’t say much.

Tomasson’s welcoming statement in the program magazine offered a flight of adjectival hyperbole of its own:

“I believe that our festival,” the impresario-choreographer wrote, “will be of significant historical importance in the world of dance.”

Contrary to hopes, we didn’t see the future in San Francisco. But we did see the present, and it was dreary.