DANCE : Pointe-Less Ballet From Spain: The Royal Flash

By DONNA PERLMUTTER

July 24, 1988 12 AM PT

Elegant men step out of the shadows and form a phalanx on stage. Wearing white bolero jackets and tight, black, high-waisted pants that reveal stretched torsos and raised rib cages, they are the essence of powerfully masculine suavity, Spanish style.

As they stomp their feet, sounding a staccato of imperious clickings, and form geometric lines that soon swell with a stiff-spined machismo , they conjure up the glory and massed physicality of Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the Twentieth Century.

But that’s where the similarity ends.

For the Royal National Spanish Ballet, which opens Tuesday at the Greek Theatre and then moves on to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa starting Aug. 2, has little to do with classical ballet. So forget comparisons to the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Covent Garden or anything connected to tutus and toe shoes.

Nor does this 50-member company follow in the Gypsy-flamenco footsteps of a Carmen Amaya--all passionate abandon. Instead its artistic product is a high-gloss brand of folklorico and modern dance. It boasts dancers grounded in classical technique and slick production values and looks toward a new, elevated status--one that bids for its post-Franco place among the Europeans.

“We want to belong to the present dance world” says current director Jose Antonio. “We can do that by treating our traditional forms to contemporary concepts.”

The real issue, then, is an identity confusion having nothing to do with the word ballet , a confusion brought about by changing politics, shifting aesthetics and upward artistic mobility.

As a result, various tour presenters have not known that this recently renamed company actually played their locales before, as it did Los Angeles in 1983. At that time, under the name Ballet Nacional Espanol, it had yet to be awarded a royal charter.

It was 10 years ago that the Madrid-based troupe came into being, with Antonio Gades as director/dancer. He has since become known to the world principally through his dance films made with Carlos Saura (“Carmen,” “Blood Wedding,” “El Amor Brujo”) and his own touring group.

“Gades lasted only a short time,” says Jose Antonio, helped on the telephone by a translator. “Actually, he was terminated by the new culture minister. I think it was wrong, artistically and ethically. But the new man always wants to appoint his own people (the crony system), so Gades was obliged to leave and Antonio Ruiz came in. ‘Grande ,’ we call him. ‘Antonio the Great.’ He lasted three years.”

Succeeding him was Maria de Avila, under whose direction the company merged with the also modest Ballet Nacional Classico. She held the chief post until 1986 when Jose Antonio took over. At 37, he not only directs the company but, as tradition dictates, is its principal dancer and a choreographer as well. Surprisingly, he says that the leading dance figures in Spain suffer no competitive battles for these fast-changing appointments.

“We are amigos , not rivals,” says Antonio in a soft-grained, mellifluous voice that almost contradicts his moody stage persona. “We have much respect for each other. We are human beings with the same capacity for affection and pride. And although Gades and I are very close in age, we differ greatly in style.”

As evidence of their camaraderie, Antonio has invited Gades, in this 10th anniversary season, to stage his production of “Blood Wedding,” based on the Garcia Lorca play.

But Antonio doesn’t really specify the differences between himself and his better-known colleague. Gades’ high-profile choreography is typified by “Blood Wedding”--a mix of broodingly contemporized Hispanic stylizations and cinematic techniques. Antonio, however, has chosen not to include his own works for this tour.

“Medea,” the runaway hit of the just-ended New York engagement, for instance, is the work of Jose Granero. And apart from the fact that it derives from Greek, rather than Spanish tragedy, it bears a strong resemblance to “Blood Wedding.” Both deal with “love, hate, a frustrated wedding and death,” says Antonio, detailing the story of the title character, who vows to kill her children as vengeance for her husband Jason’s love for another woman.

He goes on to call the 1984 ballet “the most exciting thing our company has done, especially since we’ve been joined by Merche Esmeralda,” who signed on 18 months ago. The celebrated dancer, who portrays Medea opening nights and alternates with Ana Gonzalez, is Antonio’s partner in this dramatic centerpiece.

Besides “Medea,” there are three items on the single touring program--all contributed by other choreographers. Antonio says that he simply chose what he felt “shows the company to best advantage,” regardless of whether he is represented on the agenda or not. But one can infer that he minimizes his choreographic powers by bowing to the others.

The director-dancer also prides himself on forging a new artistic profile for his company, one that blends “ballet technique, traditional Spanish, flamenco, jazz and modern dance.” A student of all these forms, he shows off a certain mastery of such steps as double turns in “Alborado del Gracioso,” a solo choreographed for him by Granero to music of the same title by Ravel. Setting a dance to this colorful Impressionist score is indicative he says of the stylistic turn the Royal Spanish company is taking.

The same is true for Alberto Lorca’s ensemble piece, “Ritmos,” which does not rely on guitars alone. Here Jose Nieto’s music--dark, spare and urgent--surrounds a slow-driving percussion that aligns itself to heel-work but ultimately gets cushioned in lush orchestral strings. Only “Flamenco,” the other group dance, boasts the on stage cante hondo singers whose hoarse cries of passion trigger associations to visceral Spanish dance.

“All this is part of an attempt to fuse the traditional with the contemporary,” says Antonio, who, at 17, went with Luisa Aranda, now his wife, to dance in the ballet at Milan’s La Scala. “I could not close my eyes to other influences, nor did I want to. When someone like Giorgio Strehler is directing on stage it’s important to pay attention.

“He was doing ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ and I’ll never forget the experience or the man: His theatrical charisma, his knowledge of every word and every note. Just being there was fantastic.”

Antonio’s open-mindedness also marks the attitude of Merche Esmeralda. Described as the company’s Anna Magnani, she says that “the ability to use complete concentration” is her most important asset.

“It doesn’t matter whether I’m dancing Medea or Juliet,” she says, noting that she did the latter role in a Gypsy adaptation of the Shakespeare play. “I must shut out thoughts of what style is this and be absorbed only in the moment.”

Surprisingly, though, there are dancers in the Royal Spanish whose classical ballet technique never gets revealed on stage.

Ana Gonzalez, studied at the Paris Opera Ballet as a child. “Regardless of how strongly rooted in ballet my whole dance technique is,” she explains, “I could never forget my family, my Andalusian roots. It’s something in the blood. Yes, I wanted very much to be a ballerina. But in the end what is important is dancing. Giselle or Medea, it doesn’t matter. My destiny took me where I am.”

Gonzalez admits, however, that there is great public excitement about the recently formed classical ballet company, Ballet del Teatro Lirico Nacional, headed by none other than Soviet living legend Maya Plisetskaya. “Our dance is Spanish,” she says. “We know it and have it. But the ballet is something we’ve had to do without. We’ve missed it.”

Juan Mata, another ballet-trained principal, and one who has seen the company in all its different guises over a 15-year period, also has had wide experience outside of Spain. And he remembers a time before Queen Sofia conferred the Royal title on the company in December, 1983.

“Many of us are the same dancers,” he says. “We started with nothing, as a private little company. Now the government pays our expenses and salaries--not very big compared to what American dancers earn, but better than before. And we’re more theatrical, more in step with the times.

“All the different directors have given us good experience. We learned something from everyone. Who knows? It may change again, but we’ll be here.”