ICE DANCERS TORVILL, DEAN AT FORUM

Olympic gold medalists and world champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were recently quoted in these pages about wanting their current touring ice-dance program (seen Friday at the Inglewood Forum) to be considered “a dance show.�

To this end, they and their associates (including Australian ballet choreographer Graeme Murphy) adapted for skating nearly all the familiar (if disreputable) subgenres in contemporary dance: the artsy symphonic ballet (“The Planets�), the cutesie mock-nostalgia ballet (“Tango�), the Angst -ridden Mahler-lieder ballet (“The Last Song�), the pious-unto-death ecclesiastical ballet (“Heaven�), the sex-and-violence-in-leather rock ballet (“Hell�) and more.

Though their pseudo-Hindu “Song of India� suite (with music by Rimsky-Korsakov and Rodgers and Hart) certainly didn’t look any sillier than Gerald Arpino’s curry-flavored “Light Rain� for the Joffrey Ballet, the borrowed pretensions of this kind of repertory often forced Torvill and Dean into feigning a grandiose glamour foreign to their performing personalities.

Both obviously think like dancers. Where their talented colleagues (Gary Beacom in “Tuxedo Junction� or Lea Ann Miller and William Fauver in “Torro�) established a dance premise but soon abandoned it for predictable, hard-sell tricks, Torvill and Dean sustained every concept and found ways to showcase virtuosity without breaking the movement flow.

Dean repeatedly proved himself a brilliant partner--able to manage impossible traveling-lifts without marring his elegance of bearing. A patineur noble , up there with such exemplary cavaliers as Anthony Dowell and Peter Martins. Sadly, many of Torvill’s costumes foreshortened her already problematic line as a dancer and made her limb-action matter far less than Dean’s. But her skating technique, of course, matched his perfectly.