E-Mail This Article to a Friend Extreme dancing Boston Ballet’s ‘Drink to Me Only’ rep program; Anna Myer at the Tsai Center BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Jorma Elo’s Plan to B was the hit of the season’s final repertory program at Boston Ballet. At least on opening night last Thursday, you could feel the audience gathering itself together for a tremendous ovation from the minute Joel Prouty flung himself into the air like a snowboarder sailing off a cliff. Prouty launched two tilted turns, landed without a bump, and sped away before a few bursts of stunned applause broke out. By then, the dance was continuing its brief, hypersonic trajectory, and the audience didn’t really catch up until the end, when it stood and screamed its acknowledgment of Prouty and his five intrepid teammates. Elo was obviously trying to push the dancers to their max, but even he seemed surprised at the delirious reception.

The music, selections by the 17th-century German violin master Heinrich von Biber, sounded like exercises to me — fast, repetitive scales and finger workouts with continuo trudging sturdily underneath. (Diane Pettipaw was the violinist, Kevin Galie played the positif organ, Marina Gendel the harpsichord.) What made the dance more than a set of advanced-level classroom endeavors was the risk it demanded. Everything was taken at a run. Legs were thrown into extension, spins descended into pliés, people did one-handed cartwheels with their legs twisting in the air. The first-night cast comprised Sarah Lamb, Larissa Ponomarenko, Jared Redick, Raul Salamanca and Sabi Varga along with Prouty. On Saturday afternoon, with a second cast, the piece looked energetic but not Olympian.

The program’s other premiere, Val Caniparoli’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (Béla Bartók), was more substantial choreographically but no less demanding. Catching some of the music’s Gypsy passion, the dancers faced new technical challenges. Women were lifted as they rearranged their leg positions. They slid on their pointes, smack into the arms of their partners. They turned very fast and were halted in midstream.

The intense and ingenious movement material was laid out in formal patterns, not always the ones you expected. Although there were 12 dancers, the ballet began and ended with eight. Somehow, two couples had come and gone, almost by stealth, and you were watching all the time.

Caniparoli’s ballet was the third in this big evening of contemporary ballets with stagefuls of over-achieving dancers. The opener, Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, seemed to me the least frenetic and the most generous, giving the dancers space to be seen.

Morris used what might be called 20th-century musical exercises, 13 of Virgil Thomson’s Etudes for Piano, played on stage by Virginia Eskin. These larky little pieces with amusing titles ranged from "Chromatic Double Harmonies" and "Repeating Tremolo" to rollicking music-hall dances and parlor songs. Thomson bid us a gracious good-night with the title song, its sentimentality diluted a little by the fact that you heard only an inside-out version of the tune, if you listened very carefully through the familiar harmonies.

The ballet was made in 1988 for some of the biggest and smallest luminaries of American Ballet Theatre, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martine Van Hamel, Julio Bocca, and Susan Jaffe. Morris’s first cast of 12 in Boston was led by Joel Prouty, again doing phenomenal things. Unlike the Elo and Caniparoli spectaculars that followed, though, Drink to Me showed off the dancers in egalitarian groupings that told us not only what the dancers could do but how choreographic form extends and enhances what they can do.

Early on, they ran onto the stage and clasped hands with a partner of the opposite or the same sex before running out again. There were sweeping arms and flying jetés, small groupings in musical counterpoint, solos echoed by other dancers, a section where each individual took the stage alone and then a section where the whole group leapt on in a line and then formed a circle of jetés. Morris keeps telling us there can be pleasure in dancing groups and solos that doesn’t depend on romance of any kind.

Although the repertory program seemed built around small-scale musical works, so as to eliminate the need for a full orchestra, the choreographies turned out to be anything but modest and spare. The exception was George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, a miniature package with a big heart.

Duo Concertant was one of the highlights of the 1972 Stravinsky Festival at the New York City Ballet. In the context of that stupendous event — seven nights of ballets, most of them newly created — it was overshadowed in size if not in effect by Balanchine’s company works Violin Concerto, Symphony in Three Movements, and Divertimento from "Le Baiser de la Fée." Now, in one of dance history’s odd reversals, it’s the compact Duo that probably gets performed more often than its formidable counterparts.

Ever eager to have his music heard by the public, Stravinsky composed the Duo, in 1932, as a practical concert piece — initially for himself and violinist Samuel Dushkin. Balanchine followed suit with just a pair of dancers, originally Peter Martins and Kay Mazzo, and proved his genius once again. In his hands, a man and a woman in practice clothes, on a stage bare of anything else except the two musicians, gave a concise account of everything ballet can do in the way of musicality, technical accomplishment, and poetic suggestion.

Boston Ballet’s production was staged by former NYCB principal Sean Lavery, who’s now assistant ballet master at NYCB and a régisseur for revivals of Balanchine ballets. The work starts off with a performing hurdle: the dancers simply stand behind the piano and listen to the opening "Cantilène" section. They have to resist being actory, trying to demonstrate how much they’re enjoying it. I thought the first cast, Melanie Atkins and Sabi Varga, with violinist Michael Rosenbloom and pianist Freda Locker, were quite magical after they got going.

They dance what is in essence a traditional pas de deux in capsule form (introduction, supported adagio, variations, and coda), pausing at moments to gaze at the musicians. Atkins, like a true Balanchine dancer, immersed herself in the music, understood how she could phrase it for herself, gave steps and transitions special nuances. Varga too caught the soft but strong quality of the jumps and intricate rhythms. By the time they got to the final vision, which is perilously close to kitsch, they convinced me I was looking at a poet and his muse, not a real romance at all.

THE PRESENCE OF THAT ABSENCE, the new piece Anna Myer presented at the Tsai Center last weekend, seemed to be about seeing how much you can subtract from dancing without erasing it entirely. This is not the same as making something so spare and concentrated that its essential metaphor is all that remains. At first, Myer’s limited group of actions and gestures seem very odd, even unlikely, but as the dancers repeat them in different sequences and settings, you think she may be developing a vocabulary that refers to the classical-ballet vocabulary. But it’s interesting that she isn’t satirizing ballet. Rather, she reduces and reroutes familiar practices in order to make us realize what’s missing.

The Presence of That Absence began with a man carrying a woman log-wise across the stage, in almost the same lift that begins Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes. When Morris’s porteur gets past mid stage, he repositions the woman, and you think he’s going to let her down, but instead he continues off stage. With this witty reconfiguration, Morris shows that he wants us to look more closely at what individual dancers do. We mustn’t take their signals for granted.

In Myer’s opening stanza, the man does put the woman down — she doesn’t budge — and as she reclines there, he stands over her and makes some kind of sacramental gestures, passing his hand across his face, digging a half-closed fist down toward her. When he finishes, he steps around her ritualistically, kneels to touch her chest with a gentle slice of his hand, then backs out. This series of gestures is invoked over and over again in the dance that follows. Its meaning never becomes apparent, but maybe it has some symbolism that would be understood after a hundred years of use.

To disparate musical selections — florid piano pieces by Jakov Jakoulov, Latin American social-dance songs — the seven dancers mostly resist the romantic implications we hear. They step together in couple formation to the rumbas and tangos but don’t look at each other. People "die" and are laid on the floor. People flap their arms as if trying to get off the ground, though their step is consistently light anyway. A woman is carried lengthwise by three or four other dancers. She places her hands on a man’s shoulders and they promenade her in a circle around him.

The whole dance gave me the strangest feeling. Here were all these people dancing as if they were together when in fact they were together. I’d venture the idea that in this unassuming dance Myer is approaching the idea of loss. Loss of companions, loss of language, loss of youth. And maybe finding in dancing some solace if not salvation.

For more reflections on last weekend’s Boston Ballet program, see "Editor’s Notebook" in "Arts News."