SFB'S ADAM FULFILLS PROMISE WITH PECH.

SFB'S ADAM FULFILLS PROMISE WITH PECH LAWRENCE PECH DANCE COMPANY CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT YERBA BUENA SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 9-12, 2000

Now in its fifth season, the Lawrence Pech Dance Company, with four world premieres on this program, has increasingly shifted its focus on presenting new work of widely divergent provenance. The company has also become a major proponent for the work of a San Francisco Ballet dancer who is rapidly becoming a choreographer not to be missed: Julia Adam. The Shroud, this fascinating artist's third work for the Pech Company in as many years, is reason enough to wish the ensemble a long and healthy life.

Adam's septet ever so fluidly wound a path from stiff ceremonial locksteps into a sense of abandon in which dancers partnered each other apparently willy-nilly until a final stamping section re-established a sense of inevitability and closure. The verticality of the torsos and a repeated motif of small, close-to-the-body hops appeared to pay tribute to the medieval music and dances that inspired the piece. Adam's ingeniously used prop, a small white cloth that metamorphosed into a stage-covering blanket, became a token of fragility and evanescence. A fresh and thoroughly contemporary piece, The Shroud wore its reference to medieval beliefs and customs lightly.

Pech also used a light touch in his world premiere, Chaveroht, a quintet that explored friendship among five women: Andrea Flores, Laurie Miller, Summer Lee Rhatigan, Tiekka Schofield and Wendy Van Dyck. Its cast dressed gorgeously (by Nancy Endy) in white gossamer frocks, Chaveroht softly explored clean lines, liquid arms, gentle skips and modest pirouettes. It's a world in which a touch, a glance, the turn of a head speak volumes. A little bit too lite for my taste, Chaveroht's sweetness edged perilously close to sentimentality. Outstanding was Rhatigan as the feverish outsider who by self-negation succeeds in merging with this self-contained circle.

Val Caniparoli's intriguing and skillfully structured Already Dusk, performed by Van Dyck and a sympathetic partner, James Strong, who stepped in for the injured Pech, was another of this choreographer's ongoing exploration of the pas de deux. Set to a section of Brahms's Sonata No. 2 in F for Cello and Piano (Op. 99)--unfortunately played on tape despite Pech's well-known preference for live music--Caniparoli's push/pull choreography revealed a new dramatic side of the silken Van Dyck. She was a thoroughly modern Wendy. Whether being dragged off-balance, pushing her head against Strong's chest, stalking on pointe or being flipped upside down, Van Dyck here asserted herself as a sweet and forceful but not unwilling partner.

Cynthia Pepper's The Habitat, to an original, though not very original, score by Robert Vieira, was the least convincing of these four premieres. Pepper, a ballet teacher whose primary choreographic experience has been with students, got lost in the common fallacy that production values can make up for a lack of movement invention. Intended as a comedy, Habitat could boast of little wit or even a sense of absurd logic. It looked, unfortunately, like an elaborate but rather silly costume party for Laurie Miller and two athletically sturdy men, Justin Flores and Michael Kruzich.