In the Garden

Here we have two full-grown people finding themselves suddenly on earth, explained the director. "To imagine that they don't have certain desires would be ridiculous. So we try to show, without being obscene about it, how they satisfy those desires." First the man, dressed in a skintight, flesh-colored costume, experimentally maneuvered the woman, similarly sheathed, into various positions--rump to rump, shoulder to shoulder--until at last she twined her body around his left leg and sinuously slid up to a standing embrace. He was Adam, of course, and she was Eve -- -in a highly successful new San Francisco ballet titled Original Sin.

Poet (and "Mature Bohemian") Ken neth Rexroth, 55, who wrote the libretto, knew that it was "potentially full of corn." but did it because "I'm kind of tired of Freud and Jung in ballet." Adds Director Lew Christensen of the San Francisco Ballet: "It's a good story, and the audience is not belabored with reading pro gram notes to find out what's going on." As the ballet opens, a spinning sun swirling over a landscape like a moon crater gives way to a lush Garden of Eden where two angels. Raphael and Lucifer, poke Adam into life with their swords. Magnificently danced by Roderick Drew in jazz-flavored classical ballet movements. Adam, according to Rexroth's directions, "emerges, as if from clay, rises, stretches, yawns, discovers one by one the use of his limbs." He then gets acquainted with the garden's livestock as they cavort in pairs and trios -- the walrus and the ape, the lamb and the leopard, the rabbit, the skunk and the fox -- all costumed to [he last whisker. Weary at last of the ballet of the beasts, Adam rests on the gnarled, raised roots of a tree. It is then that Eve (Sally Bailey) emerges from underneath him. For Choreographer Christensen, the biggest problem was the birth of Eve. "I sat at my desk for days, thinking--how do I do that? Drew pictures, and all that. As it turned out. Eve has to crouch in the hollow of that tree from the beginning of the ballet until it's time for her to slip from Adam's rib." As danced by San Francisco's exuberant, youthful bantam ballet company, Original Sin is emotional as well as entertaining.

Only the music, watered-down jazz composed by the Modern Jazz Quartet's John Lewis, is static. Christensen, however, likes it. "We wanted jazz in the proper element." he says. "The Creation does seem to work in nicely."

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