Oakland Ballet, Paramount Theatre, Zellerbach Hall, Sep. 27-Nov 17, 1997.

High tide lies all ships; beautiful dances, not having quite the same power as the sea, only elevate dance companies sometimes. If it were otherwise, and masterful dances were all a dance troupe needed to succeed artistically then Oakland Ballet, with its Diaghilevera repertory and cache of Tudor works, would be among the top companies in the country. But life with Oakland Ballet is more complicated than that, as the 1996 season proved once again.

The fall run began as it usually does in the wonderful cavern of downtown Oakland's Paramount Theatre. But that September night the glittering art deco decor of the landmark cinema seemed almost to mock the sparse audience: everywhere one turned there were allusions to a long-ago era when down-towns flourished and everyone dreamed together in public at the movies.

The company's grim diligence didn't help matters. Whether it was sparked by poor attendance opening night or by artistic uncertainty, the dancers danced with brow-furrowed determination, transforming Nijinska's mesmerizing Bolero and her satirical Le Train Bleu ("The Blue Train"), as well as Tudor's devastating beauty, Jardin aux Lilas ("Lilac Garden"), into dour workhorses. And when you turn the fun of Le Train leaden, the ballet makes about as much sense as a Noel Coward song sung as a dirge. While it was nourishing to have the Oakland East Bay Symphony back in the pit, even live music couldn't undo the gloom.

Last season, in its premiere of Bolero (reconstructed for the company by Nina Youshkevitch from Nijinska's notebooks and her own memory of the dance), the company's performance wasn't perfect. But it did transmit Nijinska's genius for spatial and musical architecture, the dance coiling like a snake as Joy Gim, in the role of the Dancer, stomped and turned relentlessly.

This season, Gim's spirit seemed bruised and her mind preoccupied, giving her Gypsy an almost brokenhearted air. This itself was heartbreaking, because Gim has been one of the company's loveliest and most versatile dancers for years. Meanwhile, the corps de ballet, which crisscrosses, encircles, and divides the stage in musical and physical counterpoint to the Dancer, who is elevated center stage, appeared shy and uncertain.

Insecurity, in fact, was the watchword. Jardin aux Lilas is as beautifully taut and haunting as a Bach fugue, and it requires effortless technique like that of Sallie Wilson, Tudor's muse, to pull it off. Wilson, in fact, set the dance on the company in 1988 and did an admirable job, but the dancers, with the exception of a regal Gim, seemed constantly at war with it, battling the snares of epaulement, cambre, and flawless placement Tudor requires.

The company fared better in Program II in October with its new Tudor acquisition, Dark Elegies, set to Mahler's song cycle Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children"), performed live by pianist Ayaka Isono and baritone Douglas Nagel. The flat, stylized folk style Tudor employs for a cast of villagers somewhere in the east of Europe mourning for their dead seemed to hang on the company more easily than the Cecchetti-style rigors of Jardin. And while the phrasing was still rough and in places flat-footed, one could imagine Dark Elegies soon glinting with spartan clarity.

In this same program, Val Caniparoli's saucily ironic premiere, Bow Out, set to a honking, serialized score for saxophones and percussion by David Bedford and Roy Powell, showed the company at its freest and sexiest best. New coartistic director Ron Thiele reprised his 1987 Diversions, a too-academic but lyrically intelligent set of divertissements to Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra that reveal Thiele's talent as much as his need to aggressively shatter his own artistic constraints.

The final event of the OB season was the premiere by founding artistic director Ronn Guidi of The Secret Garden, a charming but long-winded and sometimes confusing story ballet of the children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Guidi was academically trained in theater, and more than a few echoes of the dramaturge exist in his ballets. They most obviously appear in his often concise, lushly dramatic treatment of the mise-en-scene. With scrims rising, sets rolling away, and bodies running by, Guidi achieves here a sweep of action that can set the heart racing. He also loves character, but where he falters is in abbreviating action and making metaphor (in this case, the garden) vital. Few can, but those who, like Tudor, reduce a story to a set of poetic moments linked by an ineluctable, deeply musical forward propulsion, establish the standard.

Guidi's choreography in The Secret Garden is terribly uneven and story is compressed through parallels that come to read like devices. Still, Joral Schmalle's solo recalling his character's dead wife is one of Guidi's finest, and the director's love of character never falters. Fittingly, the character dancers never let him down. Abra Rudisill as tragic, evil-tempered Mary, Michael Lowe as Ben Weatherstaff Schmalle as Archibald Craven, and Ben Barnhart as Dickon do what Oakland Ballet does best: bring humanity--eccentric, persnickety, irresistible humanit--to the stage.