DANCE REVIEW : A Backdrop of Balanchine : Many Sides and ‘Temperaments’ of Miami City Ballet Company

Pawing the air with her legs as if stroking them against satin sheets, Iliana Lopez managesto make the ghastly lifts in “Transtangos” into spatial autographs--a testament to her star status at Miami City Ballet. Dangling in splits upside down, she becomes all legs, stretching them wide enough to claim the Orange County Performing Arts Center as conquered territory and the Friday audience as her vassals.

Unfortunately, Lopez is the only thing to see in this 1986 company vehicle by Peruvian-born resident choreographer Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros. Using a suite by Astor Piazzola, it aims to fuse tango-dancing and classical ballet but shortchanges both.

Rarely do the steps match the intricacy or drive of the music, with tango rhythm so feebly physicalized that you suspect that this could be a swing or rap ballet with equal credibility. Miami City Ballet offers an ensemble honed on the speed and complexity of Balanchine choreography, but the potential for expressing tango intensity through neoclassical technique never really takes off.

You can see hotter tangos the same weekend at LunaPark or Highways than “Transtangos” offers its 12 hard-working dancers. And even Lopez’s triumph comes at the expense of her husband and partner, Franklin Gamero, a fine artist largely reduced here to carrying her as if she were some feast-day effigy.

Fact is, Gamero would need to be taller and broader to seem the ideal cavalier for Lopez--and their performance of Gamonet De Los Heros’ 1987 gymnastic showpiece “Nous Sommes” finds him more effortful than he had been in the same duet with another partner a year ago at the Wiltern.

As before, the choreography makes a hectic, fussy intrusion on the sustained lyricism of one of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne (sung diligently by Melodee Fernandez). Breathlessly retailing slinky femininity and muscular machismo, “Nous Sommes” is the great syrupy star duet of the Miami repertory--and giggle if you dare.

Of course, Balanchine ballets offer another dimension of dance, but with Lopez and Gamero offstage for “Western Symphony” and “The Four Temperaments,” there are losses as well as gains.

Watching Miami City Ballet right after the local visit by the Royal Ballet, you notice problematic physical proportions and uneven technical capabilities that place a regional company in another class from a national one--even with the Miami dancers at their best, even with the Royal in decline.

So it helps immeasurably that everyone in the Florida ensemble has been meticulously coached in Balanchine style, starting with the details that make each work unique. Susan Hendl’s staging of “Western Symphony” may overplay the central joke of cowpokes and saloon-gals dancing in Imperial Russian style. However, the company meets the ballet’soften-fearsome technical demands impressively.

Two of Miami’s dancing twins, Mabel and Maribel Modrono, capably lead (respectively) the jaunty first and third sections, with Kendall Sparks partnering Mabel and Arnold Quintane assigned to Maribel. Marin Boieru and Paige Fullerton make the adagio funny but not especially beautiful (it can be both), while Myrna Kamara creates the sense of a special occasion every time she sashays forth in the finale.

Opposite Kamara, Douglas Gawriljuk proves better at air turns than Baryshnikov-style compression-spins and conductor Akira Endo gets into the act by turning up in full Western drag for the curtain calls.

A nice job, but “The Four Temperaments” is the stunner: a production mad for all the original choreographic weirdnesses that some other stagings refine away. Company artistic director Edward Villella and Ballet Mistress Eve Lawson are listed as Repetiteurs and they freshen every oddity of balance, position, gesture until the ballet seems as wondrous to you as it obviously is to them.

The company as a whole looks sensational here, with the principals no better than anyone else, simply more prominent. Alexander Brady sets a standard in the opening section that few of the other men can match, but Boieru and Mabel M. play the Sanguinic duet like a dazzling card-trick and Kamara again explodes into the finale as if you’ve waited for her all evening.

Gawriljuk (Phlegmatic solo) and Edward Cox (Melancholic solo) know their jobs, and Endo expertly leads the Pacific Symphony through another of Friday’s major tests of versatility.

The company danced through Sunday at OCPAC. No further performances are scheduled.