Their winter program “Twenty Years of Los Angeles Ballet,” performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on January 29-31, showcased a company brimming at least with the vitality necessary to foster an appreciation for ballet in the City of Angels. The works on the program included George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” Hans Van Manen’s “Frank Bridge Variations,” and Melissa Barak’s world premiere of "Wavelengths." The order of ballet seems designed to evoke some continuity amidst the leadership change of recent years. In 2023, the board made waves in the ballet community by tapping the former New York City Ballet dancer, Melissa Barak, who was then helming her own Barak Ballet, to take the company in a more youthful direction. The past several seasons have seen the company morph quickly from a “Balanchine company” to a mixed repertoire, contemporary ballet outfit. 

The evening on January 31 seemed to embody that shift, opening with George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” staged by Darla Hoover. LAB approached Balanchine’s angular masterpiece to Igor Stravinsky’s “Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra” with stylistic candor. Unsurprisingly, the dancers seemed at home in this neoclassical repertoire, staring down the audience with syncopated musicality and exaggerated arms. Part of his full-length neoclassical masterpiece, “Jewels,” Balanchine intended “Rubies” to embody the American aspect of his modernist and popular influences, with its jazzy rhythms, flexed hands and feet, and turned in retiré positions, evoking a certain New York sense of time and place.

As the Tall Girl, Aviva Gelfer-Mundl flirted with the audience as the four men in the corps, Marco Biella, Bryce Broedell, Jacob Soltero, and Theo Swank manipulated her legs into impossibly high extensions, stopping with each position to pose, as if for a high fashion photoshoot. The pas de deux couple, Sarah-Ashley Chicola and Evan Gorbell, capably tackled Balanchine’s demanding, off-kilter partnering. It's perhaps wishful thinking for a dancer to recreate the particular breezy, nonchalance of Edward Villella, of the original 1967 cast, the ex-boxer turned ballet dancer, whose jocular style Balanchine used to channel the everyday New Yorker. That particular artifact seems best preserved on YouTube. But Gorbell brought an effective level of punch to the various equestrian trotting jumps Balanchine infused his solo with, evoking perhaps the perky horse carriages of Central Park. Nonetheless, one couldn’t help feeling a little cramped for the dancers within the smooth walls of LA’s Wallis Center, a relatively small stage to let loose an explosive Balanchine work. Perhaps in a bigger space, the dancers would have felt freer to embody the quality of abandon that one looks for in a Balanchine piece.