DANCE REVIEW : Joffrey Marks 35th Year : Focus Is on the Future, Not Past

In the dance world, an anniversary gala is usually a pretext for audiovisual mementos of a company’s past, relentless self-congratulatory speechmaking and delirious lineups of decrepit alumnae.

Happily, the Joffrey Ballet refused to play the game Tuesday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. No bleary film clips. No weary blather. No famous faces waving from the forestage. Celebrating 35 years of achievement, the company launched its 1991 Los Angeles season with a program of four local premieres: a revival of Robert Joffrey’s “Postcards” (1980) plus three works commissioned for the event.

Sponsored by Absolut Vodka, this “celebration of new American choreography” shouldn’t be taken for granted at a time when nearly all U.S. ballet companies face financial disaster--and are responding with unparalleled conservatism. How much new American choreography has American Ballet Theatre commissioned lately? How many other companies present contemporary work as their main event rather than a sideshow? Who else believes in the creative future of ballet?

Looking very small on the Pavilion stage, Joffrey ballerina Tina LeBlanc exists as both the inheritor of a classical tradition and an instrument for choreographic experiment. In Robert Joffrey’s “Postcards,” she and the other principals wear cream-colored costumes by John David Ridge that evoke styles of clothing from the early 1900s without any trace of fussiness or weight.

In the same way, the choreography achieves a luminous, floating dream-lyricism: relationships defined with cinematic fluidity in a ballroom (designed by Herbert Migdoll) decorated in kaleidoscopic refractions of architectural drawings. Against this backdrop, LeBlanc dances with Tom Mossbrucker and then alone, moving to the pulse of cafe songs by Erik Satie, but not so much embodying the words we hear sung by Paula Rasmussen as responding intimately to them, letting the music carry her into another world.

This is a ravishing performance--technically polished, interpretatively unique--and it leaves us wanting the same personal statement from Carl Corry in the enigmatic, quasi-ringmaster role. Corry dances the virtuoso step combinations carefully and gives us nothing more. And, alas, Daniel Baudendistel’s evident strain in the duet with Deborah Dawn keeps that sequence, too, from achieving its ideal impact.

However, “Postcards” remains so potent a demonstration of Joffrey’s sensitivity as an artist that it glows with warmth and originality even when LeBlanc is offstage.

LeBlanc also dances the ballerina role in “Runaway Train,” but this forceful Christopher d’Amboise setting of Bela Bartok’s “Dance Suite” requires an entirely different technical range: stiff, semaphoric arms and the sharpest possible legwork executed with a glacial efficiency. Tyler Walters partners her through relentless technical challenges while their actions are reflected and counterpointed by an eight-member minicorps.

It’s fun to see LeBlanc go moderne with a vengeance. It’s impressive to watch the supported turn in which she smoothly revolves in one direction while Walters circles her in another. But all d’Amboise’s rigid doll-motion and hand-pulsing ultimately seem an arbitrary imposition on both dancers and score: less a runaway train than a power trip.

If “Postcards” and “Runaway Train” display LeBlanc’s versatility, “Panoramagram” and “Empyrean Dances” function in a similar way for Jodie Gates. Cast in secondary roles in these new works, Gates proves equally assured in the whimsical post modernism of the former and the propulsive classicism of the latter.

Set to a taped score by Bill Obrecht, “Panoramagram” offers a variation on Charles Moulton’s usual shtick-in-trade: precision ball-passing by a group arranged on three risers. In the past, Moulton’s audiences enjoyed watching the intricate teamwork involved--but this time, ball-passing becomes subordinated to unison gestural display and other comic hand-jive.

In addition, a solo, duet and trio now take place in front of the 18 ball-passers, with Frank Moore’s tiered, loose-paneled green costumes for Gates and Beatriz Rodriguez suggesting fish and his ruffled pants for Valerie Madonia evoking other undersea species. However, the three male soloists wear simple white shorts and black tops, Madonia dances atop a high platform in a go-goish display of the ballet vocabulary, and the mixture of movement idioms leads nowhere but Moulton’s usual destination: off-the-wall.

Moulton knows enough sequencing tricks to keep an audience constantly bedazzled, but Gates, Rodriguez and Madonia can handle far more than the wimped-out wiggle-fest assigned them here. As postmodern spectacle, “Panoramagram” unleashes three-to-four dozen balls onstage. As dance, it has absolutely none.

Choreographed by Joffrey dancer Edward Stierle, who died of complications from AIDS shortly after its premiere, “Empyrean Dances” finds the company dancing near and frequently on architectural fragments from a gutted building depicted on the backdrop. Campbell Baird’s setting also includes bright-red catwalks and ladders leading to the ruined facade: a suggestion of renewal that also finds its way into the relationships traced in the choreography.

At 22, Stierle proved masterful at complex corps deployments, and his attempt to make the scenic units integral to the dancing also yielded genuine movement invention. “Empyrean Dances” boasts challenging lead roles for Dawn and Baudendistel (both impeccably accomplished here) and a buoyant, playful interlude for Mossbrucker and seven other men: a souvenir of the kind of dancing Stierle himself performed so brilliantly.

Less successful, perhaps: the sheer quantity of steps per phrase and the literal relationship of those phrases to the Piano Concerto in G by Howard Hanson. The ballet also suffers from the bravura-overkill and all-pupose-ecstasy characteristic of many recent ballets by Joffrey artistic director Gerald Arpino.

Pianist Stanley Babin plays with fervor and Allen Lewis conducts as skillfully here as in “Runaway Train” and “Postcards.” But “Empyrean Dances” remains very obviously an uneven, early work by a young artist of enormous promise--evidence of expanding potential for someone with, tragically, no future whatsoever.