A Robbins riff on movie magic

Choreographer Jerome Robbins has been the forgotten man in the ongoing New York City Ballet visit to Southern California, not only inevitably overshadowed by the celebrations of George Balanchine’s centennial but also yielding the stage to dance-makers Christopher Wheeldon and Peter Martins with far less justification.

On Thursday, the company presented a four-part program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that included “I’m Old Fashioned” (1983), the one work in the Southland repertory by longtime company co-director Robbins (who died in 1998). It is perhaps the most complex, unusual pop ballet ever created.

After beginning with the screening of a romantic dance by Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth from the 1942 film “You Were Never Lovelier,” the ballet introduces classical variations for three couples and corps inspired by the film duet.

Composer Morton Gould started by rearranging the Jerome Kern ballad accompanying Astaire and Hayworth but soon sliced it into motifs, while Robbins developed movement ideas from their dancing.

Unfortunately, the ballet begins to go out of focus as the music and choreography grow increasingly distant from their source materials. But it recoups splendidly with a finale in which the whole cast wears Florence Klotz costumes derived from the film originals and dances along with Astaire and Hayworth before waving goodbye.

Rachel Rutherford, Arch Higgins, Jared Angle and, especially, Maria Kowroski performed expertly enough Thursday, but the heady glow of the film partnership existed only when Jenifer Ringer and Nikolaj Hubbe graced the stage.

Ringer seemed lost in a dream world, and Hubbe proved able to join her there as well as define a whimsical, wide-awake virtuosity.

Gould’s formal experiments here set the seal on an evening rich in musical interest, with violinists Arturo Delmoni and Kurt Nikkanen providing the lyric soul of Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco” (1941) and duo pianists Cameron Grant and Richard Moredock supplying the rhythmic propulsion for Martins’ “Hallelujah Junction” (2001).

The serenity of “Concerto Barocco” always seems miraculous, particularly when dancers such as Yvonne Borree and James Fayette can make the demands of the hyperextended central duet invisible and achieve a sense of intimate connection to the music by Bach and a deep involvement with each other. The eight-woman corps supplemented their dancing artfully.

The outer movements may have been less satisfying -- Rutherford initially looked bumptious opposite Borree -- but this masterwork still has the power to make slow dancing overpoweringly hypnotic.

Where the choreography for “Concerto Barocco” developed organically from its score, Martins most often ignored composer John Adams’ structural priorities in “Hallelujah Junction” in favor of irrelevant diversions. Music and dance do fleetingly merge (in a brief duet for the two lead men, for instance), but Martins mostly pursued arbitrary playoffs between cadres of dancers wearing either white or black costumes by Kirsten Lund Nielsen.

Breathlessly flying through bravura step-combinations, Benjamin Millepied attacked his role like a finalist in some technique-obsessed ballet competition, while Janie Taylor and Sebastien Marcovici glumly took final exams for Pas de Deux 101.

They passed, but Martins needs to write on the blackboard 100 times, “I believe in John Adams. You believe in John Adams. He believes in John Adams. She believes in John Adams....”

Completing the bill: a winning if occasionally accident-prone performance by Alexandra Ansanelli and Stephen Hanna of Balanchine’s familiar “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” (1960). Maurice Kaplow led the company orchestra in the Balanchine ballets, and Moredock conducted the Robbins. The program will repeat this afternoon.

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New York City Ballet

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 2 and 8 p.m. today,

2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $25 to $95

Contact: (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-7878