Oakland Ballet. - Paramount Theatre, Oakland, CA - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Janice Ross

Dance reconstructions can often be thought of as mere exhumations of choreography, while the individuals for whom that choreography was made are forgotten. Last fall, however, two of the most interesting dance events in the Bay Area centered on the latter concern: the restaging of historic works that originally functioned as vehicles for two of this century's legendary dance personalities - Ida Rubinstein and Jose Limon.

The centerpiece of Oakland Ballet's thirtieth-anniversary season was the reconstruction of Bronislava Nijinska's 1928 Bolero, a paean to the statuesque beauty Ida Rubinstein. Known for decades only from its music (it was for this ballet that Maurice Ravel created his famous fifteen-minute orchestral crescendo of the some title) or in Maurice Bejart's 1961 version featuring one woman and forty men, this original Bolero now has a "recovered" life as a memorable work of choreographic diplomacy created to showcase Rubinstein's dramatic gifts while disguising her technical limitation's.

The ballet begins as a dance improvisation on which we, as audience, eavesdrop, a seemingly spontaneous moment in which the coolly pliant Joy Gim, as The Spanish Dancer, begins an introspective solo atop a huge wooden table. Wearing a long ruffled rose dress and short black velvet jacket, she begins to slowly turn in a dance of erotic undulation. She does little but suggests a lot, her heeled feet tapping out muted rhythms. As audience, we become voyeurs, a second circle of watchers, as we view the dance over the shoulders of a ring of men who sit at the table's edge, elbows resting on it as they study the dancer as if in a private courtship with her.

Nina Youshkevitch, who danced a travesti role in an early revival of Bolero, has lovingly restaged Nijinska's choreography for Oakland. Careful attention is paid to the structural tension of the choreography, as various downstage ensembles of a toreador and two guitarists or of men with knives drawn offer a visual counterpoint to the powerful upper-body twistings of The Dancer. Eventually Joral Schmalle transgresses the feminine sanctity of her tabletop perch, landing atop it with a pantherine leap and arching his body into the concavities presented by hers.

Oakland's performance reveals this ballet as more than just a device for showcasing the sensuous Rubinstein as an eighteenth-century maja who holds a dozen men enthralled at once. it is a study of the eroticism of restraint and the aesthetic beauty of economy where there are no excess steps or emotions. In this way Bolero becomes a portrait of female strength. While the score roars toward its climax, Nijinska keeps small groups of the men performing short sorties across the stage and around the perimeter of the table. They lunge at one another, or stand in place at the table's edge, surveying The Dancer, who is both unobtainable and yet visually available to all.

Although late-twentieth-century audiences primed to see constructivist orderings and neoclassical antecedents in Nijinska's choreography would likely disagree with Edwin Denby's 1944 pronouncement of this ballet as "Radio City corn of incredible lugubriousness," it is not as boldly Spartan as the choreographer's Les Noces nor as wryly topical as Le Train Bleu or Les Biches, both Nijinska ballets that Oakland has restaged to well-deserved acclaim. Yet it is an important revival, aided considerably by Ron Steger's scenic realization of Alexandre Benois's original smoky, Goyaesque decor.

Opening the Bolero program was Wild Echoes Flying, an intelligent new ballet for ten dancers by San Francisco Ballet's ballet mistress, Betsy Erickson. Nestled within this six-part portrait of breathless dashes, carries, and dispersals, set to Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, is a tale of couples and their bittersweet unions.

Erickson's dance focus has always been the human condition, and here she works to parlay dance inventions - complicated ensembles where several men lift and flip a lone woman aloft, or headlong dashes by the women into men's arms that open out to them in just the nick of time - into romantic expressions. While there are moments in the dance where this kind of invention becomes too self-conscious, Erickson gives the Oakland dancers just what they need to counterbalance their historic repertoire, namely tasteful dancing that accentuates the individual in the contemporary dancer, just as Nijinska once did for Rubinstein.

The Limon West Dance Project, a tiny new troupe based at San Jose State University and headed by former Limon dancer Gary Masters, made an impressive debut with a program of four vintage Limon works. Limon the artist, Limon the dancer, and Limon the choreographic protege of Doris Humphrey was the steadiest focus of the evening as the company offered superbly coached performances of La Malinche, The Exiles, Chaconne, and a suite from Mazurkas. Under Masters's direction, these young dancers found profundity in the simplicity of the choreography. The dictum of the past seems to be: Do less, and trust the timelessness of emotional economy to say more.