Wilma Theater's BalletX opens strong, gracefully

No matter how great the choreography, without the right dancers to breathe life into it, a dance can go flat as a souffle when the oven door is opened too soon.

No worries at the Wilma Theater Wednesday night when BalletX opened its summer run. All 10 of the company's current lineup whipped themselves to great heights and sustained excellence.

Guest choreographer Matthew Prescott set his airy opening number Journey of the Day (a world premiere) to Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer's Appalachian Journey.

The sensual Tara Keating has been with the company since it began five years ago, but missed the company's spring run due to injury. It was good to see her back doing little happy dances en pointe and being silly with Laura Feig and Jennifer Goodman in a girly gossipfest. Kevin Yee-Chan and Colby Damon traded twirls and cheery jumps to an Irish-inflected section of the music, ending in a contact-improv duet. The exuberant bluegrass-redux dance closed with all seven dancers crossing arms over shoulders, their backs to the audience and spinning off like tops.

For the other world premiere, The Last Glass, Matthew Neenan used eight songs from Zach Condon's Indie Beirut band, whose blaring brass has been described as a global mash-up of forged Gypsy and other musics.

Condon's voice is pitched somewhere between David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright, whose songs Neenan used in his wonderful 11:11 for Pennsylvania Ballet, where he is resident choreographer.

Neenan's choreography matched the music's mash-up, but even more globally with merengue, salsa, Balkan folk steps, and militaristic salutes alternating with soft balletic arm sweeps.

Martha Chamberlain's adorable costumes - ruffled panties, pantaloons, beribboned hair, and cotton candy-colored pointe shoes - evoked an era of youthful innocence.

Moodier tensions appeared with Anitra Keegan in a three-tiered skirt being spun in a death spiral. All the dancers at times stabbed at the floor with one toe while skipping playfully. But the dark element often underscoring Neenan's work here suggested the 1930s in old Havana or Weimar Germany. Alone outside the curtain as it falls on her friends, Chloe Horne leaves us with a sense of foreboding or nostalgia.

In Adam Hoagland's 2007 requiem-like Risk of Flight, eight shadowy dancers leaned toward hard light from the wings and broke into motion that at times felt mournful. Its difficult half-lifts and turns ended as if in stop motion. The somber relationship-study nicely bridged the two frothier premieres.