With its red carpet, videographers and autograph seekers, the event Saturday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre looked like a movie premiere. In the process, they set artistic standards, developed a taste for ballet and trained the next generation of dancers. And the one after that as well. Hosted by radio personality P. Ochlan, the three-hour Ebell event not counting the half-hour late start or the reception afterward provided only a brief look at the honorees: George Zoritch, Marc Platt, Victor Moreno, Paul Maure and Andrei Tremaine.
But they proved omnipresent in videotaped oral-history segments of varying quality, in introductions by former dancers Zina Bethune, Glen Edgerton and Charles Maple, plus a filmed interview with Ballets Russes icon Frederic Franklin. For better or worse, most of the choreographies and live dancing on the program dramatized the enormous gulf between the kind of ballet popularized by the honorees and what dominates the international repertory today. Erglis Smaltzoff and Lev Lashchilin also looked emotionally tepid, but Lukash Abrahamyan and April Mcleod managed a series of difficult lifts so smoothly that they triumphed on technique alone.
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