‘GUESTS’ PREMIERE : THE JOFFREY BALLET TAMES MARK MORRIS

Los Angeles seems to have caught up late with Mark Morris.

The dancer-choreographer, 30, may just be the hottest property in American dance today. He has shocked, provoked and delighted audiences from Seattle, where he lives, to New York, where all definitive discoveries still take place.

He has gone through his erotic enfant-terrible period and, it would seem, exhausted his wry-social-comment period.

We caught a brief, tantalizing and possibly sanitized glimpse of his art and his own company at Cal State Long Beach this summer. Now, at least four years after the rest of the universe started gasping at his daring and applauding his savoir-faire, the Los Angeles dance establishment has paid its respects.

It has paid its respects, alas, to a very respectable Morris. Possibly too respectable.

Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Joffrey Ballet introduced its first Morris opus as part of the company’s own 30th-birthday celebration. Those who came hoping for nudity or iconoclasm or biting satire or strange narrative flights or lewd duets between dancers and plastic baby-dolls had to be disappointed.

Morris apparently has entered his let’s-listen-to-the-old-music-and-be-abstract phase. The wild kid is getting mellow. We aren’t sure it is a change for the better.

His newest vehicle, a 24-minute ensemble piece called “Esteemed Guests” (don’t ask me why), is reasonably interesting, eminently polite, gratifyingly sensitive to the musical pulse and strangely lacking in focus and thrust.

Appropriating a peppery C.P.E. Bach score--the A-major Cello Concerto--Morris concocts a busy, gutsy, earthy but ultimately bland fusion of Baroque rhetoric, classical convention and modernist gesture.

With a little help from the ubiquitous Santo Loquasto, he dresses his 15 energetic dancers in knee-length unitards, with black-net tank tops for the men and comparable skirts for the women. Most important, perhaps, he makes everyone wear proper, black ballet slippers.

The women dance on pointe, of course. No bare feet allowed here.

The men, often assigned identical steps, offer an unreasonable facsimile of tippy-toe maneuvers. Morris has always favored equality between the sexes.

His choreography requires a lot of extensions, a lot of posturing and a lot of falling to the ground--on the beat. The pervasive structural motive finds the men facing the women in a pair of diagonal lines, with a soloist or two or three offering independent but related counterpoint at one side. Repetition of movement appears to be the key expressive device, the initial impulses gradually ornamented with subtle permutations and combinations.

The dancers tend to use their arms more than their legs. They often manage to suggest movement while staying in one place. One senses the magnetism of the floor and the essentially ponderous nature of the exercise, even when the actual vocabulary of motion and music insists on airy elegance.

Morris creates undoubted tension. He dabbles in compelling images. He juxtaposes the free and the formal with gutsy elan. He challenges his dancers. But he ends up saying little, asking little, stretching our visions little.

A disappointment.

Although the ever-versatile Joffrey dancers responded to his sometimes unorthodox urgings with obvious good spirits, the inaugural performance seemed a bit ragged.

Even so, one could admire the nimble convolutions of Jennifer Habig and Beatriz Rodriguez in the opening Allegro, the willowy insinuations of Julie Janus in the stark Largo, and the muscular elan of Jerel Hilding and Tom Mossbrucker in the Allegro finale.

Conducting an excellent ad-hoc orchestra, Allen Lewis tended appreciatively to C.P.E. Bach in the pit. Unfortunately, Stephen Erdody found the bravura of the cello solos something of a strain.

The typically eclectic triple bill, otherwise familiar, opened with Paul Taylor’s “Arden Court” and closed with Gerald Arpino’s “Kettentanz.”