Youthful artists come of age

The only problem for Nederlands Dans Theater II has always been to steer its young performers (ages 17 to 22) away from the fabled expressive depth and nuance that makes its parent company one of the world’s great contemporary ensembles.

Instead, this dancing farm team needed to develop its own distinctive identity from sheer fervor, muscle power and animal energy, even in repertory handed down from above.

Mission accomplished at UCLA on Saturday, perhaps the most consistently thrilling program the company has ever performed in Southern California.

Take the explosive, anarchic impulse of rock dancing and add the ironic edge and hybrid style of current European ballet and modern dance -- that’s what NDT2 unleashed in Royce Hall, and it will be hard to forget.

The oldest work on the program, Jiri Kylian’s “Six Dances” (1986), put the dancers in white makeup and antique underwear for small-scale encounters that alternated between mock-aristocratic balleticism and quirky, modernistic irreverence.

Every sequence also ended with a theatrical coup: a sight gag usually involving black ball gowns moving under their own power.

Like much European dance of its time, the work can be seen as a statement about the lost primacy of European culture, but also as one that greets that loss with a sense of relief. It also opens new avenues to music visualization, in this case dancing to Mozart.

NDT2, however, left no time for analysis on Saturday with its forceful, detailed, high-velocity performance.

The slapping and punching motifs that Kylian turned into unorthodox motifs became a kind of rock-commedia dell’arte laminate here, and soloist Parvaneh Scharafali shaped a brief but complex pileup of twitches, shudders and flyaway gestures into a cool index of millennial virtuosity.

Kylian’s lessons in musicality weren’t lost on Johan Inger, a Swedish choreographer and former member of the main Nederlands Dans Theater company. His “Mellantid” was the big discovery of NDT2’s local visit in 1997 and the U.S. premiere of his “Dream Play” (2000) on Saturday confirmed his mastery with a wholly contemporary and persuasive dance drama set to the first half of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

Inger increasingly focused on Mehdi Walerski’s misadventures with the deceptively yielding Marthe Krummenacher and the openly hostile Scharafali. However, his choreography proved especially potent when all four men in the cast were stomping the floor and pummeling the air as if absolutely demented -- but exactly in synch with the score’s intricate rhythms.

Completing the program: Ohad Naharin’s ensemble showpiece “Minus 16” (1991), a very familiar “greatest hits” compilation of hot moments from the Israeli choreographer’s earlier works. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performed it at the Alex Theatre in Glendale in January and in some sections outclassed the NDT2 performance.

At one point, for instance, the dancers must solo to audiotapes telling about themselves, and the Chicago cast spent less time resisting the concept (and merely repeating their names), offering a wider range of stories, including a recipe for guacamole.

The audience participation segment also looked less manipulative at the Alex but, again, when it came to full-out physicality delivered with surgical precision, NDT2 remained peerless.