Dance: The Stars of Stuttgart

A skeletal mob of concentration-camp prisoners shuffle wearily across the stage. As the orchestra surges to the brass-driven climax of the adagio from Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony, naked fluorescent lights flash down from the ceiling, garishly illuminating the entire theater. Slowly the prisoners turn away from the audience toward a distant, fiery orange backdrop.Slowly they doff the blankets that cover t heir bodies; on their backs are stenciled stark black numerals.

It is a moment of intensive, moving theatricality—the visual and emotional high point of John Cranko's Traces, which was given its American première last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House by the magnificent Stuttgart Ballet. Traces is the portrayal of a woman who has escaped from totalitarian horrors but has yet to come to terms with those past agonies. Her present is visualized by some amiable bourgeois friends and a courtly but uncomprehending lover (Heinz Clauss).

Representing her past is a gaunt, tortured relic of the concentration camp (Richard Cragun) who periodically surfaces to stir her nightmare visions. Just as the adagio tails off in an eerie diminuendo, Traces ends with the anguish of the woman left unresolved. But the role is enacted to near perfection by Marcia Haydée, surely the finest dancing actress of the day.

Traces grandly illustrates one particular strength of Cranko's inventive —sometimes too inventive—choreography: his gift for narration and characterization. He may, in fact, be ballet's finest storyteller. Two other Cranko works, which had their U.S. premières last week—and which will be repeated later during the Stuttgart Company's six-week American tour—displayed, in varying degrees, his flair for abstract dance.

L'Estro Armonico (The Harmony of Being) is vintage Cranko (1963) that turns out to be a rather mechanical stu dio exercise in balletic geometry. Soloists on stage cavort to solo instrumental moments from three Vivaldi concert! while the ensemble blends with orchestral passages. Plotless but pretty, the work does show off the almost Bolshoi-like muscularity of the Stuttgart's unusually strong male corps and the gamine pertness of lithe Birgit Keil.

Initials R.B.M.E. is unfairly titled and pompously annotated, but a joy to watch for all that. The initials stand for the first names of the Stuttgart's four leading principals — Richard Cragun, Birgit Keil, Marcia Haydée and Egon Madsen. In all justice, the title should include an H., for Heinz Clauss, who brilliantly partners Haydée in a soaringly romantic pas de deux.