An Elegant Partnering of Performers, Place

It’s no longer news in the dance world that in his 21 years as artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, Jiri Kylian has created a repertory and a company virtually unsurpassed in eloquence--a beau ideal of modernist expression wedding refinement of technique to depth of soul. That much everyone knew.

But who guessed that Kylian could make the stage itself into a dancer--that in his “Bella Figura” the theater proscenium would iris down to the size and proportions of a window, then zoom out for panoramic spectacle lit by towers of fire? That Kylian could devise decor allowing the Segerstrom Hall picture-frame to follow the dancers, always creating fertile new spatial fields for them and becoming a true partner in the choreography? Or it could vanish entirely in overlapping layers of black, leaving the dancers suspended in an endless void?

The highlight of the company’s exciting opening program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Saturday, “Bella Figura” begins with the dancers warming up underneath two glass cases hung high above the stage--each containing an anatomically detailed naked human figure.

Thereafter, this 1995 suite for five women and four men sustains its focus on showcasing the body beautiful in dreamlike isolation, with a pantheon of Baroque composers (on tape) helping make the piece’s semi-nudity into a lush, neoclassical display. Throughout, the choreography remains fast, complex, often formal--though with ravishing flashes of tenderness (a woman rushing from the darkness to cradle a man), or sensuality (a man brushing his leg across a woman’s back), or humor (a couple bedeviled by twitches of shoulder, wrist and ankle).

A series of magnificent overlapping duets ends the piece in something close to sublime lyricism, an indication, perhaps, that Kylian has broken through the pessimism dominating the works seen on his company’s 1994 visit and discovered what the rest of us always knew: that, in an increasingly dark world, his dancers are beautiful enough to give almost anyone renewed faith.

The Saturday program (the start of a seven-performance engagement that lasts through Saturday) also featured Kylian’s powerful “Symphony of Psalms,” last seen locally at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 16 years ago when it typified human struggle and resilience in the face of social turbulence and death itself.

In 1996, it continues to look ceaselessly--indeed, restlessly--inventive, and frequently daring in the way it deliberately undercuts the text of its Stravinsky accompaniment. But William Katz’s backdrop of carpets still seems a whimsical admission that the work is undesignable--except, perhaps, by the high-tech Kylian of “Bella Figura.” And the celebrated exit upstage into darkness by all 16 dancers has been stolen and adapted by so many choreographers that it now makes you think less about the inevitability of death than the inevitability of finding Kylian’s ideas in other people’s work.

For starters, there’s a farewell trek upstage into darkness on the same Nederlands program: the nude finale to Paul Lightfoot’s brand-new octet “Start to Finish.” Just 29 and, like Kylian, a product of the Royal Ballet school in London, Lightfoot makes borrowed ideas his own by piling them up in such profusion that they form a new choreographic landscape.

Starting with a title that may be a pun, since Finnish is the language jabbered in its opening solo, “Start to Finish” offers a wildly whimsical celebration of human eccentricity that Lightfoot gilds with his own Baroque record collection and makes spatially distinctive with a emphasis on back-to-front movement paths. He’s also brilliant at splicing slumps to spasms, lurches to classical legwork--and making you love every lummox on view.

If Kylian thinks dancers are hauntingly beautiful, Lightfoot finds them delightfully weird--though he, too, senses a mystery in human individuality that he invokes without trying to explain. Like Kylian, he seems to be pushing at the limits of dance structure and staging--and it could be very satisfying to watch him grow in the next few years. Besides, how many other choreographers have names perfectly suited to their styles?

* Nederlands Dans Theater repeats this program Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The company dances a different program (same choreographers, same venue) Tuesday-Thursday, at 8 p.m. $18-$59. (714) 556-2787.