DANCE REVIEWS : PANOV’S ‘SACRE’ BY FLANDERS BALLET

Bringing the fifth choreographic version of “Le Sacre du Printemps” to be seen in Southern California since June, the Royal Ballet of Flanders moved to Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College, on Sunday.

This was the Valery Panov “Sacre,” the most rhythmically feeble “Sacre” of the five and the most hollow conceptually--but undeniably the only “Sacre” in which the sacrificial maiden (the winsome Sophie-Anne Seris) seemed to expire from sunstroke.

This maiden, or Chosen One, looked nearly catatonic when mauled (as usual) by the corps and subjected to a lot of mystic hand-passes and gymnastic lifts by a glowering, high-jumping Shaman (the dynamic Mehmet Balkan).

Panov created the work in 1977 for the Deutsche Oper, West Berlin, using 40 dancers--but only 17 performed it Sunday in the Flanders touring reduction. Numbers matter, for “Sacre” isn’t a chamber ballet--even on a one-night-stand American tour. Thus everything from Panov’s Slavic imagery to his pseudo-primitive unison stamping looked paltry, inadequate to the scale of Stravinsky’s score.

Worse, opportunities to explore archetypal human responses to estrangement, social pressure or impending doom--present, to varying degrees, in the Bausch, Graham, Bejart and even Taylor choreographies--were ignored in favor of half-baked stylization, mindless display and sheer fakery.

More of the same occurred in the delirious pas de deux from Panov’s “War and Peace” (to canned Tchaikovsky), in which Galina Panova mourned heroically and Ben van Cauwenberg yearned poignantly in pantomime between passages of shameless exhibition acrobatics a la Russe .

Real choreography did turn up twice Sunday: works acquired by the company before Panov became artistic director in August.

Details in the staging of George Balanchine’s familiar showpiece “Allegro Brillante” (to Tchaikovsky) may have been questionable--especially the romantic interplay between principals. However, technique and style were sound. Apart from roughness during high-velocity partnering, Andria Hall and Koen Onzia strongly met the challenge of the leading roles.

A moody and often profound investigation of the implications in partnering relationships, Jiri Kylian’s “La Cathedrale engloutie” featured the only live accompaniment of the evening: pianist Robert Groslot’s refined performance of Debussy’s score (mixed, sometimes, with recorded wind effects).

Kylian’s cycle of male-female, male-male and female-female duets powerfully objectified patterns of trust, dependency and the need for independence--while Marina Nicolaou, Christiane Meyten, Karel Vandeweghe and David Campos Cantero took to the sinewy modern dance style as if born to it.

During the last month, we’ve seen two Belgian ballet troupes: this one and Bejart’s Ballet of the 20th Century at UCLA. Panov’s Antwerp-based company looked as accomplished as Bejart’s Brussels ensemble. However, Panov’s overblown, old-fashioned choreodramas made Bejart look both subtle and avant-garde.