Performing Arts : Nuevo Classicism’s Dynamic Duo : Miami City Ballet’s Lopez and Gamero reflect the contemplative side of Spain’s gifts to the New World.

MIAMI BEACH — “Free. Exciting. Energetic. Happy.”

Iliana Lopez, the most finely tuned of Miami City Ballet’s ballerinas, is grabbing for adjectives to describe Edward Villella’s 9-year-old company, which opens a three-day run Friday at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts. The words also could describe Lopez herself.

“People ask us, why didn’t you go to American Ballet Theatre or New York City Ballet?” Lopez says, glancing around the Costa Brava-style bungalow she has restored with her husband and ballet partner, Franklin Gamero. “But we’re fine here. We like the city. Here, we are the head of the company. We have grown with it. We are proud that it has been able to do so much. And we prefer an atmosphere with less tension.”

Besides, Miami is only a short airplane hop from Valencia, Venezuela--an industrial city of 4 million where Lopez and Gamero met at the State Ballet School when she was 16 and he was 17. They married in 1982--just months after they were both finalists at the Fourth Moscow Ballet Competition. And since then, their on- and offstage partnership has developed with the ease of a late Mozart sonata--unfurling the most astonishing changes in dynamics, nuance and emotional freedom from a premise of secure simplicity.

“Iliana . . . has a lot of smarts in her head but also in her body,” says Villella, who hired the couple away from the Deutsche Oper Am Rhein in Dusseldorf in the summer of 1987. “Franklin has been the same kind of story.”

In fact, although Miami City Ballet as a company has earned a reputation for dancing with “Hispanic verve,” Gamero and Lopez are artists whose innate classicism reflects the more contemplative side of Spain’s cultural gift to the New World. If dancing can be like architecture, theirs is like the perfectly aligned arches in the mosque of Cordoba; if it can be craft, then theirs is an intricate golden mandala inscribed on a plate in Toledo; if it can be music, theirs is a solo guitar--not the heat of flamenco but the contained classical patterns of Andres Segovia.

But you wouldn’t know it to talk to them.

Gamero and Lopez chatter unpretentiously in a living room decorated with Lopez’s hand-sponged wall paint (Spanish yellow) and Franklin’s burgeoning collection of bright, contemporary Venezuelan oils. As they talk, her brother-in-law, bound for the airport, scurries toward the front door carrying an enormous suitcase.

“My sister is here and my mom is here and my nephews and nieces,” Lopez says. Her mother, a former teacher of Spanish literature, lives with the couple four months a year. Her sister will be with them all summer. Somewhere out back--beyond a kitchen decorated with baskets and gleaming copper, and a long hallway hung with photos of the couple dancing--Gamero and Lopez are in the process of adding a room to the little house to accommodate more family visits. “We want to dance principal parts,” she once said back in 1992, “but we also wanted a life.”

From their arrival at Miami City Ballet, Gamero and Lopez began a dual metamorphosis: performing (and growing) in original works created for the company by its Peruvian-born resident choreographer, Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros, and streamlining their initially Russian-style dancing to fit Miami City Ballet’s formidable George Balanchine repertoire.

(Two works by Balanchine--the frothy “Western Symphony” and the austere “Four Temperaments”--will be on the program for each performance in Costa Mesa. Gamonet will be represented by the pas de deux “Nous Sommes” and by his homage to Astor Piazzolla, “Transtangos.” Both Gamonet ballets are star vehicles for Lopez and Gamero.)

At the Valencia State Ballet School, Gamero and Lopez had been proteges of Russian-born Nina Nakinorova, who taught the same syllabus used in St. Petersburg’s Vaganova (popularly known as the Kirov) Conservatory. The school also hosted many guest teachers from the Kirov and the Bolshoi who taught the Russian emphasis on placement, position and that ephemeral but prized balletic quality--line.

“When we first came here, we were doing ‘Don Quixotes’ and ‘Corsaires’ and ‘Swan Lakes,’ ” Lopez says. “But I think ‘Apollo’ and ‘Serenade’--all those Balanchine ballets--are going to become the classical works of the future.”

The Balanchine works--especially as artistic director and former New York City Ballet star Villella understands them--demand a faster, more angular, more kinetic style than the one Gamero and Lopez were used to.

“Between Iliana’s willingness and her innate intelligence she has been able to absorb what for her is a different approach--a different use of the feet, a different attack, a different sense of balance,” Villella says. “We pass through balance; we do not remain in it. It has been a wonderful ongoing exploration and she has responded phenomenally.”

“Franklin . . . has made as much progress, if not more, just in his partnering. [He] used to be more straight up-and-down in the grand imperial manner . . . getting behind the lady and lifting her straight up. But to get into this new kind of classicism in terms of the partnering is a very sophisticated endeavor. . . . He does it with great elan. His feet are quicker and stronger. He moves in a broader way.”

And then, of course, there is the 30-something factor. Dancers often have to wait until their late 20s for their emotional expression to catch up with their technique. Gamero, 33, and his wife, 32, credit plain old “maturity” with opening up a new dimension in their dancing.

“I think they are much more extroverted in their dancing than they used to be when they first came,” notes Gamonet, who has choreographed 10 of the 23 ballets he has made for Miami City Ballet specifically for the couple.

Gamonet’s works fall into several genres--from the tongue-in-cheek machismo and subtle musicality of the 1986 “Transtangos” to this year’s “D Symphonies”: a computer-generated neoclassical work that somehow manages to be both serious about its music (by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach) and silly in its use of ‘60s dances like the Frug and the Hully Gully.

In almost any of these works, Lopez and Gamero can take a movement that would look ordinary on other dancers and turn it into something pellucid.

A case in point is Gamonet’s “Nous Sommes”--a pas de deux to Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne.” With lesser dancers, it runs the risk of descending into just another slink-and-slither shiny unitard ballet. But when Gamero and Lopez do it, the duet becomes, as American poet Wallace Stevens put it, “an emotion as of two people, as of two emotions becoming one.”

For this, they need focus. From birth, Lopez has been taught it. Her father, a retired contractor, “studied metaphysics all his life,” she says--particularly a school of meditation taught by the late Venezuelan author Connie Mendez, whose popular pocket books of positive mind/body affirmations predated the New Age movement by decades.

The meditative techniques, Lopez is convinced, made her particularly ripe to absorb performing knowledge from three veteran Balanchine ballerinas brought in by Villella to coach the company last season. Two were Patricia McBride and French ballerina Violette Verdy, who worked with Lopez on the Hungarian-influenced “Pas de Dix” and the froufrou “La Source.” (“Violette always wanted more,” recalls Lopez affectionately, “and she compared everything to food.”)

For her part, Verdy says she became “an enormous fan” of Lopez. “She has that wonderful passion and fire that Latin people have,” Verdy commented last month in San Francisco. “She has a nobility, a courage, a bravery . . . that wonderful honest work that produces something healthy and strong. She is devoted and it shows.”

The third ballerina may have had the most galvanizing influence on Lopez. She was Suzanne Farrell, possibly Balanchine’s greatest muse, who coached the pair in “Diamonds”--the last movement of Balanchine’s full-evening “Jewels.”

“Suzanne was the most shy,” Lopez says, “but whatever she said, it clicked.”

“There was an incredible transfer of Suzanne’s nuances and all of the phrasings and the angularities,” Villella notes. “All those kinds of subtleties of movement started to come into focus with Suzanne’s coaching.”

That may be true, but what Lopez values most about Farrell’s coaching was the simple trust Farrell placed in the younger ballerina’s artistic choices. Just as Balanchine trusted Farrell, Lopez says, Farrell gave Lopez and Gamero a gift of trust.

“She wanted us to be ourselves,” Lopez says.

And that, in this case, is more than sufficient.