Weekend Reviews : Dance : Harlem Troupe’s S.F. Look

The program sheets at the Orange County Performing Arts Center read “Dance Theatre of Harlem” all weekend long--but fully half the repertory came from San Francisco, and more than half emphasized florid emotionalism, muscle flexing and high-voltage theatricality over classical dance. Definitely not the Dance Theatre of Harlem of yore.

Gone from this engagement and the one upcoming (Feb. 9-11) at El Camino College: the Balanchine masterworks that formerly shaped the company’s image and style. Gone, too, the exemplary revivals and reconstructions of everything from familiar staples of 19th-Century Romanticism to lost treasures of Diaghilev-era modernism.

This shift may well be temporary, but the conclusion stays unmistakable: The same crisis in arts funding that recently forced the Joffrey Ballet to move to Chicago and American Ballet Theatre into extensive community outreach activity has brought Dance Theatre of Harlem to its own bottom-line compromises.

Each program in the five-performance weekend featured a lavishly mounted middlebrow story ballet by Michael Smuin, formerly co-artistic director of San Francisco Ballet and highly active in television, films and on Broadway. In both “Medea” (1977) and “A Song for Dead Warriors” (1978), he created striking theatrical effects ornamented with powerhouse Bolshoi-style bravura, plus more beefcake than the collected works of Daniel Ezralow and Maurice Bejart combined.

However, his storytelling skills remained meager and his attempts to combine virtuosity with scenery-chewing proved ridiculous--as in “Medea,” in which Jason must stop grieving over the body of his murdered love long enough to execute flashy air-turns. Or as in an early pas de deux from “Song” in which the doomed Native American lovers must run-run-run, jump-jump-jump and lurk-lurk-lurk.

Local audiences had seen San Francico Ballet principals try to make these ballets credible and their Harlem counterparts looked no less talented or resourceful. Indeed, on Saturday night, Donald Williams brooded soulfully between stunts as Jason in “Medea” and Tai Jimenez made a compellingly reckless Creusa. It wasn’t Charmaine Hunter’s fault that the title role required more posing than dancing.

In “Song,” the pileup of mimed brutalities--a rape, two beatings, a scalping and a shooting--also made dance decidedly incidental, but, on Friday, Luis Dominguez and Christina Johnson suffered nobly as the victims of the evil lawman played impassively (in whiteface) by Thaddeus Davis.

“Medea” boasted imposing scenic panels by Norman Rizzi and the intense Samuel Barber music that originally accompanied Martha Graham’s magnificent “Cave of the Heart.” Dominated by its Ronald Chase scrim-projections, “Song for Dead Warriors” featured a score by Charles Fox that incorporated documentary Native American singing, and also offered scenery and costume designs by Willa Kim juxtaposing contemporary Southwest reality with haunting visions of the past.

Coincidentally, Bay Area choreographer Alonzo King fused the here-and-now with evocations of a tribal heritage in the great triumph of the Harlem engagement, “Signs and Wonders.” Opening with a solo for Cedric Rouse that used traditional African music and movement to accent and heighten stretched neoclassical extensions, this groundbreaking new suite for 14 dancers dramatized the rich, overlapping cultural contexts belonging to African Americans in an exciting, pure-dance showpiece.

The notion of performing ballet steps to recordings of African music may sound like a Smuinesque stunt, but King infused the work with a genuine African aesthetic, reminding his audience of all the inspiration that early 20th-Century painters and composers in the West drew from African art.

Indeed, conditioned by the recordings, King’s ballet used African concepts of energy, asymmetry and radical juxtaposition more pervasively than African movement per se--and these elements transformed ballet attack, sequencing and body-sculpture in startling and innovative ways. Suddenly, a hot, sophisticated, futuristic classical style rooted in black culture seemed a fait accompli.

Unfortunately, “Signs and Wonders” represented the engagement’s only glimpse of that style. In another new piece, “The Joplin Dances,” Harlem principal Robert Garland fashioned a fluent, predictable neoclassic entertainment using ragtime music and assumptions about choreographic structure and presentation dating back to Petipa. Nothing remarkable, though it was certainly pleasant on Friday to find senior ballerina Virginia Johnson’s warmth and proficiency intact. Williams, Hunter, Davis and, particularly, Simone Cardoso all danced proficiently here.

The company also looked fit and handsome Saturday evening in Geoffrey Holder’s plotless 1974 spectacle “Dougla” (to his music and in his costumes), with all its lovingly detailed gestural exoticism in place and the glorious processions-to-nowhere still remarkable for their mixture of haughtiness and vitality.

Although conductor David LaMarche let tension ebb in “Firebird,” the Pacific Symphony sounded excellent here and throughout the repertory.