“From the Sublime to the Ridiculous” is not a title to draw audiences to a ballet program, but it would suit Boston Ballet’s current program “Thrill of Contact,” at the Opera House. Nothing could be more sublime than the opener, George Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations.” And nothing could be more ridiculous — more sublimely ridiculous — than the closer, Jerome Robbins’s “The Concert.” What’s in between is hardly inconsequential: the world premiere of company principal dancer Jeffrey Cirio’s “fremd,” and the company premiere of William Forsythe’s “The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude.” But it’s “The Concert” that concludes the Ballet’s season on a riotously high note.
“Theme and Variations” is set to the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3, a sumptuous 20 minutes that climax in one of the composer’s most gorgeously processional polonaises, with gauzy curtains framing a Mariinsky-blue backdrop and a huge chandelier. Thursday night, Misa Kuranaga and Cirio carved out the theme and, against a backdrop of ladies, polished it as if it were a diamond, her whipping chaîné turns complemented by his well-executed eight double tours. Kuranaga showed off the diamond’s facets — croisé, effacé, écarté — in the English horn — haunted eighth variation, complete with trademark Balanchine daisy chain, and then she and Cirio met up again for a pas de deux with violin cantilena. The finale, with its big diagonal, made the polonaise into a form of geometry, with Mr. B as the great geometer.
“Fremd,” Cirio has explained, was inspired by German spoken-word artist Olaf Bender’s exploration of the notion of “strange,” or “other.” At one point in the 17-minute piece, whose score also includes Aphex Twin and nocturnes by Chopin and John Field, Bender can be heard expounding, in German, and that gives the audience an appropriate sense of being estranged. The key figure is a lone man — Altan Dugaraa on Thursday night — who’s largely confined to one side of the stage while three couples engage in gestural movement on the other side. Dugaraa, clearly the stranger, the outsider, kept tiptoeing into the “other,” infringing, insinuating himself, finally seeming to exert some control over Lia Cirio and Paulo Arrais. What the couples meant to him didn’t quite come into focus, but Cirio and Arrais were poetic in Chopin’s E-minor Nocturne.
“The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude” reveals Forsythe in a carefree balletic mood, with the three ladies in flying-saucer-like plate tutus and on pointe. The music is the final movement of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C major, which is vertiginously kinetic, and the choreography demands exactitude. The two men, Bradley Schlagheck and John Lam, provided power rather than precision, but Kuranaga flitted effusively, Kathleen Breen Combes brought a volumetric energy to the movement’s buzzing second subject, and Erica Cornejo gave a Beethoven-like exuberance to Schubert’s “Ode to Joy” allusion. Forsythe describes the piece as a “divertissement”; on this bill, it worked as a palate cleanser.
“The Concert,” which Robbins created for New York City Ballet in 1956, pays homage to Chopin but also spoofs titles that people gave his pieces, like “Butterfly” and “Raindrop.” Even the onstage pianist gets into the act. Thursday, after the curtain had risen to reveal a Saul Steinberg drop and the orchestra had blasted out the “Military” Polonaise, Freda Locker walked out, sat on the piano bench, made a conspicuous show of adjusting it, extracted a handkerchief and wiped the very dusty keys, bowed her head as if communing with the composer, and then broke into his “Berceuse.”
Gradually, an audience assembles, each member bringing his or her own wooden folding chair. Over the next half hour, to various Chopin préludes, a waltz, and a mazurka, an usher reseats the patrons, the men handle the ladies as if they were mannequins, the ladies parody the Fokine ballet “Les Sylphides” (also set to Chopin), a whip-wielding Cossack and his troupe turn up, umbrellas are produced in response to the E-minor Prélude, and, to an extract from the A-flat-major Ballade, everyone cavorts in butterfly capes and antennae before the pianist, patience exhausted, jumps up and starts flailing with a butterfly net.
The principal players are a woman in a floppy hat, a cigar-smoking man in a red vest, tie, and fedora who keeps trying to make up to floppy-hat girl, and the man’s none-too-pleased wife. Ashley Ellis was a delectable floppy-hat girl, transported by the music and amenable to the roving eye of Lasha Khozashvili, if not his roving hands. Khozashvili was outrageously funny as the straying husband, not least in the moment when he tried to stab his wife. Dusty Button was appropriately severe as the wife; a bespectacled Isaac Akiba was hilarious chasing Ellis about in an attempt at a pas de deux. Some 60 years after “The Concert” debuted, it’s still one of the funniest pieces ever created for dancers.
Thrill of Contact
Presented by Boston Ballet
At: Boston Opera House, through May 24. Tickets: $29-$152.
617-695-6955, www.bostonballet.org
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.