The buddy system

Although it occasionally brings full-evening works on its American tours, the accomplished, versatile Lyon Opera Ballet usually presents a gallery of Euro-American modernism -- as it did Friday in the UCLA Live series at Royce Hall.

The four choreographic exhibits on view differed radically in style but adopted virtually the same structure: ensemble statements leading to duets. Danced sequentially or simultaneously, as statements of relationship or experiments in partnering, these duets became the focus of the evening, the revelation of each choreographer’s unique talents and priorities.

An anomaly on this program, Jiri Kylian’s 1991 “Un Ballo,” began with duets, three of them -- or, if you like, one duet passed from couple to couple. It then deployed the 14-member cast in simultaneous duets of spectacular fluidity, intricacy and invention.

Set to lush music by Ravel, with more than 40 candles burning on a grid overhead, the piece might have become impossibly sentimental except for the nonstop dynamism and the periodic humor that Kylian enforced. Many of the motifs introduced in the opening sections returned, including sculptural manipulations of skirt-fabric and passages in which the women were swirled along the floor and then pulled up into lifts.

Occasionally, the Lyon dancers’ justly celebrated precision faltered here -- but it remained exemplary in William Forsythe’s challenging 1991 ensemble piece “Second Detail” to weirdly pulsing mechanical music by Thom Willems. (Imagine a hurdy-gurdy that wants to be an electric guitar.)

Initially Forsythe set passages of formal balletic rectitude against moments of iconoclastic self-expression -- with the explosive partnership between Antonio Ruz and Eva Dewaele helping trace the progressive breakdown of classicism as we know it (though the women continued to dance on pointe).

But while Ruz performed a pas de deux with Iratxe Ansa Santesteban at the front of the stage, combining passion and prowess in equal measure, Julie Tardy Dupeyron entered at the back. Her loose hair, flowing dress, bare feet and enormous smear of lipstick clashed with the tidy, uniform look of her colleagues. But before the piece ended, Dupeyron led or inspired the company to venture even further out of the classical box -- toward something we might call divine anarchy.

Russell Maliphant’s 3-week-old modern-dance indulgence, “twelvetwentyone,” to music by Mukul, tried for a darker statement of this same vision of freedom but faltered often, and badly. Initially, it seemed about sexual politics, with the women’s movement active and purposeful but the men’s limp and directionless.

However, after a mercurial divided duet for Hongjun Li on the right side of the stage and Julie Guibert (dimly lighted) on the left, Maliphant shifted gears and introduced some diversionary hand-jive isolated by trick lighting. (Harald Lander did it better with feet in 1948.)

Finally a duet for Guibert and Ashley Chen of no special distinction beyond the execution expanded until all 12 dancers were engaged in what looked like an especially uninspired contact improvisation session. Very strenuous, going nowhere.

To close the program and display the dancers’ mastery of weighty, character-based choreography, Lyon programmed “Jardi Tancat,” Nacho Duato’s 1983 sextet to Catalan poems set to music by Maria del Mar Bonet.

Duato’s style is innately sensual, but here he worked for a sense of harsh physical labor through ensemble choreography that incorporated gestural motifs based on farming tasks. The duets softened the bleakness somewhat but kept a fatalistic forbearance in focus, especially in the performances of Santesteban with Michael Walters and Marketa Plzakova with Andrew Boddington.

A ballet depicting a situation but no actual story (like “Les Sylphides”), the work manages in just 16 minutes to convey the sense of a whole nation’s endurance and solidarity.

Taped music accompanied all four works. The UCLA program booklet contained generous amounts of biographical and background data but little information about who exactly danced the major solos and duets in the Forsythe, Maliphant and Duato pieces.