The audience today loves dancing, no doubt about that. What it doesn’t love is the aura of preciousness and affectation that clings to ballet. Classical ballet companies have yet to find convincing ways to erase these misconceptions and hook the permanent audience they need — and still preserve the idea of classicism. Meanwhile, other dance enterprises thrive by applying ballet’s components to performance that doesn’t intimidate. Two almost diametrically opposite examples of what we might call post-ballet dance faced each other across Tremont Street last weekend, and both had plenty of satisfied customers.

Mark Morris creates modern dances that have the formality and integrity of ballets. His company made its annual FleetBoston Celebrity Series appearance at the Shubert Theatre, giving four performances of a single program. At the Wang Theatre, the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg launched a massive US tour with four performances of its evening-length spectacle Who’s Who.

The Eifman Ballet’s informational verbiage touts the noble political and artistic intentions of director/choreographer Boris Eifman while trumpeting how successful the company has been all over the world. In two and a half pages of back patting, the program managed only three sentences of " synopsis " for the sprawling pastiche of music, narrative, and high-energy hoofing we were to see. Two dancers were listed for every main part, but the company didn’t inform the audience who was actually dancing Saturday night. As the evening went on and stereotype followed poorly digested cliché, I decided the ballet wasn’t about individual dancers. Instead it was a cartoon of 1920s America as skimmed from old movies, maybe Russian movies.

Who’s Who concerns two Russian ballet dancers who flee the Revolution and seek the American Dream, to the tune of jazz, swing, and Rachmaninov. Right away they annoy some gangsters and dress up in drag to disguise themselves. But they behave so outrageously, you can spot them a mile off. One of them falls for a chorus girl who thinks he’s just being motherly. The other gets engaged to a movie director resembling Cecil B. DeMille and isn’t unwigged until their wedding. The plot is laced with improbabilities like the transformation of the chorus girl from a gawky waif into a ballerina simply by the application of toe shoes.

Although much of the story takes place in Prohibition nightclubs and tawdry dressing rooms, the ballet is staged on a grand scale. All of the action is arranged and projected out to the audience bigger than life. Cubistic, machinelike scenery moves in and out to change the scale. Hanging where the moon should be is a huge metallic circle that seems made of bas reliefs of skyscrapers but sometimes spins like a windmill or winks on and off in the dark. Smoke hangs over most of the scenes, including a Hollywood beach. And there are ramps, Venetian blinds, chandeliers, and enough costumes to stage an entire Boston Ballet season.

When the main characters give vent to their feelings, their solos are all very expressionistic — desperate, intense, and danced with open mouths to signify passion. In the duets, whether the characters are fighting or making love or both, they’re either twisting and angling into grotesque shapes or stretching their arms and legs out as far as they can, sometimes in leaps, sometimes in high kicks. Then there are big unison choruses that always seem to end in rows facing the audience. All of the drag sequences and all of the chorus-girl vamping and the gangster chases and beatings are performed as over-the-top burlesque.

The music — by Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn, Louis Prima, and Count Basie with some anachronistic jazzmen thrown in (Stan Kenton for instance), together with miscellaneous pop-band tunes, klezmerish orchestral music by Kol Simcha, and bits of Rachmaninov and Samuel Barber —bounces you from one specific stylistic impression to another. But either the dances set to these selections have a bland modern-balletic style or they slide off target. We see the chorus girlfriend noodling around on a table and chair, as if making up a tap dance, but she’s faking it, with halting heel-and-toe steps and a few shuffles. The chorus lines are clumsy approximations of Broadway dancing and Broadway sex appeal.

When the lovelorn Alex finally tears off his wig and dress for good — I forget what happens to the shady nightclub boss who’s after him — he acquires a magnificent ballet company all his own. We don’t find out who bankrolled it. Max, his partner en travesti, heads back to the homeland after failing to marry the movie mogul. Maybe he’ll become the next populist choreographer in Soviet ballet.

The Eifman Ballet deploys impressive production values, improbable plots with tempestuous leading characters, and hordes of ensemble dancers who surge forward and leap with precise abandon, yet Who’s Who amounts to only a gloss of a ballet. Mark Morris, with one small, seemingly trivial piece, made a primer for what ballet can do when it starts at bedrock.

I’d seen Foursome (2002) last summer at Jacob’s Pillow and enjoyed its juxtaposing of two fit young dancers with two older gentlemen in less than ideal shape. Revisiting the dance Friday night, I thought it was casually defining and then expanding on the basics of dancemaking. When the two contrasting sets of men walk out on the stage, you might think fathers and sons, mentors and disciples, something like that. But Morris and Guillermo Resto, John Heginbotham and David Leventhal don’t act out relationships. The movement patterns themselves suggest shifting situations and encounters.

For the first of 10 short musical selections, one of the Erik Satie Gnossiennes as played by pianist Ilan Rechtman, they just walk and pause, focusing on wherever they’re going. It looks completely natural except that their movements are timed with the music. One after another, in twos or all together, they point in the same direction, squat, trip over someone else’s foot. It still looks natural, except that instead of doing these things at random, they time them to the music and there’s a prearranged order. It’s already a dance.

Rechtman begins one of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Seven Hungarian Dances and the men look at each other intently, on the music. They touch a hand to a shoulder, turn a certain way together. The simple moves seem loaded. You start to learn the music, too, because the movement is so transparent. The music suggests folk dancing. Leventhal and Heginbotham, side by side, show each other a pointed foot, a stamp, the beginnings of a csárdás perhaps.

The dance goes on this way, building little dramatic scenes and group designs. By the end, all the men have acquired a little more character, but they haven’t really done anything except show us the music, and in the process they’ve shown us the possibilities of choreography.

Mark Morris probably makes dances this way all the time, and sometimes his biggest, most balletic ones seem didactic to me, or overly literal. In the earliest piece on the program, New Love Song Waltzes (1982), with Rechtman and Sara Davis Buechner accompanying a quartet of singers, there seemed to be so many movement patterns, you couldn’t keep track of the dancers. After a vigorous solo by Michelle Yard, she and nine others recombined in playful small groups, chains, pinwheels, and more intricate figures, like a line of dancers who had to step over the rolling bodies of other dancers. None of it was typically romantic, but the patterns were as changeable and moody as the lovelorn verses set by Brahms.

The rest of the program included Going Away Party (1990), a send-up of the C&W scene, and V (2001), Morris’s choral dance to the Schumann Piano Quintet, Rechtman performing with Yosuke Kawasaki and Matilda Kaul (violin), Jessica Troy (viola), and Wolfram Koessel (cello). V has no pretext except the music, and it shows Morris’s pleasure at sheer composition. He sets out two groups of seven dancers who’re distinguished by their Martin Pakledinaz costumes. One group wear electric-blue briefs and silky tunics slit open just below the throat so they give us tantalizing glimpses of skin as the dancers move. The other group are in creamy white sleeveless tops and pants. Both sets of costumes are unisex.

The blue group dance the exposition of Schumann’s first movement in a V formation; for the repeat they’re replaced by the white group in an inverted-V formation. Having established this bipartite relationship, Morris makes small groups and partnerships that recur in remixed combinations of team members for the rest of the dance. They stride across in the footlights-to-backdrop phalanxes I think of as Morris’s signature floor pattern. They crawl on their fingers and toes, one step at a time. The women spring backward and rest on the men’s shoulders; the men carry them upstage. We don’t find out whether the two groups will fully merge or remain separate until the very last notes of the piece.