OAKLAND BALLET.

OAKLAND BALLET PARAMOUNT THEATRE, OAKLAND; ZELLERBACH HALL, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 17-NOVEMBER 14, 1998

If it's true that running any ballet company is a labor of love, Oakland Ballet appears to pump in more devotion per hour than any other ballet company around. The troupe, in fact, comports itself with the democratic spirit of a modern dance company, and it's this ensemble mood that gets it through the bad times and provides the solidarity it needs to hang on until the good times roll again.

But these are neither the best nor the worst of times for Oakland Ballet. The fall '98 run (completed by The Nutcracker in December) brought strong advances over last season as the company began moving as a unified body again, and a feeling of zest intermittently spilled across the stage apron. But it was the rise of Joral Schmalle to the role of associate artistic director and the sense of diligent authority in a core of dancers--Michael Lowe, Mario Alonzo, Lara Deans Lowe, and Abra Rudisill--that infused Oakland Ballet with a new mood of purpose.

Michael Lowe's The Emperor and the Nightingale in Program One spotlighted a promising young company choreographer whose sense of story and character has some of outgoing artistic director Ronn Guidi's own polished simplicity. This year's rendition of Guidi's three-act Romeo and Juliet in Program Two was a mature and taut production with brilliantly refurbished costumes. It was Program Three, though, with new works by Alonzo King and Betsy Erickson, plus a reprise of Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid, that revealed Oakland Ballet at its most complex and interesting.

When local audiences go to see King's stable of thoroughbred dancers in his own company, LINES Contemporary Ballet, with their gorgeously attenuated limbs and hands hanging rapturously from the wrist, they are going as much to gape at the sublime bodies as to meet King's splintered choreography.

In Oakland Ballet, King was confronted with a company of small, compact classical dancers who move best as an ensemble and who are used to a certain lyric structure, whether it's in Diaghilev-era work or in Antony Tudor. King met them where their respective strengths overlapped in his premiere, Hovering Slightly Above Ground, using stage patterns and groupings that seemed inspired by Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine but stripped of all social context, at a speed that owed something to the maniacal pace of William Forsythe's ballets. Something new was created on both sides. King pushed the East Bay dancers to new limits and they disciplined his own extensive talents, which too often devolve into a superficial fusillade of high-speed, off-kilter poses.

In Hovering, Rudisill moved her small body with an exquisite geometry that seemed to embody a mix of brooding freedom and solitude, and she and Ben Barnhart danced like despairing lovers glued together at the edge of the universe. The quartet of male dancers, echoing the quartet in Agon, leaped and darted in unison and in syncopation like a flock of birds. Only the company's corps was at sea with the rigorous combination of speed and extension that King demands. Although he still vacillated between passages of extreme consciousness and others of noodling vagueness, he nevertheless created some of his most exquisite dance moments--imagery and mood that combined the beauty of Matisse's painting The Bathers with the dour subjectivity of a Francis Bacon portrait.

Loring's Billy the Kid, by contrast, highlighted all the weaknesses of the company. The timing was awful. Most of the dancers rushed to the front of Copland's lush beats like kids smashing raindrops before they hit the ground. And the values of space, which is at heart what this dance is about, collapsed, and all its potent volumes shrank. If one didn't know the ballet, it would be hard to tell who was doing what to whom. That made Erickson's lovely, undulant Beneath the Wake, with its ebb and flow, a great relief. It's the kind of piece the dancers do best, but it also doesn't push them into new territory, where, like all companies, they frequently need to go.