DANCE REVIEW : Yeager, Bocca in ‘Sleeping Beauty’

Cheryl Yeager and Julio Bocca played fairy tale characters born in different centuries in the American Ballet Theatre “Sleeping Beauty,” Thursday in Shrine Auditorium. They also revealed as big a difference in their approaches to classical dancing.

Where Yeager (as Aurora) almost always moved by rote, Bocca (as Desire) danced from impulse. However Bocca also linked all his steps in flowing, effortless phrases that terminated with perfect elegance--his portrayal was both fastidious and full of feeling.

In contrast, Yeager obviously considered her role a test of technique--and thus prolonged her balances in the Rose Adagio beyond all suggestion of grace, ease or even optimum steadiness.

Happily, in their last-act pas de deux, she adopted his aesthetic, though in the switch she lost even the minimal vestiges of characterization she had achieved earlier.

Otherwise, the Thursday performance was distinguished by the wily, witty, feline and dangerous Carabosse of Clark Tippet--perhaps the best thing he has ever done--and Georgina Parkinson’s super-stylish performance as the Queen (her first for the company).

Anne Adair made an sparkling, dainty Florine, Wes Chapman a smoothly soaring Gold, Kathleen Moore an intelligent and sympathetic Countess. Emil de Cou’s conducting elicited neither majesty nor neatness from the orchestra.