Showing Off Its Future

To have been alive for the formation and first 50 years of New York City Ballet is to have witnessed one of the great adventures in American culture. George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins and their colleagues did not merely start a company and help transplant a tradition. Rather they followed the lead of Diaghilev and formed an institution to foster innovation. And that institution developed a unique style of dancing from the energies of American life, eventually changing the image of ballet everywhere.

Exactly 50 years and two days after the company’s inaugural performance, a 40-dancer contingent and the company orchestra performed a retrospective program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, opening a weeklong run. (Another contingent is currently in Houston.) The Costa Mesa repertory spanned some 44 years of achievement, but the casting definitely looked to the future, with no less than nine dancers making debuts in major roles.

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Not always worth celebrating in recent years, the general level of women’s dancing set the seal on the evening’s excellence, ranging from the limitless pliancy of Wendy Whelan through the bubbly vivacity of Alexandra Ansanelli, the long-limbed elegance of Maria Kowroski and on to the vision of pure, serene classicism embodied by Miranda Weese.

You could argue that nobody matched the absent Kyra Nichols and Darci Kistler in their ability to fuse technical exactitude with a sense of glowing, personal fantasy. But Weese, in particular, looked well on the way.

The chief novelty on this opening program came from company director Peter Martins in the form of “Fearful Symmetries,” a 1990 ensemble showpiece set to a propulsive minimalist score by John Adams. Although bracingly contemporary in accompaniment, Martins’ ballet represents a throwback--essentially an abstraction of those hoary old nymphs-and-satyrs divertissements such as the Bolshoi’s “Walpurgis Night” that featured hordes of demonic virtuosi flinging themselves into a frenzy with every high-speed technical trick and lift in the book.

With Steven Rubin’s costumes deepening from orange to crimson to plum, Martins occasionally bought into Adams’ structural ploys--as when one, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six women appeared to create a literal complement to a repeating figure in the music. Mostly, though, he went for arbitrary effects, alternating furioso corps excursions with more subdued passages for three couples: Whelan and Albert Evans, Ansanelli and Benjamin Millepied, Deanna McBrearty and Philip Neal. True to the City Ballet birthright, he imposed a few experimental shoulder-rolls on the classical vocabulary, plus venturing a startling switcheroo between Whelan and McBrearty midway through a pas de deux with Neal.

Otherwise, however, the most notable achievement of “Fearful Symmetries” may have been its function as a workout: keeping the company in shape for “Agon,” the program’s modernist masterpiece and still, 41 years after its premiere, fresh and witty in its response to the score by Stravinsky.

As usual, Peter Boal set a daunting standard of execution, dancing the first trio with McBrearty and Pascale van Kipnis. Cast in the second trio for the first time, Kowroski, Millepied and Edward Liang looked fine until the soggy final lift. The fiendishly intricate pas de deux found Whelan and Evans coolly triumphant.

Balanchine’s neoclassic “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” from 1960 paired Weese and Damian Woetzel: an odd couple indeed, since Weese’s performance projected stylish grandeur but lacked ideal velocity in bravura passages while Woetzel provided speed galore in his multiple turns but not much grace as a cavalier.

Kowroski proved the big news in Balanchine’s “Western Symphony,” dancing with sleek, starry majesty opposite the forceful Charles Askegard in the final movement of this broadly comic 1954 confection. Charming and strong, Ansanelli may have overplayed the jokes in her debut as the Adagio ballerina; Kipling Houston offered a drier approach as her partner. Promising if occasionally edgy debuts came from Rachel Rutherford and James Fayette in the opening section.

Conducted by Maurice Kaprow, the orchestra capably met the daunting challenges of the Adams and Stravinsky works, but came close to falling apart when faced with playing Hershy Kay’s arrangement of folk ditties in “Western Symphony.” Go figure.

* New York City Ballet, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. This program: tonight at 8; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. Another program: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. $10-$66. (714) 740-7878.