CINDERELLA STORY LYON OPERA BALLET'S FAIRY TALE RETURNS.

Byline: Vicki Smith Paluch Correspondent

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, French choreographer Maguy Marin astonished the dance world with the ``Cinderella'' she created for the Lyon Opera Ballet. Her interpretation turned dancers into 19th-century dolls set in a child's imaginative telling of the popular fairy tale.

The production became the ``calling card'' of the Lyon Opera Ballet when it toured Europe and the United States, recalled Yorgos Loukos, the company's artistic director since 1991.

``We stopped performing it for 10 years because it was becoming like a 'Holiday on Ice' show. It was the negative side of our passport to success,'' said Loukos, who joined the company in 1984 as ballet master.

During the interim, Lyon Opera Ballet, a ballet company based on the classical model and dedicated to contemporary works, gained international acclaim for presenting the works of cutting-edge, contemporary choreographers: Angelin Preljocaj, Nacho Duato, Jiri Kylian, William Forsythe, Susan Marshall and B.T. Jones.

The company was founded in 1969 by Lyon Opera director Louis Erlo, who invited Francoise Ardet to create a new ballet company committed to modern choreography.

After a decade in the prop box, Loukos decided it was safe to dust off ``Cendrillon'' for its 14-city North American tour, which concludes at UCLA's Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday with two performances. The company last performed in Los Angeles in 1997, when it presented ``An American Evening,'' featuring the works of such American choreographers as Trisha Brown, Marshall and Jones, who was the company's resident choreographer from 1994 to 1997.

``Cendrillon'' was the first modern ballet created for the Lyon Opera Ballet to use a classical music score, Loukos recalled, noting that American conductor Kent Nagano was the company's musical director at the time.

``Kent wanted to do a classical score, but very few composers for dance were doing that,'' Loukos said. So, the company decided to take a completely new approach to Prokofiev's ``Cinderella.''

Long before Matthew Bourne set ``Cinderella'' in London during the Blitz, Marin decided to hide the dancers in large bodies and masks, changing them into the porcelain dolls of the Victorian era.

``What Maguy found was that the dancers don't move the same way in large bodies and with limited vision, so the movement had to change,'' Loukos said. The masks, designed by Monteserrat Casanova, are emotive, but the dancers must always face the audience if the mask's expression is to be seen.

In crafting the piece, Marin looked deeply at how children play. Marin projects human feelings upon these dolls just as children do with their real dolls, Loukos explained.

Victoria Marks, an associate professor of dance at UCLA, said Marin's choreography has long been challenging because her dancers don't appear as dancers. ``Yet, through that separation of body and mind they become more real,'' Marks said.

The action of this 90-minute ballet takes place in a three-tiered dollhouse set. One of Marin's devices is to presage the story's chapters with an image. The initial view of the dollhouse is of one filled with 19th- century toys, including dancers dressed as dolls.

Cinderella scoots off to the ball in a toy car, the prince searches for her on a rocking horse as landscape scrolls past and a rag doll turns into a protective, robotlike fairy.

``Marin, an innovative artist of the first rank, thinks big,'' wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff in 1987 after the ballet's U.S. premiere. ``It is not the scale of the scenery but the scale of human emotions covered in her works that gives them the sense of grandeur.''

In ``Cendrillon,'' previously performed in Southern California in 1988, the choreography maintains the narrative of Cinderella, but after 20 minutes, the masked dancers cause the audience members to think about their own lost childhoods, Loukos explained.

``For children, it's completely natural,'' said Loukos. ``For adults, this second play - childhood - becomes more important to them.''

Marin also slices and splices and adds occasional baby gurgles to Prokofiev's score to further a vision of lost childhood and the search for happiness that cannot be regained.

CENDRILLON (Cinderella)

Performers: Lyon Opera Ballet.

Where: UCLA's Royce Hall, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood.

Where: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Tickets: $30 to $45. Call [phone] or go to www.ticketmaster.com or www.uclalive.com.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Dancers reinterpret the Cinderella story in ``Cendrillon,'' presented by the Lyon Opera Ballet this weekend at UCLA's Royce Hall.