The evening-long project matches Septime Webre's State of Wonder, a new ballet set on J. S. Bach's enticing Goldberg Variations, with Trey McIntyre's Always, No Sometimes, a premiere set on a suite of songs (good, bad, and indifferent) by The Beatles.

Webre has the more daunting task: to find 32 different choreographic colors for Bach's collection of keyboard pieces—an air, 30 variations on that air, and a restatement. He goes about by dividing the work roughly into thirds, with three separate costume plots and a different keyboard playing the music. The first third, danced to the canonical recordings by Glenn Gould, stresses athleticism. Men and women alike wear boy shorts and the dancing is very fast indeed. But some of the variations are so brief that a dance gets going and then it's over: the momentum is lost. The middle third sets live harpsichord accompaniment (by Scott Detra) against a more sensual dancing: the costumes are drapey, with the men in bare chests and long skirts with lots of fullness. The final third could be called a return to elegance: the women finally get up on their pointes and wear long gowns with ballerina skirts, and the live music comes from a cool piano played by Ralitza Patcheva. Variation 25, with pairs work by Michele Jimenez and Luis Torres, is a beautiful ache.

Unfortunately, the piece as a whole gives off an unfinished, unsharp feeling. Variation 27 was not danced, and Webre struggles to make each variation distinct. His trick of making a passage be about rolling something into place (in this case, a keyboardist on a platform) , used so effectively in his Carmina Burana, here just looks like filler.

McIntyre does better with his task of writing for the Beatles songs (though there was some post-press rearrangement of material here as well). Three pairs dance a spirited "Ballad of John and Yoko," Jason Hartley and Jonathan Jordan dance one of their several fine duets of the evening to "Got to Get You into My Life," and McIntyre finds a range of expression to match the episodic "A Day in the Life," the evening's closer.

posted: 7:49:20 PM