IT seemed as if all of Oklahoma was at Monday’s opening of Tulsa Ballet at the Joyce — the governor, Tulsa’s mayor and the company’s hometown fans filled the theater, cheering.
Tulsa Ballet hasn’t been to New York in more than two decades. It’s a solid, well-rehearsed regional company with strong support at home — a great thing.
That doesn’t mean New York needs to see it.
The evening started with Kenneth MacMillan’s “Elite Syncopations.” It’s an amiable, work, but the hokum of its jokes — a short boy with his face jammed in the breasts of a tall girl — isn’t the best way to reintroduce yourself.
It did show the company’s strength: its vibrant prima ballerina, Karina Gonzalez, and her partner, Alfonso Martin.
Another piece, Nacho Duato’s “Por vos Muero,” is a meditation on the medieval. It has atmosphere and motion, but little texture — nothing changed between the fast and slow sections except speed.
A magical liturgical section for Gonzalez and the men, who wore capes and swirled censers with burning incense, went all the way over the top, to Smell-o-Rama.
The biggest mistake was Young Soon Hue’s “This Is Your Life,” an uncomfortable mix of Duato’s contemporary aerobics and Pina Bausch’s dance theater. Hue set the piece in an imaginary 1950s TV show in which the stereotyped characters — the unhappy couple, the jilted lover — talked and danced their inner lives.
Her concept of cutting-edge theater wasn’t, and her mincing hairdressers, even if ironic, were as welcome as jokes about hicks and Bible-thumpers would be in Tulsa.
Someone should have thought twice about bringing it to New York.
TULSA BALLET
Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave.; 212-242-0800. Through Saturday.