The company currently numbers fourteen dancers who dance approximately seventeen performances in five Northern California auditoriums through June, for 2008's spring season; in 2007 the company appeared at New York City’s Joyce Theater. The company look is youthful and contemporary; long-limbed women, mostly blondes, with broad shoulders. The men, virtuosi technically, tend to be short, square of silhouette which may weigh against their use in companies specializing in Balanchine.

In Company C there is little evidence the long, lean,somewhat remote aura will ever find a niche, for Charles Anderson is canny of vision in his guest choreographer choices. Last season it was Paul Taylor’s Three Epitaphs; this season it is Anthony Tudor honoring the centennial of his birth, David Parsons and Alexandre Proia with Dark Elegies, The Envelope and Rhapsody in Blue. Anderson’s contribution was Hush using a musical collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin.

Prime interest lay in Dark Elegies and The Envelope, one a demanding stretch in the dancers’ interpretive powers, the other a charming, lively fit. One cannot fault Company C’s execution of Dark Elegies; it was so meticulous one could study Tudor’s composition, perhaps drawing analogies with Kurt Jooss’ Green Table, since Jooss started teaching September 1934 in England. Rita Felciano mentioned Tudor’s gestural spareness is a marked, welcome contrast to Friedrich Ruckert’s poetry which forms the text for Gustav Mahler’s music.

Whatever the qualities, Tudor captures the relentless inevitability of loss and the painful restraint of folk whose situation doesn’t admit of much histrionics. The late P.W. Manchester, a witness to the premiere, said the costumes bore all the earmarks of threadbare Sunday best with a decade or two of wear. I applaud Anderson’s inclusion of Dark Elegies, a genuine stretch for his dancers. Alas, I did not feel any dancer had experienced a loss by death,lacking that gut-emptying emotion, the work remained a skeleton.

Rhapsody in Blue, essentially a quartet, employed a stiffened scarlet curtain upstage right with legs and arms thrust or lifted above it in the preliminary chords of the Gershwin favorite. Once the dancers were out front, flirtation was the prime focus, playful, knowing like the music. The piece sagged during the prolonged passages at the end when the quartet of dancers needed additional backup. It’s a long piece to ask four dancers to fill.

The dancers’ rendition of The Envelope was totally opposite, the hit of the program; in their medieval-style black hoods and loose garments, the shuffling of the substantial oblong, the shifts in postures, the dancers’ groupings and their dissolves, the hands off reactions to the missive were on the mark throughout and made for a lively finale to the well-danced program. Reservations aside, Company C continues to develop; I follow it with interest and hope.