E-Mail This Article to a Friend What bodies are for Boston Ballet and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Distant Light, the new ballet by Peter Martins, premiered between two George Balanchine last Thursday at the Wang Theatre as Boston Ballet opened its 2004–2005 season. The program could have been read as a two-sided mission statement: ballet needs classicism to survive as well as artistic sex.

Martins used a one-movement violin concerto by the contemporary Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, music suggesting the stretched-out dissonances of Arvo Pärt as well as the imagistic gestures of John Adams. As the ballet begins, a woman (Lorna Feijóo on opening night) is writhing invitingly on the floor in a glittering swimsuit, to the high-pitched wailing of the strings. Three men in sleek Tarzan costumes enter one by one (Yury Yanowsky, Roman Rykine, and Nelson Madrigal), and over the next many minutes, they dance with Feijóo, pulling her up onto her pointes or twisting her into extreme shapes, tossing her in one-handed or no-handed lifts, spinning her dizzily. She leans on them, wraps herself around them, colludes in their every kinky design.

At first, the men seem slightly different in the ways they handle Feijóo, and perhaps she’s trying to choose among them. Or are they trying to choose who gets her? At times, as she’s dancing with one, another will appear and watch from a distance. At one point, all three men watch Feijóo soloing. Eventually, they dance among themselves in a challenge of equals. But after a series of visitations and departures, she remains alone, crumpling and unfurling on the floor.

Assuming Martins intends more than just a catalogue of erotic moves, Feijóo might be taken as a dreamer, imagining, remembering, and replaying the men in her life. She doesn’t make a choice because to solve the problem would end the dream she seems to enjoy. But this malleable and available woman could also be the object of a male fantasy, with the three men as stand-ins for the choreographer, who told the Boston Globe, "There is no story for women unless there’s men." Unquestioning, the happy voyeurs in the audience screamed their approval.

If ballet were only about how many alluring shapes a ballerina can achieve by twisting and stretching her body, it would just be legitimized porn. Fortunately, it often comes with the saving gift of choreography. George Balanchine displayed and adored the female body too, but the pleasure in his ballets comes from much more than that. There’s an interlude in Rubies (1967) when four men manipulate one of the two featured women (Melanie Atkins on opening night), sharing her, turning her in arabesque so that the audience can see her extended body from every angle.

But this episode is part of a bigger, more interesting plan, a ballet about the flamboyance of ballet dancers. Balanchine pictures the dancers here as circus performers or vaudevilleans, people who happen to have extraordinary powers of rhythm, timing, wit, strength, daring, and, yes, technique. Rubies offers continual new revelations along with its flash and its jokes, provided we follow its dance narrative.

Seeing it this time, I thought how generously Balanchine provided the dancers with character gambits. They aren’t just jazzy technicians but persons with roles to play. There’s the ensemble of perfectionists whose job is to make a glamorous frame for the soloists. Yury Yanowsky and Romi Beppu played the leading couple as an oafish but strong and phenomenally nimble escort and a ballerina who delights in the versatility of her own feet.

Melanie Atkins didn’t seize the possibilities of Balanchine’s "other woman," a role he inserted in several plotless ballets to give his dancers more visibility. This figure is never a rival for the man’s affections, as she would be in a more pedestrian choreographer’s domain. Rather, she can be a queen, a benevolent or foreboding fairy, a warrior. In Rubies, she can allow the men their game of showing her off because, in the rest of the ballet, she’s the pivotal, powerful leader of the 12-member ensemble, taking orders from Stravinsky and no one else.

The company looked a little ragged in the first performance of Rubies, but Divertimento No. 15, which opened the evening, was as clean and delicate as the fins of a mushroom. Choreographed in 1956, Divertimento needs no character shading to enrich its movement through-line. It simply rearranges traditional ballet resources (three male and five female soloists and a small corps of eight women) to complement Mozart’s music. Each component is featured in its own special ways, and just when you think they’ve shown you everything, they regroup for another invention.

If you want steps, there’s a string of solos introduced by two of the men. The women and the principal male play with this movement theme six more ways. In duets relieved of desire, all five women are partnered in turn by the men, and each little pas de deux picks up an idea from the one before. You get to see the corps in a virtuosic display of its own. Starting with just walking on pointe, it rearranges itself into lines, circles, squares, its movement getting more complicated until the pattern yields its own duets.

The corps women looked confident and smart, and it was fine to see the variations so well danced. Balanchine is an acquired taste for the audience and an acquired skill for dancers. Even when they aren’t quite up to it (in the leading roles, Larissa Ponomarenko slurred some of the speedy footwork, and Carlos Molina looked a bit strained), I’m sure every one of these revivals is a learning experience for them.

IT’S DISCONCERTING how things you thought were poles apart can suddenly seem much more compatible. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company returned to the Shubert last weekend, presented by the Bank of America Celebrity Series. Playing opposite the Ballet, they looked almost classical even though their roots are planted in the deeply anti-traditional postmodern dance.

I’m thinking especially of There Were . . . , a revised version of a 1993 work by Bill T. Jones, set to the almost nonexistent Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard by John Cage and intermittent silences. After delivering some preliminary, elegiac reflections, Jones drifts in and out, overseeing, approving, and leaving the 10 dancers to go on with things. They’re all dressed (by Liz Prince) in individual outfits in shades of white and pink. Some of the costumes are fanciful; all of them have parts that float free as their wearers move.

The dancers spread out over the stage, facing different directions, doing short gestural phrases, then holding still, quite disconnected yet all of a piece somehow. On their slow walks or running journeys, they encounter one another in brief, intimate meetings, sudden pounces, falls and rescues. Later they assemble in larger groups, as if posing for a photographer. All these incidents seem to belong to a story where only the important parts have been remembered.

Maybe it’s the account of one day, a picnic Jones evoked at the beginning with his poem about all the people who were together and are now gone. Or maybe it’s about all the lives of this recollected community. What’s striking to me about it is how clear and distinct all these movement events are, and how whatever it is that holds them together is never made apparent to the audience.

Bill T. Jones has the postmodern temperament of dissociation. But he’s also possessed of a social conscience and a knack for relating his dance to the culture at large. When he goes for the big picture, he uses a collage form. Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger, his 2003 work being seen for the first time here, seems to be an expanded version of another dance, Mercy 10 x 8 on a Circle, which preceded it on the program. There were recognizable elements from the earlier dance — certain movement patterns, the costumes (pants with suspenders, white short-sleeved shirts, jackets added), the large disc on the backdrop that may represent the moon.

But at the same time, two actors, Rachel Lee Harris and Ryan Hilliard, are reading a Flannery O’Connor story ("The Artificial Nigger") about a boy’s trip to the big city with his grandfather. The story takes 45 minutes to tell. It’s kind of a shaggy-dog story, with many little incidents that could be significant but may not actually be building to any climax. The dancers may or may not be reflecting what the narrators tell.

Words and dance on stage together always split my attention stream. In this case, I started to lose my way soon after it all began. I’m sure Jones is trying for a way to make a point about race and community in a big theatrical way, without retreating into obvious narrative formulas. But Mercy the dance, with its strange, stopped movement phrases, its duets that got doubled by other pairs of dancers, its paper leaves sifting down in the moonlight, had more atmosphere and more to tell me. I’d like to read Flannery O’Connor’s tale, then visit Reading, Mercy again.