A Glimpse at ABT’s Future

Local fans of American Ballet Theatre had a chance to look into the future Tuesday when the 16- to 21-year-old members of the ABT Studio Company danced an ambitious five-part program in Bovard Auditorium at USC. Directed by former ABT principal John Meehan, these trainees arguably lacked authority in the evening’s big classical and neoclassical showpieces, but triumphed in perhaps their greatest expressive challenge: Jiri Kylian’s elegiac “Return to a Strange Land.”

Set to piano pieces by Janacek, this mercurial 1975 arrangement of duets and trios requires classical and gymnastic prowess along with musicality and interpretive refinement: qualities shared by everyone in the six-member cast but especially evident in the dancing of Maria Bystrova and Ricardo Torres as the couple in blue.

If Bystrova had seemed stylish but technically unreliable in Petipa’s Black Swan pas de deux (opposite the promising Jamar Goodman), here this statuesque Russian heightened every sculptural and emotional facet of the choreography with great skill. And if Torres had seemed correct but clenched as the male lead in Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante” (opposite the hard-working Mayo Sugano), here this slender Puerto Rican managed the unorthodox lifts and partnering tasks with disarming ease.

Even Issac Stappas with his heroic physique couldn’t surpass him in this regard, though Stappas and Carrie Peterson established a sensual rapport as the couple in brown. Moreover, Torres displayed a volatile emotionalism in an excerpt from an untitled new work by Australian choreographer Natalie Weir. Kristi Boone matched him in this sardonic and often abrasive (if unresolved) dance conversation to music by Rachmaninoff.

The evening’s major liability--apart from ruinously tubby sound in “Allegro Brillante”--turned out to be Mark Godden’s comic ensemble piece “La Folia,” which began as a leaden parody of Expressionism and ended with everyone wearing giant lampshades as dresses. Don’t ask why.