Miami City Ballet.

MIAMI CITY BALLET JACKIE GLEASON THEATER, MIAMI BEACH, FL FEBRUARY 11-13, 2005

Three company premieres gave Miami City Ballet's winter season the vigor of spring. Balanchine's Sonatine, the only restaging, still bore a flesh bloom in the indigo mood of its velvet phrases. Renato Penteado and Mary Carmen Catova (one of the troupe's more musical classicists) upheld the intricate decorum here, suddenly unleashing passions to a Ravel piano composition (played onstage by Francisco Renno).

Within this Balanchine domain, the company whirled with glamour and delirium in La Valse (also to Ravel). After the initial fashion-plate poses of the ballerinas in cascading, color-layered tutus (Haydee Morales' gorgeous rendering of the Karinska originals), three duets showed panache in beats, then leaps, and finally arabesques, when eerily ardent Katia Carranza surrendered to Kenta Shimizu's willing hands. As this party spun toward the spectral, principals Deanna Seay and Mikhail Nikitine splashed into its eddying dance. Death (Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez, with his usual centripetal force) exacted Seay's last breath in the vortex of a waltz.

Night's dark grip changed into the awakening caress of light in Afternoon of a Faun, MCB's first foray into Jerome Robbins repertoire. To Debussy's insinuations, Mikhail Ilyin lolled and stretched sensuously in a studio, glimmers of Nijinsky's faun in his feral vigor. Making every move delicate but definite, Haiyan Wu endowed her trying out of a balance or the trace of pointe work with iconic flashes, like a Degas documentation of ballet routine. In mirrored regard for each other--and in the marvel of their art--these youthful yet meticulous performers revealed an eternity behind acutely observed moments.

Fancy Free, Robbins' buddy-romp in wartime, striding to Leonard Bernstein's score, might today seem too naive if not for its disarming craft and zest. And though these three sailors on leave failed to get their gals (Carranza and Tricia Albertson), they bowled the audience over. Luis Serrano flaunted elevation and quick impulses in his high-wire act, and with some success Carlos Guerra pitched bravura. An easygoing guy with hard-driving technique, Jeremy Cox earned medals for his artful congeniality.

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