In the face of apocalypse

The slowest, the fastest, the bleakest, the deepest, the hyperkinetic, the anti-kinetic, the sweetest, the most dangerous: Nederlands Dans Theater offered a whole spectrum of extremes in a program of three mysterious recent works by Jiri Kylian at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Tuesday.

Created between early 2002 and late 2003, the pieces all used new scores by Dirk Haubrich that punctuated a stream of subdued instrumental washes and textures with sudden outbursts of metallic crashes, grating noises or rhythmic pulses. These intrusions prefigured the climactic violence at the end of the evening as well as the pervasive sense of an outmoded way of life facing imminent collapse.

Kylian portrayed this theme sardonically in earlier works for the company he directed for 22 years, but an almost clinical detachment sent a chill through “Claude Pascal” and “Last Touch” on Tuesday. Each depicted isolated, self-obsessed characters in fancy period clothes -- characters who could be seen as symbols of European disintegration or as the incarnation of staid values and behavior increasingly irrelevant in the modern world.

Kylian provided these characters with a spoken text in “Claude Pascal.” Here, they wore black, carried and later exchanged white props of leisure (a fan, a walking stick, a ball, a tennis racquet) and reduced every subject they talked about to triviality. Emerging from a line of 13 door panels -- each mirrored on the inside, so we could see ourselves in Kylian’s character gallery -- they embodied a kind of useless, tetchy status quo, in contrast with six contemporary dancers emphasizing mastery of balance and passionate immediacy.

Skimming across the gleaming floor, pausing in challenging lifts for moments of ravishing intimacy, the three dancing couples represented the alternative to their talky, overdressed colleagues: a vision of wholeness and connection.

The absence of any such alternative made “Last Touch” grimly oppressive.

In this mime-play, exaggerated slow motion heightened the detailed interplay of six characters in a room covered in dust-cloths: a room that used to have pictures on the wall but now functioned as a holding cell for more clueless people (a society?) awaiting extinction.

No conventional dancing took place, but the cast’s meticulous control sustained the daring slo-mo pace of the piece and spotlighted the erotic interplay of the three couples. In a few passages, their actions became tableaux: all the women held high in their partners’ arms, for instance. But a sudden, enigmatic act of destruction shattered the piece’s heartbeat and illusion of domestic normalcy.

In “27’52”,” the clothing (again by Joke Visser) remained contemporary, the score included melodic references to Mahler, and the six dancers’ overlapping solos and duets initially seemed to promise affirmation. But that turned out to be another illusion of normalcy, for all the beauty, skill and inspiration of these dancers soon began to vanish as the ground swallowed them up or the sky fell onto them.

In one duet for Lydia Bustinduy and Medhi Walerski, gunfire or explosions propelled the brilliant partnering innovations evident throughout both “27’52” “ and “Claude Pascal,” as if the force of those shots or bombardments was throwing the dancers from one step to the next. Call it the ultimate millennial pas de deux: virtuosity at once horrific and despairing.

A final duet for Natasa Novotna and Vaclav Kunes provided an extended immersion in lush Kylian lyricism -- but no happy ending. Not now.

Kylian sees what we see in the world today, and whether you found his Tuesday program a meditation on the welcome destruction of the old order or a portrait of societal paralysis in a time of escalating barbarism, uplift was never among its priorities.

Indeed, Kylian may well have assigned Nederlands Dans Theater to perform funeral rites for Western culture in Costa Mesa on Tuesday.

If so, the send-off superbly commemorated that culture through its high conceptual ambition, stunning creative surety and transcendent performances. And what greater choreographer or company could you choose to be dancing on our graves?

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Nederlands Dans Theater

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $20-$75

Contact: (714) 740-7878