E-Mail This Article to a Friend No biz Susan Stroman at NYCB, plus Hubbard Street Dance Chicago BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

The relationship between Broadway and ballet has been tightening little by little for years. Ballet dancers have gotten flashier and more extroverted; show dancers have piled on more technique. Susan Stroman’s new Double Feature, for New York City Ballet, demonstrates that there’s still a big difference between genres, and that she hasn’t made a convincing fusion.

Stroman belongs to the recent generation of dancemakers who’ve come to ballet from a successful Broadway career. Usually the traffic has gone in the other direction, with ballet choreographers venturing into show business. George Balanchine did masses of commercial work in the 1930s and ’40s, but for a lot of reasons, it stayed on the back pages of his résumé.

Balanchine often used commercial opportunities to have fun with classical conventions that would be taken more respectfully elsewhere. I’m thinking of his Swan Lake and Sheherazade send-ups, and his idea of Romeo and Juliet as a ballet/tap tournament. These morsels can be seen in movies. Among the tantalizing but vanished treasures, there’s stuff like the 1942 Ballet of the Elephants (to Stravinsky’s Circus Polka) and "The Ill-Tempered Clavichord" from the 1943 musical What’s Up?

Balanchine’s relish for these out-of-school antics spilled over into his popular ballets. In pieces like Who Cares (Gershwin) and Union Jack (English music hall), he could set out a completely classical form, lightly disguised in thematic clothing, and make you see ballet as a broader playing field than you’d thought. The dancers didn’t actually have to do jazz dancing or honky-tonk; they only had to wink at it. Maybe Balanchine felt it would be undignified to use vernacular material in a literal way, but popular ballets in his hands never turned out stodgy.

What Susan Stroman does in Double Feature is to apply a minimally skewed ballet vocabulary to a silent-movie pretext. The result, in her hands, is efficient, entertaining, and styleless. For the first act, "The Blue Necklace," Stroman and Glen Kelly dreamed up a melodrama about a baby switch, a mean stepmother, and a happy ending where the ill-treated but cheerful heroine gets Prince Charming and is reunited with her real mother at one fairy-tale party. "Makin’ Whoopee," the second act on the bill, is based on Buster Keaton’s 1925 movie Seven Chances, which is about a hapless hero who will inherit $7 million if only he can find someone to marry by seven p.m. Although Keaton didn’t like the script, he turned Seven Chances into an inspired updraft of wackiness. He scrambles out of one predicament only to land in something worse. As in a nightmare, he must outrun diminishing time and expanding space. The later it gets, the farther he has to go to solve his problem. On screen, these distortions become not only plausible but funny. Translated to Stroman’s more pragmatic stage world, the plot dissolves into the figment that it is.

Tom Gold plays the Keaton character with inexhaustible wide-eyed bashfulness and marathon legs. When he fails to win several prospects, he advertises for a bride and then has to escape from a churchful of thwarted applicants. Keaton’s dénouement may be the greatest chase in movie history, involving trolley cars, cops, beehives, taxicabs, construction equipment, barbed wire, rowboats, brickbats, and a football game as the hundreds of would-be brides pursue him through town and over hill and dale, till they turn into an avalanche of marauding boulders. Stroman’s horde looks like a pack of multi-gendered Wilis.

In "The Blue Necklace," old stage tropes are dressed up in glamorous pre-technicolor costumes by William Ivey Long. The baby bundles are left on the church steps. The stuck-up daughter wrangles with the virtuous foundling. Kyra Nichols, NYCB’s still-gorgeous senior ballerina, played the awful mom with social-climbing gusto.

Stroman’s choreography has no particular distinction, either as ’20s-inflected ballet or as a subject for jazz-age satire. It serves as a vehicle for presenting pretty girls and romantic get-togethers while the plot bumps along with the assistance of title cards projected on the backdrop. Dance after dance skimmed over the peppy Irving Berlin songs, which were played infectiously in Doug Besterman’s orchestrations by NYCB’s fine big band. Rhythmic bounce and echoes of Fred and Ginger went unnoticed on the stage until the appearance of Damian Woetzel as the matinee idol our heroine has been dreaming about. Then he charmed the whole party with his generous turns and jumps, his dead-on portrayal of a bon vivant who’s also a nice guy.

THE COMBINATION of focused choreography and a dancer’s instinct for style is getting rare. Broadway’s big sell has infiltrated modern dance as well as ballet, and the audience seems delighted. One of the outfits that has been perfecting a knockout delivery for years, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, arrived at the Shubert Theatre last weekend for a FleetBoston Celebrity Series–sponsored appearance. Hubbard Street says it does contemporary dance, which has become synonymous with choreography that speaks the language of a technically demanding, high-powered culture.

The four works on the program, though outwardly different, were all performed with Hubbard Street’s hyperbolic intensity, even the parts that had some implicit introspectiveness. They dated from the late ’80s to the late ’90s, and I had a sense of nostalgia for the postmodern dance strategies and sensibility that lay behind each one. Postmodern dance of the previous decades opened up big doors to possibilities in movement, composition, and subject matter, and here Hubbard Street was demonstrating how those discoveries have implemented a popular dance theater.

Rooster (1991), by the English choreographer Christopher Bruce, used the music and attitude of the Rolling Stones for a suite of dances about cruising modeled on Twyla Tharp’s cool pop-music anthologies of the ’70s. Bruce’s men are all strong and funky, and the women are all slinky and tough, and all of them make the best of rejection. Daniel Ezralow’s SUPER STRAIGHT is coming down (1989) could have been the same group in a more alienated school. Someone is always being left out, but all of them keep on jumping and spinning, falling and leaping up to spin again.

I would call Susan Marshall’s Kiss (1987) an early trapeze work, air dancing being one of the circus skills the modern dancers acquired during the postmodern days. In this small duet, Cheryl Mann and Tobin Del Cuore are suspended by harnesses on their own ropes, and the dance is about embracing and pushing off from embracing. A whole gamut of emotional attachments is suggested as the dancers circle in a clinch, fly out in big arcs on the unwinding ropes, spiral back together again. Mann and Del Cuore seemed harsh and even violent at times, whereas the original dancers, Eileen Thomas and the late Arthur Armijo, were tender. In both versions, though, the woman seemed like the initiator to me; the man was more passive, more needy.

I’ve now seen Ohad Naharin’s 1999 Minus 16 four times, with different companies. This movable piece has big blocks of material that Naharin adds to, subtracts, and edits according to the group he’s setting it for. I still find it galvanizing even if Hubbard Street now performs it without a trace of vulnerability. Parts of it come from the democratic days when members of the audience could be invited up on the stage, dancers told personal stories, and movement could be as simple as sitting in a chair or taking off your clothes.

The dance begins during intermission. One man comes out in front of the curtain and begins dancing a cha cha to some cheap lounge music. He has to keep going for about 20 minutes, doing whatever he can think up, until the house lights go down and the empty stage is revealed. Finally, another dancer walks out and begins doing his own cha cha. One by one, all 15 or so company members join in a free-for-all of self-absorbed twitching elbows, arms jerking tight to the body, feet strutting in place. With no warning, the music switches to a bossa nova and the whole company explodes into a unison dance of huge leaps and turns.

After this, there’s a typically postmodern dance structure for women: accompanied by a metronome, they do a sequence in unison that moves across the front of the stage. As soon as one woman disappears into the wings, another one replaces her from the other side, continuing the sequence. In another structure, the dancers do little solos that they’ve probably choreographed themselves while their voices on tape tell cheerful or painful anecdotes.

Besides the big number where some of the audience gets to participate, the showpiece of this long and energetic work is the electrifying chair dance. Seated in a semi-circle, dressed in men’s evening clothes, the dancers hurl through a sequence of moves that’s augmented with each repetition of a pounding Israeli folk song. Mostly sitting down, they pitch forward, stamp their feet, throw their bodies backward, sling both arms to one side. They stand up and sing the chorus of the song with the accompanying tape. They never stop, and their fierce intensity never lets down. By turns they tear off their jackets, their pants, their shirts, their shoes and throw them into a pile in the center.

I have never known what this song is about, but the whole thing works up to a kind of frenzy — a religious or militaristic ritual, or simply a euphoria of highly organized dance excess.