This weekend and next, Ohio Ballet brings its winter repertoire program to Cleveland and Akron. Determined as always to give our readers the best possible preview, we went to Youngstown in January to see the company perform the same program at the beautiful Powers Auditorium. Three ballets later we were convinced that this is a strong program in terms of both the dances and the dancing.

Let us walk you through the program using Raymonda Variations, a tutu ballet, to talk about the company's classical technique; Lost and Found, inspired by 9/11, to talk about the company's ability to convey emotion through their dancing; and Rapturous Heart, a Valentines Day dance, to talk about company identity.

It is a strong program not least because of the dancers, who are looking well and dancing well; and there is no better ground on which to discuss the dancers' aptitude than Raymonda Variations, choreographed for Ohio Ballet by Cynthia Gregory, now retired but once called America's prima ballerina assoluta, offers an opportunity to work with the original and excellent choreography by Petipa, a highly-praised score by Alexander Glazunov, but a nonsensical story. Because of this, it has become one of the most excerpted ballets ever. During her stellar career, Cynthia Gregory danced in some of the best of these excerpted versions with the best dancers of her time, including Rudolf Nureyev and Eric Bruhn. This background and her long personal and professional relationship with Ohio Ballet Artistic Director Jeffrey Graham Hughes render her uniquely qualified to set her Raymonda Variations on Hughes' company.

Classical dance technique as epitomized by Petipa is demanding. Turns are an example. No matter what comes before or after a turn it must go up and down on the same axis. If a dancer falls out of a turn or comes down before the turn is completed, the audience intuits that small failure to fully achieve the expectation of perfection implied in classical technique.

From principals to corps, Ohio Ballet's dancers finish their turns up and come down through that invisible axis to go on effortlessly to the next step. We spotted no bobbles despite Raymonda's way of framing difficult moments, as, for example, in Scene 3: four men, each in turn, execute double tours en l'air finishing with feet together in fifth position; they do this several times. As the audience checks off each dancer's successful finish, it relaxes into the assumption that successive executions of this difficult feat will be tossed off routinely. Then the audience can just enjoy watching how all the elements of the performance come together:

In one scene, Eva Trapp, dancing the principal ballerina's role, executes a series of traveling turns, pique en de hors. It is usually the shorter dancers who have the acknowledged advantage in turns, so it is noteworthy that Trapp, who is notably tall (for a dancer) and stunningly willowy and long of limb, opted to do the entire series as doubles, always finishing up, always coming down through her fifth, never varying her rhythm. Her colleagues, the women dancing Raymonda's corp roles, threw off the fast, furious pointe work that Gregory gave them with equal ease - a newly tuned Jaguar should run as smoothly. Toby George, dancing the principal role as partner to Trapp, showed nice, high jumps with notably soft, silent landings during his scene 5 variation.

However, technical mastery is not the whole story of Ohio Ballet's Raymonda, for ballet is always much more than a gymnastic event: Technical mastery frees dancers to project that gracious glamour to which both audience and critic alike respond. As the principal ballerina in Raymonda, it's Eva Trapp's job to epitomize these qualities, and she succeeds handily, thanks to her own talent and, no doubt, to astute coaching by Gregory. At times she seems to dance as much with her eyelids as with the rest of her body, creating benchmarks for hauteur to which actual princesses can only aspire.

All this, and beautiful costumes, and live music! Costume design is credited to Gregory and local Janet Bolick, execution to Bolick, who designs and makes many of the costumes seen in local dance performances, and who deserves mention more often than she receives it. For Raymonda, costumes hinted at nakedness, with flesh pink tights under the women's tutus.

The music is Music Director David Fisher playing his own arrangement of the Glazunov score. Fisher volunteered that he is not completely comfortable reducing orchestral music to a solo piano, but we were struck by how satisfying the final result proved to be. It is a live musical performance that is at once expressive and danceable.

Some say that art can be about nothing but itself; others insist that art must be relevant to a wider world of meaning and emotion. In Lost and Found, Tony-award winning Broadway director, choreographer and lyricist Lynne Taylor-Corbett achieves both goals in a dance "inspired by" the images in the days following 9/11. Without text or sets, with only a minimal story line, and no props or questionable projections, as so many others have attempted, Lost and Found provides perhaps the most moving demonstration yet of how dance can be inspired by 9/11 yet not limited to that world changing event. .

Without the program note, connecting Lost and Found to 9/11 would involve guesswork, but it's hard to see how anyone could miss the theme of loss and remembrance told around the girl in yellow, danced, in Youngstown, by Alicia Pitts. Given the context of 9/11 one inevitably sees her as a person who was lost in the towers and is remembered by her loved ones. In his pre-performance talk, Hughes likened her to Giselle in the afterlife. We were reminded of the eye-catching woman in yellow in Susan Stroman's Contact. And a rolling movement theme reminded us of a similar theme in a Bill T. Jones dance about loved ones lost. Whatever her influences, Taylor-Corbett appropriates with great skill, and weaves all into a single fabric.

Facial expressions and body language do some of the work. When the dancers first turn to face the audience we notice that Damien Highfield, who is capable of projecting a singularly brooding intensity (we remember his Hamlet), is front and center.

But the emotion mostly comes from the passionate execution of the contemporary steps to Fisher's performance of the Robert Schumann score. Everybody gets a chance to shine in solos or duets. Those who remember Eric Carvill's Romeo will not be surprised to see him throwing himself into his solo with apparent abandon; but there's always that rhythmic Schumann score to stay with. The lifts and partnering are gymnastic rather than balletic, reminiscent of Taylor-Corbett's Swing!, except that here she turns the movement to a different purpose. This is dance in the service of an idea, and it comes across without over reaching or being sentimental.

Rapturous Heart is Hughes latest dance, a string of romantic/erotic pas deux set to selections from Puccini's operas. Like most in-house choreographers, Hughes would probably be the first to admit that he's not in the same league as Petipa or Taylor-Corbett. But as is so often the case, when he does the kind of dances he does best, his dances look good next to theirs.

The reasons for this strange aesthetic equation are several. In this case, Hughes' has played to both his own and his companies strengths. He's particularly good at choreographing pas de deux. As dancers he and his wife, now Ohio Ballet's Ballet Mistress, Pamela Reyman, developed strong partnering skills, and they have passed this on to their dancers. Thus in Rapturous Heart we have six short duets (only five in Youngstown due to an injury), each a little different in character, each one well danced.

No matter how talented the guest artist, the in-house choreographer knows his dancers and their abilities more intimately. Hughes apparently knows what his dancers can do before they can do it. A lovely soft solo for young dancer Seth Parker in the middle of Rapturous Heart is an example of this; Parker's youthful ballon and his many special abilities are brought to bear in a solo that fits him perfectly.

We realize that some will find fault with this work because its score is a kind of a medley of Puccini's Greatest Hits. Fisher's piano arrangements are to replace orchestral recordings in Cleveland and Akron; perhaps that will ameliorate this criticism. Others sometimes object to concerts of such diverse repertoire. For our part we see this as a strong program that deserves an audience.

Get out and support the local scene or bid it a fond farewell we said to ourselves as we left the beautiful (and large, and under-populated) Powers Auditorium where they have only six concerts this month: get out and support the local dance scene or lose it.

And it was then when, on that snowy night, we were subject to a visitation, the Ghost of Cleveland Future. With dreadful portent the wraith showed us - the grim future of Cleveland: the beautiful theatres of Playhouse Square fallen into disuse and decay; the local dance scene atrophied beyond recovery; Clevelanders sitting at home, enervated beyond hope of recall by the mesmerizing prison of their boob-tubes, or lost in a slough of despond, longing for the concert opportunities of old. "Say nay, spirit; say thou liest. It will not be so," we protested. "Ah but it will be so. It must be so unless you arise from your duff and support the local scene," said the spirit and with that he vanished.

See it at Ohio Theatre in Cleveland Fri 2/18, at 8PM and Sat 2/19 at 2PM. Call for tickets at 241-6000 or 330-945-9400. from Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsa@earthlink.net

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