Uneven Programs, Promising Talent At DTH.

DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM CITY CENTER NEW YORK, NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 25-OCTOBER 7, 2001

Programming can make good works look great and turn a mediocre bill into an exciting theatrical experience. It can also do the opposite. Dance Theatre of Harlem chose to open its two-week New York season with a gala featuring new ballets by company alumni. The results were decidedly mixed.

The evening began with Laveen Naidu's Viraa, a work for fourteen dancers in a neoclassical vein. Naidu made his choreographic debut in 1999 with South African Suite, a collaboration with DTH Artistic Director Arthur Mitchell and Augustus van Heerden. Set to Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 2, Viraa keeps its dancers moving, while showcasing the strengths of its principals, especially young Eric Underwood, whose open manner, unforced turnout, and classical demeanor reveal a prince in the making.

Lowell Smith's A Pas de Deux for Phrygia and Spartacus, to the familiar music by Aram Khachaturian, is all breathless lifts, barrel turns, and the wrenching emotion Soviet dancers used to be so good at. Duncan Cooper, an elegant classicist, and the sprite-like Melissa Morrissey do a credible job as the slave leader and his ardent wife, but neither has the grand scale or technical power to make this a Bolshoi-style showstopper.

Robert Garland's New Bach is a send-up of Balanchine at his most sublime. The music, Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor, recalls that of Concerto Barocco, and there are choreographic echoes of the Balanchine classic as well. Garland jazzes up the classical action, using hip swivels and shoulder rolls to make it "black," a parody the audience loved. Apart from Donald Williams, who danced with his usual artistry, the cast lacked the technical finesse to do justice to the classical passages. Here and elsewhere the occasional exhibitionism of members of the male corps should be curbed.

Van Heerden's Passion of the Blood, by contrast, is a dramatic ballet, with Spanish music (by Jesus Villa-Rojo and others) and an unintelligible plot about illicit love and bloody revenge, a la Garcia Lorca. The set by Maxine Willi Klein evokes traditional Andalusian courtyards with minimalist beauty, and the period costumes by Pamela Allen-Cummings are handsome. However, few scenes are realized as dance action, and the choreographic invention is modest. At the end, when the Groom slugs it out with his rival, the audience roared.

Also new to the company this season was The Sphinx, a tedious 1977 work by Glen Tetley, in which Caroline Rocher looked more like a pussycat than the guardian of Thebes. More ambitious was the revival of Domy Reiter-Soffer's 1980 Equus. Based on the Peter Shaffer play, the ballet is both pretentious and dated, the fantasies of a young man troubled by his desire for other men. There are six prancing stallions, the "horse-gods" who keep young Strang from bedding a girl in the stable, a mother from hell, a distant father--the usual pop Freudian cliches. Ramon Thielen as the sometimes catatonic Strang, Donald Williams as his psychiatrist, and Duncan Cooper as Nugget, the lead horse, were all splendid.

By contrast with these tired narratives, Dougla, with its infectious Trinidadian rhythms, and Firebird, with its marvelous Stravinsky score, seemed fresher than ever. In Firebird, Leanne Codrington was graciousness itself as the Princess of Unreal Beauty, while in the title role Bethania Gomes showed that she has the makings of a ballerina, but not as yet the strength.