REVIVING THE OLD, PONDERING THE NEW.

SMUIN BALLETS/SF
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
MAY 3-21, 2000

Michael Smuin's spunky chamber troupe is still six years young, and yet the best works offered among this spring season's three chock-full programs were, relatively speaking, old indeed: Medea and Shinju, neither seen in Smuin's hometown since his acrimonious departure as co-director of San Francisco Ballet in 1985.

Both revivals were triumphs of casting, and testaments to the dancers' growing technical and dramatic amplitude. Medea, choreographed in 1977 and meticulously restaged here by Evelyn Cisneros, is timeless, a brutally clear piece of pure dance storytelling that makes perfect use of Samuel Barber's chillingly economical score. It takes artistically mature dancers to give full import to Medea's steady crescendo of horrific revelations. With confident Celia Fushille-Burke in the title role, the work was positively bloodcurdling.

Shinju (1975) was also in safe hands with the wonderfully icy Dalyn Chew and Joral Schmalle (guesting from Oakland Ballet) portraying doomed Japanese lovers. Shinju is at most points a stunningly restrained, tension-filled tragedy, but time has not erased its weak patches. Smuin's melding of Kabuki, ballet and martial art, often seamless, occasionally--especially in the early scenes--melts down into an out-of-context series of jetes or textbook arabesques. But for whatever delicate dramatic balance it occasionally upsets, Shinju is a richly imaged work, and meaningful touches, such as the ominous butterfly keepers that appear throughout the ballet to reflect the delicacy of the lovers' bond, invite fascinating interpretations.

Elsewhere the programming capitalized on child prodigy Roberto Cisneros, the 11-year-old do-it-all dancing machine who made his splash last year in Pinocchio, delightfully revived this season. Precocious verbally as well as kinesthetically, he took the podium to lead Smuin's clever new Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, as a conductor narrating the instruments--um, dancers--to Benjamin Britten's illustrative score. The beauty here was in Smuin's playfulness with his conceit: the instruments were rarely represented literally, and instead, the pounding of the percussion section came vividly to life as aerobic jogging, and the harp materialized as an effervescent Fushille-Burke, wearing butterfly wings.

Funnily enough, it was the company's most recently created revivals that satisfied least. The bucolic Chants d'Auvergne was danced so honey-sweet it gave you sugar shock. Quattro a Verdi, Smuin's showstopper homage to Petipa, just doesn't play to his dancers' strengths--only Hernan Piquin, this year's highly gifted addition to the Smuin roster, and Shannon Hurlburt have the line and placement to pull off its required feats. Smuin's 1999 version of Les Noces lacked the sense of urgency so omnipresent in the Stravinsky score. Excepting 1995's classy One Step Forward to Bach, all of the recent ballets looked faintly Disney-fled and bordered on parody. The deliciously zany "El Salon Mexico" from 1998's Suenos Latinos, worked best, because the audience never had to question its degree of seriousness.

All of which makes one wonder if Smuin isn't too competent for his own good at this point; he is a skilled showman, and audiences love him for it. But Shinju and Medea remind us that Smuin has deep creative wells to plumb--and prove that his young company can handle his darker explorations. Perhaps that is both an achievement and a challenge.