Ballet British Columbia, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, Canada, January 22-24, 1998.

French choreographer Myriam Naisy made her new Petites Donses pour Mammiferes ("Short Dances for Mammals") at the Banff Centre for the Arts, a creative haven abutting the Canadian Rocky Mountains. So it's not surprising that the work is all about landscape, about context and unlikely juxtapositions. In a set of strange, lyrical dances set to Arcangelo Corelli's Sonata, Op. 5, for violin, viola, and harpsichord, and a sound-scape of creature noises and water, ten dancers meet formally as an ensemble, then break off for extended one-on-one encounters. The work has a sustained and intrinsic tension all its own. This kinetic edginess is underscored by the look of the piece, a weird mixture of seventeenth-century costumes and minimalist chiffon shirts and shifts, and a constellation of lightbulbs canopying the stage, a starry sky that dawns, light by light, as the ballet progresses.

The company dancers looked ravishing in Petites Donses. They also looked at home in Serge Bennathan's 1994 In and Around Kozla Street (Warsaw). Set to Arne Eigenfeldt' s haunting, melodic score, the ballet is a series of pictures in half-tones: it has the look of a fading photograph. Bennathan is artistic director of Toronto's Dancemakers. His work is sometimes marred by its start-and-stop nature, but Kozias fine points are potent and true: vertiginous leans in tours en l'air and attitudes, contrasts such as bourrees rising to Fifth on pointe right through the feet, all plantlike pliancy, foiled by slack, emotionless arms, and an endless kiss that is all mouth, no limbs, the yearning to connect at odds with an environment that denies it.

Artistic director John Alleyne's In the Course of Sleeping, to new music by Timothy Sullivan, closed the program. Made for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in 1996, the ballet is hampered by literal and overpowering designs, a contrast to Alleyne's previous ballets, which have tended to employ the cool conventions of the day. But the steps and the way in which they are knit together are more of the some. The work is not cumulative in its impact; it is without afterlife. All" has said that in the Course of Sleeping, Sex is My Religion (made in 1996 for Ballet BC), and Adrian (Angel on Earth) (1997, for Dance Theatre of Harlem) constitute a trilogy representing years of development and collaboration.