Stylish Hispanico Celebration. (New York).

Stylish Hispanico Celebration Ballet Hispanico Joyce Theater New York, New York November 27-December 9, 2001

Ballet Hispanico's annual New York seasons are always a much-anticipated pleasure for the company's loyal viewers, who know they can count on polished, sassy dancing to an often-catchy Latin beat. Tina Ramirez, the company's founder, has commissioned an astounding seventy-plus works over the troupe's thirty-one-year history and deserves a great deal of credit for bringing Hispanic culture to the forefront of mainstream dance. (In the process, the company also makes abundantly clear how important that culture is to our notion of social dance today.) Ballet Hispanico presented the premiere of Spanish choreographer Ramon Oller's Besame and repeated the work he made for the company in 2000, Eyes of the Soul, along with two pieces by company principal Pedro Ruiz and works by David Rousseve and Ann Reinking.

Besame, set to recordings of Latin American pop songs, takes its title from the familiar song "Besame Mucho," and echoes the song's lyrics about romantic love and loss. The piece opens with a yearning, lyrical duo for Ruiz, in a suit, and Jennifer DePalo, in a lilac ruffled dress. Working around and over a table and sofa, the couple moved through a sequence of inventive lifts that underscored their supple grace, even if the dance's content seemed somewhat overwrought, with no context for us to understand its rather melodramatic air of despair. In the second section, Oller struck a truer note with a neat, witty quartet for two chatterboxes (Nicole Corea, Irene Hogarth) and their admirers (Yarden Ronen, Solomon Bafana Matea), who conducted their curvy, body-swiveling courtships over a genteel cup of tea. In the final section, a small, neatly suited man (Hector Montero) danced with a corseted androgynous figure (Jae-Man Joo), before Ruiz returned to dance a final solo that seemed to portend his death.

Besame had its moments--and was extremely well danced--but it displayed much of the same unfocused sentimentality that was the downfall of Oller's Eyes of the Soul. Based on the life of the blind Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo--and set to his music--the work offered a similarly yearning duo for Ruiz and DePalo (this time with a chair) and used the dancers as incarnations of the composer's music, before offering a final scene of an elderly Rodrigo, saved by his art, at peace with his past and his fate. Ruiz and DePalo, both remarkable dancers, did as much as they could with their material.

Ruiz's own Guajira (1999) was far less ambitious and far more successful on its own terms. The title refers to the women of the Cuban countryside, and the fluid, appealing choreography evokes a single day for eight men and women who work in the field, do laundry, and find love and companionship with one another. Costumed in drab earth tones (by Ann Hould-Ward), and subtly lit (by Jeff Segal), the work possessed a painterly quality that bestowed a timeless dignity on its subjects.

Ruiz's more recent piece, Club Havana, and Rousseve's Somethin' From Nothin' both offered highly enjoyable Latin dance set pieces, expertly performed by the dancers. Audiences love this stuff--and what's not to love?--but Ballet Hispanico walks a fine line here between promoting Hispanic culture and settling into a stereotypical version of it. The wonderful dancers and enthusiastic audiences need more.