A Glittery Miami City Ballet

The sleek, moneyed, increasingly European San Francisco Ballet normally owns the Balanchine franchise in the Bay Area. But not this week, when the younger, hotter Miami City Ballet is dancing the West Coast premiere of Balanchine’s full-length “Jewels” in UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

In a staging by company ballet mistress Eve Lawson on Thursday, the first of three performances on the UC campus, Miami’s “Jewels” glowed with energy and glittered with sharp choreographic detail. .

It’s not merely that the company understood how the three contrasting sections--”Emeralds” (to Faure), “Rubies” (to Stravinsky) and “Diamonds” (to Tchaikovsky)--respectively epitomized French refinement, American bravado and Imperial Russian majesty. It’s that the Miami forces had been coached to highlight the array of contrasts within each section and convey every facet with maximum vivacity.

This shared clarity of purpose sustained even the dancing of those principals far beneath the level of the New York City Ballet paragons who introduced “Jewels” back in 1967: Suzanne Farrell, for example, in “Diamonds,” Violette Verdy in “Emeralds” and Miami City Ballet founding director Edward Villella in “Rubies.”

Unfortunately, the hyperkinetic, all-American Villella role may have suffered the most in Berkeley from under casting--specifically, a substitution occasioned by dancer incapacity. Replacing the scheduled Eric Quillere (reportedly suffering from bursitis), Arnold Quintane delivered the choreographic text diligently but otherwise yielded the spotlight to the icy slinking of Sally Ann Isaacks and, particularly, the brilliant, fearless virtuosity of Jennifer Kronenberg. For those who remember Villella and Baryshnikov, the loss of male firepower threw “Rubies” off balance, but somehow Kronenberg managed to reconceive the ballet as just one more “Jewels” segment dominated by the ballet-is-woman philosophy. And the results were glorious.

If Kronenberg proved the Miami discovery of the evening, “Emeralds” emerged as the choreographic revelation. Thirty-two years ago, this mercurial ensemble challenge may have seemed merely a prelude to the higher-profile jazziness of “Rubies” and the formal grandeur of “Diamonds,” but today its sustained invention and even daring--the sense of spontaneous expression achieved through fluid gesture, coupled with innovative partnering gambits--make it drop-dead ravishing. Paige Fullerton, Callye Robinson, Jared Redick, Deanna Seay and Douglas Gawriljuk all served its lyric refinement devotedly, but the freshest, most seductive dancing came from two Miami newcomers: Mary Carmen Catoya of Venezuela and Julien Ringdahl of Denmark.

In “Diamonds,” however, all the fine-grained expertise of Iliana Lopez, Franklin Gamero and a 32-member corps couldn’t quite banish the suspicion that the choreography is reflexive and almost generic Balanchine Tchaikovsky, less an inspired complement to the music than, say, “Theme and Variations” or “Allegro Brillante” and more a series of arbitrary choices--especially early on. Not unmusical, certainly, but often skating across the score rather than intimately fused with it or adding anything essential.

Moreover, the question lingers whether “Jewels” satisfies as a genuine full-evening ballet or merely represents a highly marketable all-Balanchine bill. Certainly the three sections don’t notably enrich one another and you could substitute virtually any one of Balanchine’s other Petipa tributes for the finale without doing any violence to the cumulative effect. It may have marked a juncture in the perception of New York City Ballet’s image--the dancers covered with precious gems in contrast to the company’s previous practice clothes and T-shirts look. However, in Berkeley all those sewn-on rocks looked over the top, and whatever the ballets’ achievements individually, the project as a whole seemed essentially a very clever and successful example of ‘60s event programming.

Conducting members of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, veteran ballet specialist Akira Endo provided carefully wrought accompaniments, with Francisco Renno capably dispatching the “Rubies” piano solos. Haydee Morales’ re-creations of the 1967 Karinska costumes capitalized on intense colors and rich textures, but did the original women’s bodices separate from their skirts so awkwardly? Unique to the Miami production, a fiber-optic backdrop by Tony Walton served Balanchine most when evoking distant galaxies than when depicting arches and chandeliers in points of light.

Unfortunately, there are no announced plans to bring Miami City Ballet to Southern California, where the company last appeared four years ago. Our loss: In just under 13 years, Villella has shaped a dynamic performing institution boasting polished skills and a distinctively immediate attack--one that transmits his understanding of Balanchine style to a new generation of dancers and audiences.

The fact that his success story took place in a predominately Latino community makes it particularly relevant to our own cultural scene--and particularly regrettable that nobody in that scene can be enlightened or inspired by it this season.

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* Miami City Ballet gives its final performance of “Jewels” tonight in Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way at Telegraph, on the campus of UC Berkeley. $20-$42. (510) 642-9988.