American Ballet Theatre's Summer Intensive.

Parents, friends, and families at summer program showcases expect simple and easy pleasures. Most of these are related to seeing youthful dancers strut their stuff. But who expects a wondrous choreographic voice to rise up from such a summer show? Not I, said the flabbergasted onlooker, tickled by Kreisler Variations, an enchantingly sweet suite of a work by Ricardo Bustamante presented at the final performance of American Ballet Theatre's Summer Intensive (Pace Downtown Theater, August 1, 1997).

The Oxford Companion to Music refers to the kinds of pieces composed by Viennese violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler as "attractive bits of melody either original or picked up here and there in the classical repertory and recast." I can think of no better way to describe the choreographic numbers in Bustamante's ballet, originally made for the San Francisco Ballet School in 1995. Dressed in simple outfits with an Eastern European air, Bustamante's sixteen women and four men whirl, prance, kick, and leap through his fanciful geometric choreography with delectable flair. At the center of the sweetly perfumed dances for various complements of the cast comes a pas de deux which Dana Genshah and Brian Maloney made tingle with the eagerness of their scrupulous schooling. Even without its concluding minuet (eliminated because of time constraints!, Kreisler Variations reveals a personal choreographic voice--and a remarkably impressive one at that.