Cruel Garden.

HOUSTON BALLET BROWN THEATER, WORTHAM THEATER CENTER, HOUSTON FEBRUARY 22-MARCH 3, 1996 REVIEWED BY MARGARET PUTNAM

Coming as it did on the heels of Coppelia and The Nutcracker, Houston Ballet's Cruel Garden played like Nine Inch Nails to an audience expecting Mozart. "Harrumph, harrumph." You could hear throats clearing all over the dark, elegantly understated interior of the Brown Theater.

With no toe shoes worth mentioning and no tidy plot line, Cruel Garden offers instead a homosexual hero moving through a tapestry of dreams to whispered poems and rasping songs. From its somber opening on a dark, empty, bloodstained bullring, to the equally ghostly ending, Cruel Garden works its way insidiously into your consciousness, a ninety-minute dream that can't be easily shaken off.

The subject is the life of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by fascists in 1936 for being "a red fag." The brutality of his life is evoked as brilliantly as the beauty of his poetry, in scenes that seem to drift, dissolve, and vanish as eerily as fog over a moor.

In the ballet's central, most electrifying scene, the Poet appears as a bullfighter, arrogant in his beauty, pitted against a ponderous Bull. The bullfighter flicks a white cape against the air; the Bull, chest strapped S&M fashion, arms thrust high like horns, charges. The Bull, outmaneuvered, craskes, brutally, into the wall.

Our pity is for the Bull, though we know, eventually, he'll gore the bullfighter. But the dying Poet is not easily destroyed. Soon after, he pops up again, this time in a tuxedo, his eyebrows plucked and arched, between two men in tails. They stroke his face. Then he fades away, reappearing as a Bride; and yet again, as Buster Keaton.

In all of these mystifying, liquid scenes, equally strange characters appear--the Moon, antic and quicksilver; an enormous, black-booted Inquisitor; a Lady with the Head of a Nightingale; Columbine and four Pierrots.

They materialize out of the darkness, drift across the stage, evaporate. Each set of characters comes into sharpest focus through dance. The mourners glide and sink, the minstrel Negro taps and prances, the marathon dancers lurch in exhaustion, and a trio of men in tails bounds through the air with lightning swiftness.

Conceived by actor-director Lindsay Kemp and choreographed by Christopher Bruce, Houston Ballet's resident choreographer, and with a wonderful score by Carlos Miranda, Cruel Garden was first produced in England in 1977 and in Houston in 1993. Houston Ballet is the only company in the U.S. to perform it and does so brilliantly, with exceptional performances from Karl Vakili as the Poet, Mark Arvin as the Bull, and Paul LeGros as the silvery, mocking Moon.