Killer Kylián at Boston Ballet

Paulo Arrais and Lia Cirio in Wings of Wax. Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

"All Kylián," the current offering from Boston Ballet (at the Opera House through this weekend) may not tell the entire story of Jiří Kylián, one of the leading choreographic lights of the millennium. But it does convincingly chart the arc of his career, from the late apprenticeship of Symphony of Psalms (1978), to the glory days of Wings of Wax (1997), to such latter-day explorations as Tar and Feathers (2006).  

The only conceptual trouble with the evening is that its chronology is muddled (we get the earliest piece last, and the last in the middle). So for the uninitiated, the development of this remarkable artist may be a little hard to parse amid what amounts to artistic background noise. Symphony of Psalms, for instance, is too indebted to other choreographers, and the dance tradition of Stravinsky in general, to quite count as all Kylián. And Tar and Feathers more than meets Samuel Beckett half-way, in a daring attempt to meld dance with absurdist theatre. Only in Wings of Wax (at left), from roughly the mid-point of his achievement, does Kylián's unique style "come clear," if you will.

Thus I'll be treating this trio of dances in their historical (rather than programmatic) order.  Which means I'll begin with Symphony of Psalms, a sweeping, if slightly stiff, evocation of Stravinsky's late work of the same name (which was a BSO commission, btw, back in the days when the BSO commissioned important stuff).  This choral piece is, as you might guess from its title, vaguely liturgical in character, but somewhat restless in form; perhaps most striking is that Stravinsky dips into octatonic scales, the basis of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; hence even though Psalms is grouped in the composer's "neoclassical" period, echoes of his early breakthroughs haunt it (and especially so in the forceful performance at the Ballet by the New World Chorale).

Kylián, for his part, conjures a complex ceremony that might be a courtship dance - or even a group marriage.  (Perhaps inspired by claims that octatonic scales are sourced in Persian music, the choreographer sets his couples before a cascade of carpets.)  Or is the action some kind of purge - as much of it takes the shape of combative duets alternating with exultant gestures - or perhaps even a form of funeral, as the entire community marches off into suicidal darkness at the finish (with one poor girl looking back)?  Whatever  Kylián may be aiming at precisely - and ambiguity became one of his signatures - the choreographer often echoes not only Rite of Spring but also Les Noces, so clearly the general idea is metaphoric extension of those works' cruel, communal religiosity.  In stylistic terms, this sometimes gives the piece the air of apprentice-work. Still, you can make out in its lineaments the beginnings of Kylián's mature style: couples tend to pivot against each other in what amount to choreographic co-shares; the stage is almost unconsciously laid out into a metaphoric grid, with dancers often obliquely plotted to the audience; and almost every gesture admits to at least two interpretations.
The ensemble the Ballet deployed against the work's substantial demands was heavy with established stars - Erica Cornejo, Jeffrey Cirio, Lasha Khozashvili, Sabi Varga, and Yury Yanowsky all had their moments as they mixed it up with (relative) newcomers like Adiarys Almeida, Emily Mistretta, Dalay Parrondo, and Patrick Yocum.  Thus, perhaps inevitably, the duets came off better than the patterned corps work.  I have to admit, though, that I was most struck by someone I'd never seen before - who turned out to be Avetik Karapetyan, a passionate soloist who joined the company only last year. When a new soloist steals the spotlight from half the Ballet's principal dancers, I'd say he's someone to watch.

Bright young lights likewise dominated Wings of Wax, the meditation on the myth of Icarus that showcased Kylián in mid-flight.  Here the complexities had if anything deepened, in a fluidly interlocking set of variations for eight couples (I believe there were 8 couples in Psalms, too); but the dance still felt accessible, interpretible.  A ghostly tree floated center-stage, but upside down - a resonant but ambiguous totem, orbited by a mechanical sun (a single spotlight).  Had it, like that wing-bound youth of legend, plummeted to earth from some unimaginable height?  Or were we actually looking at its fully-formed root system, while its branches were still mere stubs?  Or was the stage floor actually meant as stand-in for the sky, across which the dancers "flew"?



Whatever one made of the back-drop, the moves themselves were clearly about risk, both emotional and physical, and, yes, the inevitable falls to earth that result from taking chances.  To a mosaic of snippets from von Biber, Cage, Glass, and Bach, dancers raced ahead of each other, nearly "flew" away from each other, leaned on each other, connected and disconnected and connected again (more choreographic co-shares) in complex yet spontaneous patterns of dependency, restraint, and support (see Youtube of an earlier Nederlands Dans Theater performance, above).

And I'm happy to report that the Ballet sailed through this challenging piece with flying colors (even if it's in black and white).  By now the company boasts one of the most experienced Kylián ensembles in America, but even in this context there were startlingly electric turns from the reliable Paulo Arrais and Kathleen Breen Combes; meanwhile Lia Cirio and Whitney Jensen brought their usual grace and poise to everything they did.  Robert Kretz was more convincing when coupled than when solo - he needs  a partner to come life - but Bradley Schlagheck seemed more committed than I've remembered him in the past, and Emily Mistretta glowed with a kind of stricken glamor.

Sandwiched between these two successes, however, was the mysterious Tar and Feathers (from 2006), in which Kylián often plays the sphinx, in an apparent attempt to conjure the haunting, gnomic absurdity of late-stage Beckett.  The piece is even partly set to a scrap of the great playwright's work - his last poem, in fact, "What is the Word?," read by none other than Kylián himself (so we know precisely where he's coming from, if not exactly what he's saying).  The poem in question was dedicated to the late Joseph Chaikin, the noted American director who at the time was suffering from aphasia as the result of a stroke (Chaikin spent his last years performing texts developed for him as a result of his affliction; one of his own last performances was of Beckett's poem).

Lia Cirio, John Lam and Robert Kretz in Tar and Feathers.

Now aphasia - a disruption in the ability to process language - is, even on the surface, a challenging topic for a dance (even for a straightforward choreographer). And with Kylián in charge, you also know the dance itself will be in some ways aphasic - that is, its inability to communicate its own theme will be part and parcel of its performance.

No wonder, then, many in the audience were puzzled by the strange spectacle of Tar and Feathers (the critics didn't do much better, btw).  The piece is certainly elegant, with talented pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama up near the rafters, tinkling away on a Steinway on stilts (perhaps to suggest the distance between the musings of the aphasic and the sparkling music of Mozart, among others).  Meanwhile, downstage left, a kind of crystal built of bubble wrap glows invitingly.  The dancers attempt to approach it - perhaps they intend to describe it - but their gestures are tortured, their faces torn into poignant grimaces (at right). Often they turn away from its luminous mystery, and grope for order among themselves - the performances here were all headlong - but little of this comes to much (and their struggles are interrupted by snarls on the soundtrack, anyway, as their communal efforts inevitably collapse).

So Tar and Feathers proves a frustrating, but somehow intriguing (perhaps even darkly charming) dance - and one that slips in an absurdist wink from tragedy to burlesque and back again.  Indeed, it closes on a wry note that's more than worthy of Beckett: the last dancer steps unthinkingly on a stray panel of bubble-wrap, which pops amusingly beneath her toes: the unnameable enigma she has been so desperately trying to explain at last begins to speak for itself, unbidden.



Altan Dugaraa, Sarah Wroth and Yury Yanowsky in Bella Figura.





Two years ago, in its own words, Boston Ballet’s production of Jiří Kylián’s Black and White took the city by storm (it proved so popular the company reprised it last season); the production was one of those rare, thrilling moments in which a startling intellectual statement was also a roaring popular success. Now the Ballet is back with another Kylián premiere from the same fertile period (through this weekend at the Opera House), which poses an inevitable question: can the company catch lightning in a bottle twice?

And the answer is: yah, pretty much. Bella Figura (above) doesn’t  pack quite the shocking wallop of Black and White, even though it covers much of the same territory (gender, violence, and identity, for those of you keeping score). But if that earlier blockbuster was a choreographic call to arms, in which men danced with rapiers while women prowled the stage like lionesses, Figura is more of a rumination, sometimes tragic, sometimes bemused, on the smaller-scaled (perhaps even internal) struggles that Black and White treated as overt combat. Thus it has less of a sense of attack, but perhaps even more ambiguous depth. And it goes without saying that it’s danced peerlessly at the Ballet, where the women carry off with admirable sang froid the partial nudity (at top) the piece demands.

What’s more, Bella Figura shares its program with two other worthy postmodern works: William Forsythe’s The Second Detail, one of his seminal experiments from the 80's and 90's, and the brand-new Pärt I, II & III, from Forsythe disciple Helen Pickett, who is perhaps the Ballet’s second choreographer in residence (after Jorma Elo). Taken together, these pieces provide a solid sense of the breadth and depth of the ongoing, post-Balanchine intersection of ballet and modern dance.  And one of the most richly satisfying evenings of thoughtful high culture the city has to offer right now.



You could argue that with the great Balanchine's death in 1983, ballet had lost its Shakespeare, and maybe even its compass.  Certainly a sense of unspoken void is palpable in the works of William Forsythe, an American whose rise began almost precisely with Mr. B's demise (in an eerie coincidence, Forsythe's first landmark work, which won him the directorship of the influential Ballett Frankfurt, appeared the year of Balanchine's death).  The Second Detail - seen in snippets above - was set on the National Ballet of Canada some years later (1991), but it operates almost as a purification of the atmosphere of the time: it takes place in an abstract, white-on-white rehearsal hall, in which any leader or choreographer is strangely absent.  Elvis has clearly left the building, but the dancers are carrying on by themselves, trying this or that combination in various directions, searching for a new style to move them forward.  The score, by perennial Forsythe collaborator Thom Willems, is amplified electronic percussion, mournful and even a little morbid, and lacking a real melody - it's inching forward, too - but nevertheless weirdly energized.

The vibe may recall Balanchine in its techno-purity,  but it doesn't feel particularly committed; the dancers engage each other with a strict grace (with clean, incisive turns from Kathleen Breen Combes, James Whiteside, John Lam and Whitney Jensen, who I think was born for Forsythe), but they often just drop things in mid-step, to retire to a seat along the back, or saunter off stage, or even drop in exhaustion to the floor.  The work is thus a strange mix of the classic and the casual; everything only works until one of the dancers loses interest; meanwhile the question of exactly what they're all doing - or looking for - remains an open one.  In a quirky nod to that formal issue, there's even a title card with the word "THE" printed on it center stage, as in "The - what?" In a word, there's no name for this kind of dance (and there still isn't).

The Second Detail certainly haunts, but beautiful and striking as it is, you couldn't argue that it coheres - at least until its unexpected finale, when a very different figure - perhaps representative of that eponymous "second detail" - invades, and tries to shatter, the work's cool self-possession.  On opening night this impassioned figure took the form of prima ballerina Lorna Feijóo, who threw herself with abandon into (and through) the icy permutations going on around her.  Clad in what looked like a cross between a shower curtain and a wedding gown (she was, I think, a kind of bride), Feijóo may have been a madwoman, or perhaps some pagan spirit of the dance - but she couldn't in the end turn the tide toward her idea of passion; instead she collapsed, and then the title card did, too.  I'm not sure if that meant the work had ended on a hopeful note or not, but clearly the question was closed; the statement had been made, even if it was too ambiguous to name.

Next came Pickett's Pärt I, II and III, a triptych set to the mystically minimalist music of Arvo Pärt. Each dance had its own exotic name: "Layli o Majnun," (Persian for "Layla and the Madman") "Tsukiyo," (Japanese for "Moonlit Night") and "Tabula Rasa" (Latin for - you should know that one). The actual dancing, however, was in none of these traditions; Pickett is a Forsythe protégée, and you could feel his influence in her steps, but only subtly - perhaps because she was more interested in narrative and relationships than Forsythe usually is.

As you might guess from the variety of titles, the pieces didn't quite hold together as a matched set, although there were brilliant moments in each.  The strongest was probably "Layli o Majnun," which featured fierce turns from the great Larissa Ponomarenko and Yury Yanowsky as a troubled couple, shadowed by a mysterious Lorin Mathis (identified bluntly in the program as "Madness").  This is the kind of conceit that sounds corny, but that dance can bring off thrillingly, and Pickett conjured a gripping development that led to a spooky climax in which "Madness" mirrored Yanowsky's tormented moves as Ponomarenko clung to him desperately.  But Pickett didn't seem to know how to resolve her story (which she had changed from its source, anyhow: in the original fable, "madness" results from the frustration of the couple's being unable to marry; here it seemed intrinsic to them).  For while  Mathis was apparently driven off at the end, we didn't really understand why or how; it was just the power of Ponomarenko's luuhv, apparently. 

"Tsukiyo" likewise could have used a few more specifics and a bit more plot; it's a lovely pas de deux, in a highly traditional vein - a lonely swain woos the goddess of the moon, or something like that - but dramatically, it's curiously inert.  Set to Pärt's haunting, and by-now-ubiquitous, "Spiegel im Spiegel" ("Mirror in Mirror"), the piece is sweet, but at least as danced by Sabi Varga and Lia Cirio (above left) - that is exquisitely but with a shade too much self-conscious grace - its mirrored passion seems to be more about its own loveliness than about love itself. 

Pickett did more forceful work in the buoyant "Tabula Rasa" - set to a Pärt piece of the same name - which, as that moniker implies, was a kind of Forsythian blank slate: whatever "plot" it had seemed scrambled, and mostly it was just pure dance, and much in the master's manner, but without the formal questions and probing sense of cool that Mr. F brought to The Second Detail.  Still, Pickett's main prop - a giant mothership/chandelier borrowed from Close Encounters - was gorgeous, and she scribbled all over her "Tabula" with spirit, if not coherence; indeed, at times - as in the leaping romp for the company's young men  - she even tapped into a sense of competitive joy that I've never seen her mentor match.

At last came Bella Figura - itself both a striking formal statement and a complex construction freighted with metaphor - although the one thing everybody knows about it is that halfway through, the girls take their tops off. Before you point any fingers, though, ponder that the resulting imagery is curiously asexual - indeed, Kylián soon pulls together a crowd of topless men and women in flowing, blood-red skirts (see above), and we're forced to consider their lack of differentiation, the similarities of their "genders."

Sabi Varga, Rie Ichikawa and Tiffany Hedman. 

But from the top (sorry), Kylián has hinted that gender is a prison - the piece opens with two nude manikins, one male and one female, suspended in glass coffins over the action, before switching to a half-nude woman struggled to free herself from the stage curtain, while her male twin twists, upside down, within a box much like the ones that housed those earlier "bella figuras."

Immediately we sense a loose set of themes has been declared. "Bella figura" is both an Italian catch-phrase and an attitude; roughly translated, it conveys the need to meet life's challenges with a forceful sense of beauty and style. But Kylián's choice of music - yearning melodies from the likes of Pergolesi, Vivaldi and the contemporary Lukas Foss - tells you he's interested in the cost of beauty rather than its benefits. Thus in the iconic costumes of Bella Figura - which eventually everyone dons - the dancers are both flamboyantly beautiful (in flowing red bloomers) and yet simultaneously stripped; there's a vulnerability beneath their operatic beauty, and indeed it's the need to be beautiful itself that makes them so vulnerable.

Kylián rings many changes on this fundamental insight. We see duos and trios, romantic couples and, well, triangles, in which beauty is always present, but sometimes a problem, or even just superfluous - it can't always change an ugly power dynamic; the most attractive people, in fact, sometimes walk each other off stage like dogs (beauty as a form of degradation). Elsewhere coupling is even more awkward; dancers suddenly become knock-kneed puppets (above left), or fall into fetal positions, or to the ground.  Sometimes a partner will decide to twirl his intended mischievously, like a top.  The ludicrous is never far from the lovely in Kylián's sometimes-sardonic vision.

And always the stage itself shape-shifts with the dance, because the idea of self-presentation is always in play. Dancers drag the curtains after them, or push them aside, to change the shape and size of their playing space; at one point they're even holding up the curtain themselves. In the piece's most iconic moment, black drapes swoop down, like a camera lens focusing on a key detail, to frame Rie Ichikawa and Kathleen Breen Combes as they kneel before each other like two tentative wraiths, gingerly reaching out, but never quite touching. Finally they shed their gowns, too, abandoning one form of beauty for another; they come completely clean, not so much as naked bodies as naked souls.

This is a strangely tender moment - a transcendent one, actually, and Ichikawa and Combes play it perfectly; but Bella Figura isn't quite over yet, and it closes with an odd sort of fire dance that I admit left me scratching my head. But then part of what makes a Kylián dance fascinating is that he leaves some questions open, and other statements ambiguous; like Black and White, Bella Figura is made for repeat viewings (and luckily I'll get a chance to ponder it again - the Ballet will bring it back next year). At any rate, against a background of flames, most of the dancers return, in a final set of variations that are dotted with curious details. One man puts his hand over a woman's mouth to silence her (it wouldn't be pretty to complain about things, now would it). But another simply reaches out to his partner and gently eases her tense shoulder down in a moment that's as resonant as anything in the piece. There's nothing to be done about the beauty part, Bella Figura whispers in the end; so you might as well relax.

"Black and White" returns

Last weekend's encore performances of "Black and White" at Boston Ballet (excerpts above) gave me a rare chance to reconsider what I thought was one of the signature cultural events of 2009.

And I changed my mind about it. A bit. Not that it struck me as any less brilliant - Jiří Kylián's masterpiece is one of the most ambitious and free-ranging evenings of dance of the last few decades, and Boston Ballet brought it off thrillingly. And the Boston press, which was positive, but lukewarm, last year - I think I was the only one really raving - all came around, as they are wont to do (if a bit slowly).

What surprised me about the piece's revival was how differently the individual components of "Black and White" - which was pulled together from a few seasons of work created by Kylián for Nederlands Dans Theater some twenty years ago - impressed me on this third viewing. The big, bold showpieces ("Sarabande" and "Falling Angels") seemed to me just as striking as ever, but a bit flatter than I remembered them, even as the work's first two sequences, "No More Play" and "Petite Mort," seemed to open up to surprising new depths.

This was partly because they were danced a bit better this time around - particularly "No More Play," whose bitter geometries were carried off with cold panache by Kathleen Breen Combes, Erica Cornejo, Nelson Madrigal, Yury Yanowsky, and especially Sabi Varga, who seemed to find his own voice in Kylián's physical language - a style which welds together folk and classical motifs in a way that conjures isolation rather than community. Indeed, almost all of "Black and White" had clearly settled further into the company's bones, which only argues for more repertory performances of dance; great dance perhaps most fully blooms when it has become unconscious - and that takes time.

It takes time to understand a dance, too. "Black and White" is often as thematically dense as many classic plays, and it's certainly denser than almost any recent play I can think of. (And part of its appeal is that it often straddles the conceptual line between dance and theatre.) It's a commonplace that our comprehension of a play accretes over many performances and interpretations. Yet dances, even great dances, get far fewer public outings. I've seen most of Shakespeare's plays half a dozen or even a dozen or more times - and of course I've read them several times, too. Only you can't "read" a dance, and I've seen the great Balanchine dances at most two or three times apiece.



Still, thanks to YouTube, you can ponder "Black and White" at length - it's all there (with even one dance, "Sweet Dreams," that Boston Ballet didn't do), although in a different order than seen here, and even though watching it on your computer screen (sometimes broken up by varying camera angles) is hardly like watching it live. Still, you get the gist of it, I think; and it was interesting to me to just check in about details of certain sequences I wasn't sure about (it can be tricky taking in all the details of a fully realized dance, even on your second or third try).

So after repeated exposures, what do I think about this dance? Well, the first thing is that a better title for "Black and White" might be "Sex and Death." Because its seeming sexual scenarios are always arenas of aggression, haunted by a persistent sense of darkness and doom. The standard subtext of a pas de deux is seduction; here, it's usually blunt force, or even rape. Or maybe murder. Often the spectre of death is just off-stage, embodied, for instance, in the black, rigid ball gowns that stand watching the action of "Petite Mort" (a sobriquet for the orgasm that pretty much sums up Kylián's theme). And there's more than a hint of mortality in the shroud that ripples through the same piece like a dark tsunami to sweep all the dancers from the stage. Elsewhere the fatal is even intertwined with the natal - those same rigid ball gowns "birth" male dancers at the top of "Sarabande," and at the close of "Falling Angels," the women of the company seem to freeze in a position of labor that's also stiff as rigor mortis.

Although we really should replace the "sex" in "sex and death" with "sexual politics," because almost every interaction in "Black and White" is about power - there's really not much actual sex in the ballet at all. Instead, sex infuses everything else, engendering anger, dismay and isolation. The men of "Petite Mort" silently wield phallic rapiers before they woo - and when they manage to mount their respective mates, the women respond with closed, blocking knees, above which the males hover like birds of prey (an image which recurs again and again in the ballet, like so many of its motifs). In "Sarabande," the dancers rage at the female forms from which they have been cast - at one point even holding their shirts around their faces like vaginal frames and screaming out at the world. And if "Sarabande" infantilizes men, then "Falling Angels" mechanizes women - they come striding out at first like lionesses on the savannah, calm and powerful, but soon are obsessed with ever-more intricate routines that make less and less sense. No real leader emerges from their ranks; no real "story" evolves - this is a collective, not a Mark-Morris-style community. And of course no men appear; by the time the dancers sink to their backs at the finale, their legs spread wide, we realize we may as well have been watching robots as women.

There are, of course, interludes of rapture in "Black and White" - beautiful duets dot "Petite Mort," and even the men of "Sarabande" get some devastatingly lyrical solos. These, however, are laughed off the stage at the close of the dance, and even the pair dancing of "Petite Mort" and "No More Play" is quickly subsumed into the ongoing battle; the participants only get reprieves, not release. And the battle goes on and on - history hangs over "Black and White" like a second shroud. Its last, wacky number - "Sechs Tänze" (Six Dances, to Mozart's German ones) - is a campy take on lords and ladies that quickly devolves into sexual anarchy, with power structures toppled, men leaping into each others' arms, and giant drag queens stalking the stage like amazons. What's funniest about "Sechs Tänze," however, is that it's the first piece Kylián choreographed in "Black and White;" although now a ditzy show-topper, it's really the source of the whole piece, and the suite might better be read in reverse, as a long investigation of the serious themes buried in its silliness. And the picture Kylián paints, for all its sexy glamour, isn't very pretty. "No More Play" is a portrait of modernist despair that ends in exhaustion, "Petite Mort" an elegant image of baroque sterility - meanwhile "Sarabande" and "Falling Angels" reveal men and women who have completely disengaged from one another. Meanwhile ""Sechs Tänze" is gay camp - that holds court against a persistent, menacing rumble. Still, it ends in a bemused shrug, as celebratory bubbles fill the stage. Freedom at last from the power games of the past? we wonder to ourselves. Well, even the dancers don't seem sure. Whether those bubbles are a sign of real hope or just one more seductive illusion remains an open question.

Dancing in the dark

Excerpt from "Shutters Shut" by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León.

Reviewers have been tough on the current tour of Nederlands Dans Theater II, but you should ignore them, and try to scarf tickets to the remaining Celebrity Series performance tonight at BU - if you can, that is; they're probably sold out (they were last night).

It's true, however, that the crowd had clearly come to see the dancers rather than the dances. Nederlands Dans Theater II is essentially the "feeder" company for its namesake global powerhouse (which tours far less often); and its dancers, aged only 17(!)-22, are as fresh-faced as they are elastically talented.

There's also some truth in the charge that their choreographers - particularly Paul Lightfoot and Sol León (a.k.a. "Lightfoot León") - tend to exploit that youthful prowess rather than allow it to develop. The house style of Nederlands Dans Theater is an exciting amalgam of classical strictness, modern freedom, and street-wise moves - call it "break ballet," if you will - and these youngsters perform it better than anyone I've ever seen (the Kylián touch has crept into the repertory of just about every ballet company in the world, including Boston's). But said signature easily devolves into micro-management of the dancer, and sometimes a series of ever-tinier swivels and pops and breaks turned these performers into puppets. In the works of "Lightfoot León" in particular, they never got a break from the breaks - there were no long phrases, and thus little for them to interpret, and very few opportunities to connect with each other.

To be fair to "Lightfoot León," however, they exploited their control fetish expertly in one piece, "Shutters Shut," (above) set to Gertrude Stein's ""If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso." The choreographers' micro-beats mimicked perfectly Stein's iterative vocal rhythms (the nearly-nonsense verse was wryly read by the poet herself), while their usual atmosphere of alienated posture wittily matched something in the writer's po-faced deflation of grandeur. And dancers Jin Young Won and Anton Valdbauer performed the piece with a charming combination of grotesque grace and deadpan precision. Rarely has Stein seemed so transparent, or so amusing.

Alas, the two longer pieces by Lightfoot and León, "Said and Done" and "Sad Case," weren't as compelling. "Said and Done" proved pretentious and overblown, with its lone dancer standing in pain in a shower of black feathers, and "Sad Case," though almost bursting with energy, began to feel a bit reductive. "Case" at least had a poignantly perverse vibe - set to a bouncing Latin score, it seemed to be seeking the pain hidden within its own rambunctiousness; but alas, sometimes its contorted dancers seemed almost simian, and its many variations never built into anything cohesive.


Excerpts from Jiří Kylián's "Sleepless."

Jiří Kylián, the guiding light of this whole enterprise, had only one dance on the program, "Sleepless" (see above), but it was by far the most ambitious of the evening. It opened with a single female dancer (the fascinating Carolina Mancuso) creeping toward a pale, undulating wall, then, like Alice, vanishing into it. Other dancers soon popped out of it, however, and the piece (set to a percussive re-imagining of Mozart's Adagio in C-minor, for glass harmonica) quickly developed into a strange rumination on movement as a kind of perceptual dream, which was always bounded by that weirdly resonant wall. (It was interesting to compare "Sleepless" to "Walking Mad," by Johan Inger, which Hubbard Street Dance brought to town this season, and which depended on a very similar type of prop.) Kylián also afforded his dancers a bit of space in which to shine, via a suite of duets at the work's center. Here Mancuso shone again, sensitively partnered by Anton Valdbauer, although there was also clean, crisp work from Maud de la Purification and Roger Van der Poel. I hope we see this troupe again soon, but perhaps more in the hands of Kylián than "Lightfoot León."

Dirty dancing at the Ballet

A moment from "Falling Angels."

A triumph; a must-see; a dance that brings the audience to its feet, cheering. You could, I suppose, say that about, oh, Dirty Dancing, if you wanted to. But if you added the phrase, "And then sets the crowd to thinking," then you could only be talking about the far-sexier, far-dirtier "Black and White," the brilliant suite of dances by Jiří Kylián that Boston Ballet premiered at the Wang Center last night (and which only runs through Sunday; half-price offer here.) It was promoted as one of the major cultural events of the year, and it turned out to be just that.

All this even though the performance stumbled at its very first step (when I think the wrong piece of music, incredibly, began to play!). And the first offering, "No More Play," is a little diffuse and restrained to serve as an effective overture. But the program started to rock with "Petite Mort" (that's French slang for "orgasm," btw, all you Dirty Dancing fans) with its corsets and rapiers and dazzling duets, and from then on it never lapsed in energy or interest; and in retrospect, we could see how the moves and hesitations of "No More Play" served as an introduction to the language which Kylián later deployed through a dizzying range of settings and moods.

The five pieces (the remaining three are "Sarabande," "Falling Angels," and "Sechs Tänze") were actually choreographed over a span of five years, then arranged into a suite in the early 90's, and so serve as a guided tour through Kylián's thoughts and concerns during the period (roughly his middle years as Artistic Director of the influential Nederlands Dans Theater). And it's startling to ponder just how much cultural material he's layered into these moves, all while producing dances which are reliably gripping minute-to-minute. Central to the suite is an overarching meditation on the relation of classicism to modernism, and modernism to postmodernism (and then postmodernism to camp!) - an extreme thematic and historical latitude that would be all but impossible in theatre or the visual arts. But Kylián keeps his format so flexible that there's also room for intriguing detours into sexuality and its construction, role-playing and violence, and dance as a vehicle for both the individual and the group - as well as a determined exploration of the edge between narrative and "pure" movement (and even between dance and theatre). If that sounds like a lecture, fear not; the good news is that Kylián has the popular touch of a born entertainer, and "Black and White" is always sleek and even a little slick.

Binding the whole evening together is a set of dark ball gowns, rigid as rocks, and painted a deep black. Sometimes they hang overhead like funeral bells, or whiz by like bumper cars, or merely make ghostly, totemic appearances, but they're omnipresent, and seem to represent the cornerstone of the suite - the feminine with a capital F, rigid, ravishing, and imprisoning. In the suite's most iconic moment, from "Sarabande," they even seem to "birth" half-naked men from their skirts, who squirm and squeal - and sometimes scream - and struggle to breathe free. But do these men speak for the hidden male animus within the society "woman," or are they danseurs raging against the primacy of the ballerina - or are they simply modern men struggling with their "feminine sides" (the central solo, sensuously rendered here by Yury Yanowsky, suggests as much)? Kylián's genius is that he never insists on a single interpretation. Thus in "Petite Mort," when the men lay down their rapiers (with which they've made their slashing entrance) and greet their newly-arrived dancing partners, it's unclear whether they're actually laying their weapons aside, or merely picking up new ones. And when the tribe of women pounding through the many variations of "Falling Angels" change their formation, we can make out that dark ball gown standing silently behind them - hinting, perhaps, that the "new" woman isn't quite so new after all.

With or without all the structuralist symbology, however, Kylián always holds us with his formal command of the many dance modes he deploys. He opens with a stretch of bleak, questioning modernism ("No More Play"), then slips into an edgy, postmodern parody of classical duets ("Petite Mort," left) that slowly reveals its own rapturous, private beauty. The following "Sarabande" is more gestural theatre and striking lighting design than dance (I wish the final, mournful solo had been fuller), but is always fascinating, while "Falling Angels" - a percussive dance for eight women to Steve Reich's "Drumming, Part I" - proves a bracingly propulsive (yet oddly calm) piece of minimalist extrapolation (and perhaps the most impressive feat of physical memorization you'll ever see). The evening wraps, as postmodernism always seems to, with camp - "Sechs Tänze," a goofy romp to Mozart (below right), in which those ball gowns have morphed into giant drag queens, and everyone seems very, very confused in their powdered wigs until clouds of soap bubbles start floating in, and provide about as ditzily lovely a closing image as I can remember. If you're a long Ballet-watcher like me, you know that there's a whole circus troupe of hilarious clowns lurking within these dancers, and it's great fun to see them have a chance to cut loose.

So Kylián sends us out into the night in high spirits - and with perhaps more thematic material on our minds than it's possible to unpack. It's rare that a dance can be so smoothly accessible, and yet so rich (although by now, nearly twenty years after its first appearance, "Black and White" feels a bit more like recap than revelation). Of course it wouldn't seem so entertaining sans the skills of the Boston Ballet. As always, the company - or at least the men - had a little trouble with the synchronous precision that Kylián's choral movements demand (the eight women of "Falling Angels," perhaps due to past service in the corps, were by comparison a finely-tuned machine). But there were brilliant individual moments from almost everyone. Boyko Dossev and Larissa Ponomarenko brought exquisite grace to their swooping duet in "Petite Mort," as did Megan Gray and Lorin Mathis, while Yury Yanowsky and Sabi Varga found a sinuous tension in "Sarabande." The eight women of "Falling Angels" - Kathleen Breen Combes, Erica Cornejo, Melissa Hough, Rie Ichikawa, Heather Myers, Larissa Ponomarenko, Luciana Voltolini and Heather Waymack - were disciplined perfection, and there was new fire in familiar faces like Carlos Molina and Roman Rykine. Meanwhile Lorna Feijóo, Pavel Gurevich, Altankhuyag Dugaraa and Jared Redick were all articulately witty in the final shenanigans, and James Whiteside made a very impressive 10-foot-tall belle of the ball. Something tells me "Black and White" will probably loom as large over the local dance season - although isn't it time, particularly in a program titled "Black and White," with the whole Euro-African axis operating as its subtext, that we began to see some black boys and girls in the Boston Ballet? I mean, what's up with that?