American Ballet Theatre's new Tharp ballet

(Herman Cornejo, Craig Salstein and Ethan Stiefel in Rabbit & Rogue. Photo: Rosalie O'Connor)

American Ballet Theatre opened a double bill of Harold Lander's Etudes and Twyla Tharp's new Rabbit and Rogue at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last night. The Tharp ballet was co-commissioned by OCPAC and had its premiere in June at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. While Etudes set a somewhat subdued mood at the beginning of the evening, I loved Rabbit & Rogue, with its energy and fantastic performances, plus a great new score by Danny Elfman.

Lander's Etudes is a demonstration of sorts. Ballet classroom exercises progress into full fledged Romantic and Classical ballet, with tutus chandeliers and the whole nine yards. It starts with five young student dancers demonstrating the five basic positions in ballet, then moves to the ballet barre, where company dancers perform leg exercises. The barres are then moved away and the ballerina and her cavaliers arrive: the dancing then becomes full fledged dancing, interspersed with "across the floor" exercises and variations. It's cute and pretty for the first few minutes and does the job of impressing as a technical showcase for the company - but it quickly becomes tiresome. The ballet's construction is plodding and unimaginative: painfully slow in pacing in the first half, it ramps up by the end, but then lasts too long. It is further hamstrung by Lander's choice of music, with clunky orchestrations of Carl Czerny piano exercises. These exercises normally played by piano players to warm up or increase playing agility, here they are clumsily arranged into short segments for ballet dancing. The individual sections are either too short or simply build into nothing before dancers are rushing off stage or rearranging themselves. The ballet seems to be building and building towards something - anything - but it never really gets there, and it feels like a ballet built for a special event or gala, but in the absence of an event, does not hold up so well on its own. ABT's performance of it last night was perfectly correct and had the requisite virtuoso moments, but it never came alive for me; I'm not sure whether it was the ballet itself or the performance. Michele Wiles led the performance as the ballerina (she impressed in a series of chaines that sped up to light speed as they traversed the stage), with Jared Matthews and Corey Stearns as her cavaliers.

Twyla Tharp's brand new ballet Rabbit & Rogue, on the other hand, was a great new ballet that really let the company's dancers show their personalities. The ballet has a dreamlike quality, a mood established with Danny Elfman's enormously pleasing score for the piece. Dance moments and episodes flow across the stage, while groups of dancers expand and contract into the stage space and out of openings in the back drop-cloth. The main characters are Rabbit (last night, danced by Ethan Stiefel), who starts the ballet off solo and Rogue (Herman Cornejo), an annoying sidekick of sorts who follows Rabbit around and alternatingly challenges and mimicks Rabbit. Two couples, a Rag couple (Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg) and a Gamelan couple (Paloma Herrera and Gennadi Savaliev), dance in episodes between Rabbit and Rogue's loosely recurring plot, and both are a kind of dream presence. Rag is a couple that dances together then gets into a fight before reconciling, Gemalan is a fantasy of pure love, complete with flowing white costumes. A quartet of dancers (Yuriko Kajiya, Carlos Lopez, Maria Ricceto and Craig Salstein), further intersperse the ballet as counterpoint and support to the suggested drama. The role of Rabbit is tailormade for Stiefel, who created the role, and lets him show off the masculine pizzazz that he is so well known for, while Rogue similarly takes full advantage of Cornejo's virtuosic gifts. Tharp wonderfully combines ballet with a contemporary speed and feeling, so while the dancers do work on pointe, it doesn't feel a drop like the tutus of Etudes before it. The dancers had a thrilling vitality and focus in this work, and it came off as a pulsing 45 minutes of dazzling dancing.

Performances continue through Sunday.

(Second photo: David Hallberg and Gillian Murphy in Rabbit & Rogue. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor)