LOVERS AND OUTCASTS.

LOVERS AND OUTCASTS EIFMAN BALLET CITY CENTER NEW YORK, NEW YORK MAY 11-20, 2001

When the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg returned to City Center for eight performances this spring, business was so bad at Lincoln Center that American Ballet Theatre was offering half-price tickets for some performances at the Metropolitan Opera House on its Web site, and New York City Ballet was offering discount coupons on its performance at the New York State Theater. Boris Eifman's troupe, however, offered no bargains and ran no ads, yet it sold out City Center within days. Granted, it was in town for a much shorter visit than either ABT or NYCB, and performed only two works, one a world premiere. By any standard, however, this marketing feat at least attests to the remarkable loyalty and cohesion of the city's Russian emigre community, if not its taste.

The Eifman style, for want of a better word, is invariably described as "theatrical." In the season's novelty, Don Juan & Moliere, the action alternated between the great playwright (double cast with Igor Markov and Albert Galichanin) and his creation, the great seducer (Alexei Turko, Yuri Ananyan). Moliere was simultaneously conducting a love affair with his mistress, Madeleine (Nina Zmievets, Alina Solonskaya), and her daughter, Armande (Vera Arbuzova, Natalia Povorozniuk). The Don's amorous complications, although more extensive, echo the playwright's by having the Don's two main squeezes, Elvira and Donna Anna, danced, respectively, by the women who perform Madeleine and Armande. So far, so clever.

Eifman's gifted collaborator, designer Slava Okunev, created handsome costumes and a two-level setting that evoked everything from cathedrals and palaces to cloisters. Instead of a musically coherent score, however, Eifman served up a taped smorgasbord of Mozart and Berlioz chunks, and instead of anything worthy of his dedicated, go-for-broke dancers, he put them--and us--through choreography so insistently, sensationally strenuous it suggested Bejart crossed with an aerobics class conducted by the Marquis de Sade. Fittingly, Eifman's most inventive vignette, a banquet scene for a bevy of the Don's voracious beauties, was played for laughs.

The season's other offering, the similarly overheated Russian Hamlet, had been presented last season, but it also qualified as a novelty in the two weekend performances when ABT superstar Julio Bocca appeared as the tormented son of Catherine the Great. Eifman reportedly talked him into the project when they were serving on the jury of last summer's New York International Ballet Competition. He must have been really exhausted by that grinding, duty if he agreed to appear with a company in which even the shortest woman would look at least four inches taller than he. Dancing superbly and fully committed, Bocca was all too convincing as a tormented outcast everyone looked down on.