Ballet Biarritz.

Joyce Theater New York, New York November 5-10, 2002 Reviewed by Lynn Garafola

In America, where the past evaporates before anyone seems to notice, reconstruction in dance is an obsession. Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Jean Borlin, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Leonide Massine, early Balanchine-the list of choreographers whose work has been staged of late goes on and on. In continental Europe, by contrast, where the past is everywhere and every small city has an opera house, forgotten works are resurrected with hardly a nod to the text of the original.

Founded in 1998 with Thierry Malandain as artistic director, Ballet Biarritz is the newest of France's nineteen official "national choreographic centers." The company of fourteen dancers grew out of Malandain's own Compagnie Temps Present (Present Time Company), and its modern-dance orientation, both in choreography and idiom, is evident-despite its official title.

So, too, is its sense of French ballet tradition. The company's "Homage to the Ballets Russes" brought entirely new versions of four Diaghilev-era works--Pulcinella, L'Apres-midi d'un faune, Le Spectre de la rose, and Bolero--to the U.S. Originally produced for the international festival "Madrid in Dance," the program had little to recommend it except the music.

The best of the four was Pulcinella, a Neapolitan commedia romp set to a sparkling score by Igor Stravinsky. Malandain has reconceived the ballet for a lovable bad boy in jeans (Cyril Lot), his spirited sweetheart (Nathalie Verspecht), two love-struck girls in gray (Magali Praud and Amaya Iglesias), and a well-dressed sophisticate in drag (Giuseppe Chiavaro). The plot loosely follows Stravinsky's plan for the ballet, in which dancing alternates with comic episodes. WITH ITS PHYSICAL INTERPLAY, GESTURAL ACTING, AND SLAPSTICK, MALANDAIN'S VERSION NICELY CONVEYS THE FAIRGROUND SPIRIT OF THE ORIGINAL; A REFLECTION, IN PART, OF THE SOUTHERN EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF MOST OF THE COMPANY'S PERSONABLE AND WELL-REHEARSED DANCERS.

Malandain's choreography is typical of French modern dance when it finds a home in the opera house. The movement is idiosyncratic, without the logic and inner rhythm that come from a physically generated technique. In fact, the baseline is what might be called "ballet lite"--ballet without the fine points, but sufficient to give the dancing precision and expansiveness.

Malandain turns a deaf ear to the music, and he happily sacrifices mystery to aerobics. In Faune, for instance, he emphasizes gymnastics at the expense of the dreaminess of Claude Debussy's score, while in Spectre he eliminates the erotic perfume by making the hero a sexual bully. He places much weight on contemporary visual design. His Faun dives at the end into the slit of a giant tissue box, while his Spectre leaps offstage in a cloud of balloons. However clever, neither idea adds to the poetry.

More problematic is the use of design in Bolero, where huge translucent screens, attractive in themselves, enclose the dance space. Inside, partly blocked, the dancers go through their aerobic paces at much the same pitch throughout. As the Maurice Ravel music picked up momentum, I thought of Maurice Bejart's brilliant version, in which a woman (or sometimes a man) danced alone on a huge table surrounded by a lusting ensemble of men. Even more than Bronislava Nijinska, the ballet's first choreographer, Bejart caught the score's powerful sexual undertow. Sometimes, a remake can be more defining than the original.