Kiev Ballet ‘Nutcracker’ puts feet first

STUNG by an audience backlash against the provocative, idiosyncratic Matthew Bourne “Nutcracker!” a year ago, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has been promoting its 2005 holiday offering -- the Kiev Ballet version of the Christmas classic -- as “beautifully traditional.”

But what exactly does “traditional” mean when the opening performance on Tuesday introduced to American audiences a “Nutcracker” with no Sugar Plum Fairy, no Mother Ginger, no children and nothing that plausibly resembles a carved wooden nutcracker?

The T-word here obviously serves as code -- for Tchaikovsky, tutus, tiaras, toe shoes and tights.

It also seems to stand for triviality. The meaning of Christmas -- and the dark forces in human nature that make its eventual triumph such a miracle -- may be central to Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” and dramatizations of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” our culture’s two other traditional yuletide entertainments. But the Ukrainians, like too many other people, apparently believe that a T-”Nutcracker” must stay unfailingly escapist and empty-headed. Or else.

Choreographed by Valery Kovtun, this edition is all steps, with no brains and no heart. From her first moment on stage, little Clara must dance relentlessly hard and fast -- she has no time to be a child, she’s the ballerina.

No chicken Kiev, the obviously grown-up Anastassia Matvienko brings gorgeous line and polished technique to the assignment, but she can’t motivate meaningless movement or give the ballet as a whole a center of feeling. Yes, this Clara rapturously holds a nutcracker rag doll up to the light in the staging’s final moment, but it’s a doll she’s never previously seen -- so the act is just another T-reflex, with no connection to any experience she’s encountered in the previous two hours.

Like Matvienko, nearly all the Kiev Ballet principals, soloists and corps members prove exemplary in technical refinement, and their elegant proficiency gives the inexpressive choreography its only reason for existing.

Gooey falsity reigns in the Act 1 party scene, with adult women playing children (boys and girls). But the suave Maxym Motkov offers plenty of flair and even a sense of humor as Drosselmeyer. Moreover, Kateryna Kuhar and, especially, Vadym Burtan are so spirited and buoyant as the leading doll dancers, it’s a pleasure to find them returning after intermission in the bouncy Chinese divertissement.

IN the mouse battle, rodent monarch Sergiy Lytvynenko swaggers energetically, but the staging remains expressively clueless. This scene is (or should be) the heart of darkness in “The Nutcracker,” the crisis in which goodness must arm itself or Clara’s dream and the Christmas spirit are doomed.

Listen to the music. Tchaikovsky took the episode seriously, and so did Matthew Bourne and Mark Morris (“The Hard Nut”) in their iconoclastic alternative versions. But Kovtun simply gives us an empty drill-team exercise, with Clara attacking the mouse king from behind (conduct unbecoming a “Nutcracker” warrior).

In Act 2, six duets and two major ensembles (one to the Mother Ginger music) focus attention on facets of Ukrainian excellence. The unabashed gusto of the deft Mariia Tkalenko and the irrepressible Ruslan Bentsianov in the Russian Dance represents one extreme. Matvienko’s serene partnership with her long-limbed husband, Denis Matvienko, in the grand pas de deux showcases another. And the stylish dancing by two dozen couples in aqua and lavender brings a pleasing symmetry to “The Waltz of the Flowers,” though Kovtun never harnesses the passion in the score, here or anywhere.

DOMINATED by what looks like a giant mantelpiece clock, Maria Levitskaya’s unit set enforces a palatial formality, relieved somewhat by a gossamer curtain that peels back as if someone were unwrapping a Christmas present. Rampant overdecoration (jewels everywhere) often spoils the line of her costumes, however, and it’s curious that the dancers in Act 1 all sport powdered wigs while Act 2 seems set in a different century, a la “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Does Clara doze for a hundred years?)

If anyone besides the dancers upholds the Christmas spirit at the Performing Arts Center this year, it’s company conductor Olexiy Baklan, who coaxes a performance of great verve and luminous detail from the Pacific Symphony, with the missing children’s vocalise in Act 1 the only fall from grace. Some “Nutcracker” traditions are worth upholding without question or modification -- and playing of this quality is one of them.

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Kiev Ballet

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 p.m. today and Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25 to $85

Info: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org