At the Kimmel, La La La Human Steps

Montreal choreographer Édouard Lock brought his company La La La Human Steps to Philadelphia for its Kimmel Center debut Thursday to mixed reactions from the audience. Lock's

Amjad

awed many with the piece's relentless speed and focus, its perilous darkness, its tricked-out Tchaikovsky, and its vicious refusal to be nice.

As Matthew Bourne had for his almost all-male

Swan Lake

a few years ago, Lock, for

Amjad,

revisited that iconic early ballet, as well as its younger sister,

Sleeping Beauty

. He commissioned composers Gavin Bryars and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang to deconstruct Tchaikovsky's czardas, waltzes and mazurkas however they liked. Meanwhile, he set his nine dancers on an independent movement path that somehow converged with the composers'.

A quartet plays live onstage, but imagine Tchaikovsky's music on a piano roll looping main themes, retexturizing them each time for contemporary ears used to music for film. Not a stretch, considering that

Amjad

opens with Lock's enigmatic films on three huge disks hovering high above the stage's apron.

Lock is no neophyte filmmaker or choreographer. His 2004 dance film

Amelia

won many international awards, and his athletic

Human Sex

won a Bessie Award in 1986.

Kimmel management announced that

Amjad

- the title is an Arabic name that may be used for people of either gender - would run one hour and 45 minutes, but inexplicably it made it through in less than an hour and a half. Perhaps the dance and music went into an even more up-tempo mode?

Statuesque American dancer Zofia Tujaka opens the ballet like an obsidian obelisk, en pointe in one of lighting designer John Munro's cold shafts of light. An Amazonian Odile impersonating Odette, her vain brittleness is brilliant but unconvincing. Later, in a white shift as the awakened Aurora, she displays delicacy, gingerly picking her way through an unknown world. Munro bathes Dominic Santia in warm shades. Wearing the same oyster-pink pointe slippers the women wear, Santia further accentuates the linear illusions of the dancing bodies. His bourrees and still poses en pointe drive home the almost inhumanly poignant and piquant nature of dancing on toe.

The elfin Andrea Boardman best embodies Lock's signature nervosity, flitting mothlike throughout. Lock also uses two-footed turns and the most dazzling point work, but no fancy leaps or throws. The men often stand in a demi-lunge spinning the women by their waists, their hands looking huge against the black bustiers. Jason Shipley-Holmes excels at this.

If you're looking for just a pleasant evening in the theater, don't look here.

Mais oui

, if you don't mind immense beauty, the underside of love, and sexy, virtuosic dancing, this is your ticket. Ooh La La.