LINES Ballet Takes Fest Further

The annual BalletFest returned to the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A. over the weekend offering another sampling of California-based achievement, but with greater quality control than in previous years.

The two-night 2002 edition broke with the event’s dubious tradition by insisting on a high level of professionalism from all the participating companies. But only Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet took classical dancing beyond obvious and often trivial entertainment values into the realm of art.

Indeed, for movement invention and emotional power, the silent first minute or two of King’s “The Heart’s Natural Inclination” on Saturday left the entire two-company Friday program in the dust.

Inching across the stage in this opening sequence, his arms tightly clamped around his head, Artur Sultanov unclenched only when warmed by the tenderness of Maurya Kerr. As he threw his arms around her, an eerie, rough-textured score by Leslie Stuck launched an intricate and daring duet--classical steps resituated amid deliberately off-center balances, asymmetrical lifts and an engulfing use of gymnastics.

As Sultanov moved across the stage, Kerr rapidly climbed all over him until their bonding reached a flashpoint, and they imploded into a rolling sphere of tangled limbs and torsos, all individuality lost in their obsessive hunger for one another.

The work also included a virtuosic character solo for Gregory Dawson and a finale in which Lauren Porter manipulated the assembled cast rather like a nurse in a ward, with King giving each episode an air of mystery.

After 20 years of running LINES in San Francisco, he’s experimenting with structure and what seems like an intuitive musicality, letting the spectacular technical innovations that he achieved early in the company’s history support complex, unpredictable and often enigmatic expressive statements.

In “Koto,” for instance, Sultanov again served as the resident dreamboat-psychopath, brutally beating Brett Conway with a wooden pole but feeling his own strength bleed away with every assault. It was Conway who not only survived but also danced ecstatically in the gathering darkness as the piece ended.

With Miya Masaoka playing and chanting her atmospheric score on a platform behind the dancers, “Koto” again wedded mystery and even mysticism to powerful classical technique.

Along the way, King introduced intriguing, even teasing structural gambits (a trio that kept forming and dissolving), along with incredibly intense solo dancing (Prince Credell and Xavier Ferla, in particular).

Set to music by Hamza El Din, “Tarab” emphasized flow, with plenty of percussive points of contrast, and often so many things going on at once that you had to choose, Merce Cunningham-style, between simultaneous actions of equal interest.

Two excerpts from “Klang” (music by Miguel Frasconi) featured brilliant mini-corps choreography that framed phenomenal solos by Ferla and Laurel Keen: the groups defining a state-of-the-art norm, the soloists something like the bravura of the future.

The Friday program found Orange County’s Ballet Pacifica on its best behavior in the late Choo-San Goh’s rather rigidly formulaic neoclassic showpiece “Double Contrasts,” with half the company mirroring the other half to music by Poulenc. Paul Michael Bloodgood and Eloisa Enerio capably led the cadre dressed in black, while Adam Hundt and Erin Holmes proved equally skillful as their white-costumed counterparts.

Ann Marie DeAngelo’s “Blackberry Winter” used the Conni Ellisor dulcimer concerto to accompany a number of scattered, intermittently diverting effects--including an unresolved quasi-narrative about the crushing of a free spirit (Holmes again, this time in red with blond hair flying free). The audience-courting finale, however, had only its clean execution to recommend it.

Oakland Ballet showed proficiency galore Friday, but nothing to dance other than the slick fripperies of Val Caniparoli’s endless pop divertissement “Djangology” (music by Django Reinhardt) and Reginald Ray-Savage’s passable but undistinguished jazz-ballet “Faux Pas” (to music arranged and/or composed by Marcus Shelby). Erin Yarbrough and Gabriel Williams looked especially stylish in both pieces, while Ethan White and Phaedra Jarrett slumped deliciously in “Djangology.”