Lawrence Pech Dance Company.

THEATER ARTAUD, SAN FRANCISCO APRIL 25-28, 1996 REVIEWED BY JANICE ROSS

In its inaugural season the Lawrence Pech Dance Company offered some of the most seasoned ballet dancers in the Bay Area performing in a curiously personal program of six ballets, all choreographed by Pech. The troupe includes San Francisco Ballet alumni Alaina Albertson, Antonio Castilla, Pascale Leroy, Galina Alexandrova, and Wendy Van Dyck; Oakland Ballet's Joral Schmalle; and Diablo Ballet's Gina Domenichelli and Jordi Ribera. But Pech is handily the most charismatic dancer in is company. Formerly a principal with SFB and cofounder and artistic director of Diablo Ballet, he knows how to shape whatever he dances so that it has a sense of dramatic logic, character, and warmth.

Perhaps because he brings these qualities so readily to his own dancing, Pech tends to omit them in his choreography. A piece like 6 4 3 X 4-A, an ensemble work for three couples to a Faure harp, cello, and flute score played live, was danced by three oddly estranged couples. Pech was animated, smiling, and graciously attentive to the others. But only in the margins of the ballet, in a shadowy trio for himself and the two other men, did he hint at palpable emotional engagement, via furtive touches and gentle looks.

Pech's ballets often seem to have too many stories to tell and yet the steadily most consistent one, that of himself as a man outside the crowd, is also the most consistently clandestine. A work like Euphonia, set to one movement each from a J.S. Bach concerto and sonata, is fluent but inconclusive in that the dance doesn't build or evolve from section to section, beginning to end, or image to idea. Many ideas are displayed, some of them very beautifully like the brief duet for Pech and Schmalle toward the end of Euphonia, where Pech begins by gazing out over the audience contemplatively, while several feet upstage Schmalle noiselessly echoes Pech's actions, arching his body back and then slicing his arm through the air and closing it in an upraised fist. Yet this intimate moment between the two men bears no connection to the busily leaping group of women who precede and follow his section.

Scapes, the evening's one premiere, is typically ambitious. A four-section portrait of "Land," "Sea," "City," and "Space," it opens on a sculptural grouping of dancers shifting slowly in silence. To a taped score of music and sounds from nature, the dancers slip from one posed configuration to another as if enacting a series of snapshots, moments that are attractive individually, but whose emotional and physical impulses always seem secondary to concerns about appearances. Repeatedly, here and in the evening's other works, the company remains a group of soloists while Pech looms as a splendid performer, a man bubbling with energy and ideas but without the immediate tools for shaping them into rich dance investigations.