A Refurbished ‘Beauty’ Among Season’s Brightest

The newly renamed Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (a.k.a. the Music Center) again programmed a mere handful of concert dance performances; the Luckman Complex at Cal State L.A. cut back on dance; and Occidental College abandoned it entirely. However, the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Irvine Barclay Theatre made presenting major international touring companies look easy, while the Getty Center and, particularly, California Plaza supported local dance with increasingly creative curatorship.

Finally, the Alex Theatre in Glendale not only mounted an ambitious dance series but also launched an annual residency by the Paul Taylor company that brought us enchanting performances of “Arden Court” and “Roses.”

Below are highlights from one 1999 journal of achievement:

1. The Kirov Ballet: “Sleeping Beauty.” This brand-new reconstruction of the authentic, four-hour 1890 Marius Petipa choreography, came complete with the original set and costume designs. No, it didn’t make it to Southern California, but it did set the seal on a whole era of international dance archeology, demonstrating how consistently 20th century stagings have misrepresented the style and scale of a masterpiece that everyone takes for granted. At the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in June.

2. The Royal Swedish Ballet: “Ballets Suedois.” Dating from the 1920s, the four lost ballets in the program offered fabled designs and scores by the likes of Fernand Leger, Gerald Murphy, Arthur Honegger and Cole Porter. However, the major achievement involved restoring the reputation of a forgotten, long-dead Swedish choreographer named Jean Borlin: a vital link between experimental 20th century ballet and emerging modern dance. At the Orange County Performing Arts Center in June.

3. Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal: “Nelken.” Not much in the way of conventional dancing in this parodistic, nonlinear cavalcade of audience manipulation techniques--but plenty of expressive insights turned into imaginative whole-body statements. Tracing our need for theatrical fantasy back to the loss of innocence in our childhoods, Bausch powerfully projected a sense that the creative spirit will survive even in an age of government repression and media lies. At Royce Hall in October.

4. Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures: “Cinderella.” Set in World War II London, this was the first “Cinderella” to embrace all the darkness in Prokofiev’s score and the first that found the title character spending more time trying to rescue her prince than awaiting her own happy ending. Stellar performances from Adam Cooper as a wounded flier and Will Kemp as a mercurial angel helped Sarah Wildor make Cinderella deeply real and touching. At the Ahmanson Theatre, March to May.

5. National Ballet of Cuba: “Giselle.” The Kirov brought New Yorkers a sumptuous, Soviet-style production, while a new neoclassic revamp by San Francisco Ballet put tons of money on the stage. But nobody brought audiences closer to the high-Romantic heartbreak of this classic than Alicia Alonso’s 1959 staging. Led by Lorna Feijoo, the principals confirmed Havana’s reputation for training, but it was the implacable 24-member wili-corps that proved the greatest revelation. At the Wiltern Theatre in February.

6. Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. Touring with five excellent female dancers and two musicians, Baryshnikov not only summarized the virtuosity and acting prowess that had made him the ballet world’s reigning superstar, but also followed his artistic wanderlust into new creative adventures. These included dauntingly spare Japanese modernism, courtesy of his Grand Kabuki counterpart, Tamasaburo Bando V. An engagement full of startling redefinitions of mastery. At Royce Hall in June.

7. American Repertory Dance Company. Linked to an exhibition of dance photographs, this was an eight-part program of small-scale modern dance treasures. The choreographies on view ranged from a reconstruction of Ruth St. Denis’ frieze-like “Greek Veil” (circa 1918) to Lar Lubovitch’s revival of his liquid “Air” from “Joy of Man’s Desiring” (1972). Later in the year, the company hired a drag diva for a splashy outdoor event, but nothing eclipsed the level of artistry here. At the Getty Center in March.

8. Liz Lerman’s “Moving to Hallelujah.” A multicultural, multi-generational, multidisciplinary spectacle. Because Lerman assembled this freewheeling, site-specific cavalcade of Jewish thought and history at the very, very last moment--enlisting students from CalArts along with her Washington, D.C.-based company--this writer persuaded his editor that the result would most likely be too ragged and off-the-cuff to review in these pages. Big mistake. At the Skirball Cultural Center in May.

9. Eliot Feld’s Ballet Tech. Imagine a ballet company that looks like America, reflecting the nation’s diversity, youth, energy and style. Seek no further. Staffed from graduates of Feld’s tuition-free training programs in the New York public school system, Ballet Tech represents an investment in the future that also manages to be thrilling in the here and now. Feld’s powerhouse male duet “Yo Shakespeare” may be its ultimate statement, but just about everything throbbed with heat and flair. At the Irvine Barclay Theatre in October.

10. Ten unforgettable performances:

For throwaway classical brilliance--Vladimir Malakhov, disarmingly seedy as the slave trader in a dreadful American Ballet Theatre staging of “Le Corsaire” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in February.

For another kind of throwaway classical brilliance--India’s Kathak master Birju Maharaj, accompanied by Zakir Hussain at Pasadena City College in June.

For characterizational range and depth--Sarah Wildor in the title role of Bourne’s “Cinderella.”

For modernistic purity of soul--John Pennington in a spiritual-sculptural Harald Kreutzberg rarity on the American Rep program at the Getty Center.

For comic flair--David Dorfman and Dan Froot in “Live Sax Acts” at Highways Performance Space in April.

For tragic stature and partnering prowess--Domingo Rubio and Fidel Garcia in contrasting interpretations of Romeo on separate programs by Mexico’s Taller Coreografico de la UNAM at Cal State L.A. in February.

For sustained collaborative rapport--Oguri and Adam Rudolph in their 75-minute, experimental butoh-and-percussion duet “Earthbeat” at the Electric Lodge in Venice in May.

For drop-dead exactitude and a ravishing delicacy--Diana Vishneva as the Kirov’s Aurora and Giselle in New York, and also in the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in November.

For unstinting ensemble power--the Liat Dror/Nur Ben Gal Company of Israel in “The Dance of Nothing” at Bovard Auditorium, USC, in November.

For a perfect match in physical beauty, technical refinement and potent, heart-stopping chemistry--the brief, luminous duet between Loretta Livingston and John Malashock during the talky dance documentary “From the Horse’s Mouth” at the Japan America Theatre in July.

Performance of the year? Martin Wuttke’s simultaneously uproarious and frightening portrayal of the title role in Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic parable “Arturo Ui” with the Berliner Ensemble at UCLA in July. Most conventionally dance-like in his grotesque dog-solo at the beginning, Wuttke forcefully sustained a link between the spoken and physical components of his characterization throughout the evening. If what the Bausch company does can be called dancing, so can this.