Black, white, and contemporary all over

Boston Ballet prepares for the US premiere of a striking program by Czech choreographer Jirí Kylián

Megan Gray (center) and other Boston Ballet dancers rehearse one of the pieces in Kylián's ''Black and White'' program. (Photo by David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)

A few weeks ago, four dancers in a Boston Ballet rehearsal studio were finding their way through the elegantly fractured landscape of "No More Play," a contemporary ballet for two women and three men by the famed Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian. Five is an odd number, but asymmetry is the point, and even though one of the men was out sick the remaining dancers formed striking factions, combining and recombining like shape-shifting puzzle pieces. Their bodies hinged and crumpled and draped over one another in variations on a theme of loners, pairs, and tricky triangles. Love was, and then wasn't, in the air.

Set to a bleak Anton Webern score with long stretches of silence, "No More Play" is the most primal of five visually and emotionally arresting works that make up Kylian's "Black and White" program, which receives its US premiere Thursday through Feb. 15 at the Citi Wang Theatre. The other pieces in the evening range from "Falling Angels," a brash dance for eight women with a percussive Steve Reich score, to "Six Dances," a whimsical confection set to mellifluous Mozart.

Boston Ballet is the first company outside Nederlands Dans Theater, where Kylian is resident choreographer and former artistic director, to perform "Black and White" in its entirety. For Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen, who says that Kylian's great gift is his ability to illuminate the human soul, getting the green light to present this program is something like anointment.

"What is the most important thing for a choreographer? They want to know that you will take good care of their piece. They want to know your philosophy. In this case Jiri was very selective," says Nissinen, who speaks of the 61-year-old Czech choreographer with flat-out reverence. "I think they were so impressed when we did two of the works in 2005."

For dancers, being cast in a Kylian program is reason to literally jump for joy.

"He comes up with amazing partnering combinations and different grips that are so unique," says company soloist Melissa Hough, who was featured in Boston Ballet's 2005 Kylian program and is performing in three of the dances next week. "There's a level of intelligence to his approach that you just don't see from most choreographers."

But executing Kylian's choreography can present unfamiliar challenges for dancers, according to Roslyn Anderson, a former NDT dancer who, with Patrick Delcroix, also a veteran of NDT, has come to Boston to stage the "Black and White" program with the company. The first thing Anderson did when she arrived here a year ago to begin casting was watch the company in class, in rehearsals - and on the sidelines.

"I wanted to get to know the qualities of all the dancers, and also their personalities," says Anderson. "They must be flexible in body and in mind. This was, I have to say, a tough one - to cast five pieces and try to share the load and not have your favorites in every piece. But I think we've managed."

Anderson and Delcroix travel the world staging works by Kylian, whose fear of flying, Delcroix says, prevents him from traveling by plane these days. And it is up to them to convey to dancers images and ideas that are as fundamental to his work as physical movement. Nissinen notes that even when a dancer is asked to do a familiar step, in Kylian's world there is likely a very different motivation for taking that step. Delcroix concedes that sometimes those motivations are "a little strange."

"There's one movement where the dancers point one finger down and then pull it up into the air," Delcroix explains. "The idea is that there is a little dog on the floor who you think needs to be punished. But then you realize that the dog is dead. So you are sorry. There are lots of images like that that Jiri talks to me about. It's not just movement but something more."

At a recent rehearsal for "Petite Mort" - a refined study in sexuality, aggression, tenderness, and humor for six men, six women, six rapiers, and six freestanding gowns - Anderson was fine-tuning details.

"Don't touch me now!" she snaps at a male dancer, mimicking the revulsion that will underscore a sudden jerk of his shoulder

"You're leaving something behind," Anderson explains to the cast, in order to conjure a sense of melancholy as the group falls back en masse.

Unlike many of her peers, Anderson doesn't use videos of past performances as a teaching tool, at least not until the dancers have learned the steps, absorbed the conceptual framework, and - most critically - found their own voices in the dance. Facial expressions and even vocalizations are incorporated into Kylian's works, on top of choreography that owes as much to modern dance as classical ballet.

Nissinen says that Boston Ballet's versatility makes it possible for the company to master its range of traditional and contemporary repertoire, and that having a resident choreographer like Jorma Elo, who danced with NDT for 14 years, has helped acclimate Boston Ballet's dancers to contemporary aesthetics.

Yet Hough, whose extensive jazz training has prepared her well for the Kylian program, suspects that some dancers may not feel ready even when they take the stage.

" 'Falling Angels,' especially, requires a real attack," she says. "You have to find a different part of yourself, and that isn't taught in ballet class."

By the same token, ballet audiences must open up to new experiences as well, and Nissinen - in his eighth year guiding the company through what is widely considered a period of significant revitalization - continues to demonstrate his eagerness to meet that challenge.

"After the previous Kylian program, an elderly gentleman, a benefactor, came to talk to me and said, 'I'm just not sure what I think about these two works. I've been thinking about them for three weeks,' " Nissinen recalls. "Can you imagine?"

The notion that any experience in our go-go lives - let alone a night at the ballet - would haunt a person for weeks on end underscores Nissinen's mission. "We want to see pretty things. There's a place for 'Sleeping Beauty.' But there are so many things in life, and it's so important to be inclusive. Otherwise," he says, "we become a museum."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.