OAKLAND—Hallelujah, the excitement of the Oakland Ballet Company is back!

Pronounced deceased by CPA coroners a year ago, it rose from the dead Oct. 20 at the sumptuous Paramount Theater, giving a generous revival of oldies before a highly enthusiastic audience that, truth be told, couldn’t believe its eyes. Here was a bright, well-disciplined interracial ensemble of 15, plus eight apprentices, taking center stage, a goodly number of them holdovers from the pre-dissolution group. And the group is harmoniously interracial, much like the first-night audience.

Credit it all to OB founder and longtime Artistic Director Ronn Guidi, who could not abide staring at the corpse of a beloved, once innovative troupe that toured all over the American map. Since its incorporation in 1965, it had made its name with whirlwind revivals of modern-ballet classics created 60-100 years ago, both in the US and abroad. Local product Guidi, who is 71 or 73, depending on which of his ages you believe, had retained rights to the OB name, and was able to buy back sets lost in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Oakland was once seen as a graveyard for performing-arts companies; even in the old vaudeville days, there was an unforgettable handwritten dictum at a NY theater dressing room: “The three slowest weeks of the year are Christmas, Easter, and Oakland.” The demise of both large-scale troupes—the Oakland Symphony in the mid-1980s, and in this decade the OB—had a domino effect downtown, leading also to various retail closures, including some inviting restaurants.

But now with the two indefatigable leaders Michael Morgan leading the symphonic renaissance, and Guidi back too,well, enfin, maybe, just maybe, the tide has turned and Oakland is saved. For a city too often headlined as one of the homicide and gangland-drug-trade capitals of our nation, it could not come a moment too soon.

Still, Lazarus, much remains to be done in order to live beyond an inspiring one-night stand. Sponsorship, donations, a substantial audience (yet to materialize), an OB web site, and certainly new ballets.

Guidi is a company director first, and a choreographer second. But no work he ever created was as significant as one of his first, “Trois Gymnopedies,” in which he had trumped the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. Rewind to Ashton’s “Monotones” of 1965-66, played and revived on both sides of the Atlantic ad infinitum. When, later on, Guidi presented his “Gymnopedies” back east, he was accused in print of ripping off Ashton. Both were ballets for a couple in white tights, bathed in moonlight, dancing serenely to the same music of Erik Satie.

Guidi defended himself with much earlier newspaper reviews of his work (the author of which modesty forbids my mentioning), documenting the origins of “Gymnopedies” four years earlier. Prestigious New York critics were forced to eat their words. (In his defense, Ashton had never encountered either Guidi or his ballet.)

Significantly, “Trois Gymnopedies” was back on stage this time around, beautifully executed, with David Bertlin, Gianna Davy and Angela Evans, accompanied deliciously by the soft-focus sounds from Michael Morgan’s pit orchestra. The standing ovation and the bravos were apt.

There was the madcap French commedia dell’arte confection which Guidi created in 1980, “Carnival d’Aix,” vacillating between the farcical and the raunchy. The lead couple, doing the tango, was Omar Shabazz---now grown into a big, powerful leading man who can move---and Davy. Then too came Marc Wilde’s surprising twists on “Bolero” (1974), set in a ballet studio with a crescendo build-up of forces at each reprise.

Guidi and his cohorts broke their necks to achieve the remounting of the Nijinsky “Afternoon of a Faun” (1912), recreating the Leon Bakst backdrop. It was the night’s lone misfire, with neither the Faun nor the Nymphs achieving that Greek-vase-design angularity that the original produced so stunningly.

The OBC has also announced Guidi’s “Nutcracker,” coming to this same stage Dec. 21-24, with Morgan again leading the orchestra.

Oakland Ballet Company, Ronn Guidi, director, at the Paramount Theater, Oakland, Oct. 20, and Dec. 21-24.

© Paul Hertelendy 2007