Oakland Ballet Company, Valley Center for Performing Arts, Oakland, California, September 26-28, 1997.

There was grumbling bewilderment among some of the steadfast patrons as they entered the Valley Center for Performing Arts in the Oakland foothills. Traditionally, Oakland Ballet has launched each season in the art deco palace of the Paramount Theatre downtown, with all the requisite razzle-dazzle and fancy dress of a gala night. But in the last few years opening-night crowds have grown sparser and the festive air has felt forced. None of it was helped by the fact that at night, at that end of town, the city is virtually deserted.

But what director Ronn Guidi accomplished by the temporary shift in site was a mood change, and because it felt in sync with the current caliber of the company and its strong but modest place in the arts scene in the Bay Area, it was a stroke of good sense and proportion that gave the night a kind of honest grace. As a result, both the company's strengths and flaws glowed with virtue.

Company member Michael Lowe's ingenuous and entertaining Dim Sum was first on the evening's bill. Here, Lowe paid sweet homage to traditional Chinese acrobatic circuses and set his ballet to haunting and rollicking traditional music of the sort he heard as a child in Oakland's Chinatown.

As in Petrouchka, when the sidewalk swells with entertainment, Lowe parades out a potentially endless stream of acts (like dim sum carts), and relies on goofy-sweet mime to convey magic and danger. This is a kids' ballet par excellence, and what was so satisfying was that the lyricism, the light humor, and the dancers' attack caught the essence of Oakland Ballet: young, athletically playful, and irrepressibly optimistic.

The night suddenly lost that air of aptness when Jenita Vargas and David Bertlin danced the "Hand of Fate" pas de deux from George Balanchine's Cotillon, last performed by the company in 1988. Oakland Ballet is a wonderful repository of neoclassical jewels that need to be seen the way Ibsen and Chekhov need to 6e viewed again and again, and the dancers have to understand the ballets just as much as actresses need to comprehend Ibsen's Nora. Vargas and Bertlin seemed both too young and too lost to grasp that this highly stylized, ghostly dance, with its formal black attire, was meant to be a poem about love not unlike Bronislava Nijinska's Chopin Concerto, which followed.

Lara Deans Lowe and Joral Schmalle did understand the romantic essences of the "Romanze" section of the 1937 Chopin Concerto, which was beautifully set by eighty-four-year-old Nina Youshkevitch, protegee of the great choreographer. The reed-thin Lowe and robust Schmalle transformed themselves and she became a languorous, gravity-laden dryad, he an otherworldly lover, reminiscent of but less frenetic than the spirit in Spectre de la Rose.

Even the corps, despite its bad bourrees and sunken pointe work, captured the deeply refined simplicity of the dance and made it materialize onstage like a perfect fragment of ancient Greek poetry. I hope Oakland Ballet will find funds in the near future to stage Chopin Concerto in its entirety. it was the highlight of an evening that also included the "Can-Can" section from Massine's La Boutique Fantasque and Val Caniparoli's Bow Out.