Oregon Ballet Theatre.

The current generation of American ballet choreographers has a tough row to hoe, not only in large urban areas but also in regional vineyards like Portland.

Dennis Spaight, Oregon Ballet Theatre's resident choreographer until his death a year ago, and company artistic director James Canfield are no more exempt from comparisons with their artistic forebears than are Peter Martins and Helgi Tomasson. The specters of those who have gone before hover over them in the studio and on the stage, with none looming larger than George Balanchine. Which is a little like asking a parish priest to compete with the Pope.

Spaight, three of whose pieces opened OBT's fifth-anniversary season last October, was, in fact, influenced by Balanchine technique, having danced with San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet.

And like Balanchine, Spaight received his greatest choreographic impetus from music. There the resemblance ends, for Spaight, an Irish-American and former Roman Catholic who also danced with Bejart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century, carried different cultural baggage, and in his last years had a vision of ballet that was both technically eclectic and at times even literary, an aesthetic eschewed by Balanchine.

Take his Scheherazade, which closed the all-Spaight program presented by OBT last October. Spaight loved Rimsky-Korsakov's lush, expressionistic score but was repelled by the sexist brutality of the scenario. So he rewrote it, giving a strong role to the women and making Scheherazade herself a redemptive figure.

When the ballet premiered in 1990 the choreography was somewhat overwhelmed by Portland painter Henk Pander's luminous set and the late Ric Young's art nouveau costumes. This time, Tracy Taylor was a knockout as the desperate slave girl, and the corps overcame the problems inherent in some of the costumes t6 create exactly the drama Spaight intended.

If Scheherazade represented Spaight's nod to eros, Gloria, which premiered in 1983 when Spaight was twenty-eight, is his expression of agape--spiritual love--and a heartfelt visualization of Vivaldi's work of the same name.

The solos, duets, and trios reflect the simplicity of the score and the ensemble dances express its harmonic complexity, particularly the finale, in which the dancers perform in counterpoint to the music.

Equally complex, but much more lighthearted, is Rhapsody in Blue (1987), Spaight's tribute to American music, which was the middle piece in the show. Peter West's penthouse set, created with lights, and the mix of ballet, jazz, and tap movement, all executed with elegant wit, evoked 1930s musicals on film.

Pictures, moving and otherwise, are the chief source of choreographic inspiration for Canfield, whose retrospective was performed in March. What the five pieces on the program demonstrated is that the thirty-three-year-old choreographer is a master of the pas de deux and--his new, cohesive production of The Nutcracker notwithstanding--is at his best when brief.

The lengthy Degas Impressions (1992) raised the curtain, ending with a tableau emulating the painter's Foyer de la Danse. OBT's dancers proved themselves capable--in some cases more than capable--of performing the airy nineteenth-century romantic steps, but the series of solos, duets, and ensemble bits is much too long, and couturiere Mary McFadden's lilac-colored tights still obscure the articulation of the feet.

Anais, Canfield's 1991 ten-minute version of the film Henry and June, may be his best work, an exploration of character in movement that was passionately conveyed on opening night by Tracy Taylor as the narcissistic diarist Anais Nin, Michael Rios as writer Henry Miller, and Elizabeth Lewis as June Miller.

Drifted in a Deeper Land (1990), a seven-minute tribute to the company men, is lyrically athletic. It has at its center a poignant pas de deux danced eloquently by Rios and Thomas Lawton.

A reprise of Canfield's 1986 Equinoxe featured the choreographer and the retired Patricia Miller in a guest appearance. The piece, which is highly reminiscent of Gerald Arpino, still works well, with an undersea feeling as the dancers run and swim around to music by Jean Michel Jarre.

The Relief of Mass Hysteria is the MTV ballet to end them all, featuring bells, whistles, balloons, dancers leaping into the empty orchestra pit, graffiti, and choreography more reminiscent of the positions of the Kama Sutra than the five positions of the danse d'ecole. The audience always loves it: former Joffrey principal Canfield, who made this piece in 1989, thought of Billboards first!