Movement isn't very moving in this 'Carmen'

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.

You know something is seriously amiss when George Balanchine's ''Serenade," a neo-Romantic masterpiece of dissolving and emerging patterns, has more of a story line than ''Carmen," an oft-told tale of passion and jealousy based on an 1854 novella by Prosper Merimee and popularized by the Georges Bizet opera of the same name.

But that was the case Thursday night when Boston Ballet presented the world premiere of Jorma Elo's ''Carmen" and the Balanchine classic from 1934, the first dance the New York City Ballet founder choreographed in this country.

Elo has set his ''Carmen" to Rodion Shchedrin's ''Carmen Suite," an adaptation of the Bizet score for percussion and strings originally crafted for Alberto Alonso's 1967 version of the dance. He has transported the action from a 19th-century cigarette factory to the world of high fashion, complete with neon-lit catwalk and now-smoke-wrapped, now-blinding klieg lights. Carmen is no longer a gypsy-temptress but a leggy model; Don Jose, her temptee, has morphed from a soldier to a businessman, and the slick matador Escamillo has been reborn as a Formula 1 racecar driver.

All of which would be fine -- despite how preposterous it sounds -- if the movement and the narrative, the traffic and the pacing measured up. But this ''Carmen" operates on a single plane, Walt Spangler's imposing two-level runway set notwithstanding. Indeed, if you didn't know the story -- that Carmen, with her wiles, leads Jose to theft and murder, drops him for Escamillo, and then dies at his hand -- you'd be hard-pressed to find it here. Elo has instead given us a series of dances -- for groups, for couples -- that seem to go nowhere, a variety show rather than a dramatic arc.

Those dances, as admirably as they were performed on opening night by Karine Seneca (Carmen), Roman Rykine (Jose), Carlos Molina (Escamillo), and especially Lia Cirio (Michaela), who functioned as a kind of foreshadowing device, seemed to vary little in their invention. Nonstop and hard-charging, they were a compendium of undulating torsos and hands framing faces; legs splayed wide in second position and elbows banging into knees; jolting backs and off-kilter hips. Seneca's stamina in particular was astonishing.

The dances -- oddly, interestingly -- had a locking-and-popping sensibility, a kind of hip-hop bent. Elo clearly knows his classical technique; he just needs to mix it up. Each dance here was nearly indistinguishable from the next.

Cirio was a standout for her soul. Toward the end, she thrust her arms forward, conjuring images of tears. Her part alone revealed the tragedy of Jose's fate.

Conversely, Balanchine's ''Serenade," to Tchaikovsky's lush score, was a construction of elegiac proportions. Configurations of dancers coalesced and evaporated like a breath on a window pane. Even the seemingly most abstract of movements -- the back of a wrist coming to rest on a brow, parallel feet split into first position -- brought a catch to your throat.

Seeping through the geometric shifts as well was a story: a woman's collapse and deliverance by an angel of death. Movement here begat meaning, and heart.