Dance Review

Expect the unexpected from Maurice Bejart. Two years ago his brilliant Ballet of the 20th Century offered American audiences an evening-length choreographic retrospective and a mixed program that each emphasized fluid, relatively classical dance values. No longer.

From the late '40s, both modern dance choreographer/performer Murray Louis and modern jazz composer/performer Dave Brubeck have embodied a new style of virtuosity--one that looks to Europe in its emphasis on technical intricacy but remains all-American in its surging energy and eclectic vernacular influences.

Helgi Tomasson's lavish yet tasteful production of "Romeo and Juliet," which the San Francisco Ballet introduced at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday, isn't like any other version of the Shakespearean tragedy. It lacks the operatic extroversion of Lavrovsky's ultra-Soviet staging. It can claim neither the picturesque theatricality established by Cranko in Stuttgart nor the verismo swagger that MacMillan enforced in London.

What a miserable lot we humans are, wallowing in violence, oppression and cruelty. This was the starting point for Akram Khan's latest ensemble dance, "Vertical Road" (2010), which had its West Coast premiere Friday at Royce Hall, presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. The "vertical road" was a spiritual journey, a loose depiction of the writings and philosophies of Rumi, a revered 13th century Persian poet and theologian. Khan, an award-winning British choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, began with the most base of human behaviors, setting the stage for a through-line that all could experience as the search for the divine progressed and the dance unreeled.

Looking exactly like the young Mitzi Gaynor, tiny Anna de Cardi made an unusually childlike and vivacious Giselle in the final Australian Ballet performance of the Romantic classic at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Friday.

To generations of American dancers trained to think of themselves as athletes, technical perfection has become synonymous with artistry. Yet "Giselle" is a ballet created before the era of the steel toe and--as two American Ballet Theatre casts demonstrated, Saturday in Shrine Auditorium--the most flawless performances aren't necessarily the best. At the matinee, Cynthia Harvey danced Giselle with ravishing technique, and her sumptuous command extended to a detailed and apt characterization.

Showing her customary technical authority, Cynthia Harvey danced her first Sugar Plum Fairy in Kevin McKenzie's new "Nutcracker" in an otherwise largely familiar cast Saturday afternoon at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Jazz Dancers, Inc.'s Dennon and Sayhber Rawles offer some pretty snazzy jazz dancing, but they tend to get in their own way. Their concert Friday at Loyola Marymount was no exception. In a mixed bill of new and familiar dances, the seven-woman, two-man troupe alternated between clearheaded, ably-danced choreography and cloying theatricality. In "Tribute to Brubeck" (1979, updated), the ensemble took off with showy moves in an aptly asymmetrical choreography.

If things had gone as originally planned, Susan Jaffe would have had pride of place on Friday as the first Aurora in American Ballet Theatre's production of "The Sleeping Beauty" at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. But Jaffe became ill, other principals were rescheduled, and she wasn't able to dance the role until Sunday afternoon.

With her baby face and sparkling eyes, her coltish energy and sense of wonder, Deirdre Carberry may make the most adorable first impression of any Clara who has yet graced the American Ballet Theatre "Nutcracker" this season. In the Christmas party sequence, Thursday afternoon in Shrine Auditorium, Carberry defined Clara as vibrant, spontaneous and touchingly childlike--qualities that vanished when the serious dancing began after the Mouse Battle.