Ballet Metropolitano de Caracas.

The six-work repertoire brought from Venezeula by Ballet Metropolitano de Caracas was billed as "A Program of Contemporary Ballets by South American Choreogrpahers." Keyla Ermecheo, the group's artistic director, showed three short pieces, which were placed in the middle of the program. All were based on Venezuelan folk dance and music. Each sweetly showcased its dancers: a quartet of women for Joropo, a solo woman for Tonada de las Espigas, and a quartet of couples for Caballo Viejo.

The dancers in Ermecheo's thirteen-year-old company have been described as combining "Russian clasical technique" with "Latin energy and the music of their culture." Her own works called less for strict academic dancing. Joropo and Caballo Viejo were aswirl with ruffled skirts and skimming floor patterns. The former, based on the national dance of Venezuela, used pointe work to enliven its methods and to brighten its patterning. The latter, to a recorded song by Simon Diaz, was cochoreographed with Rafael Portillo. It presented a bright quadrille of skirt-rustling women and their dapper, solicitous escorts.

Una Danza para Ti ("A Dance for You"), which closed the program, was choreographed by Vicente Nebrada as a tribute to Teresa Carreno, whose Chopinesque piano music made up the ballet's score. Arranged for five couples, each identified by the coordinated color of their costuming--bloused shirts and tights for the men and chiffon shifts for the women--Nebrada's work owes a debt to Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering. Although some of the partnering often looked rough-hewn and willfully complicated, this gathering of Venezuelan dancers moved condidently and gathered a palpable momentum. Its cast, led by Ivana Ruscitti and Christian Perez, intermittently seemed stiffly challenged by the solo and double work, but no ome was overwhelmed by it.

The late Randy Rasquin's En Linea Recta ("A straight Line"), to a sound collage by Tangerine Dream, strayed into the realm of postmodernist flash dancing and looked more trendy than theatrical. Hector Zaraspe's Fuga con Pajarillo (to a fugal composition by Aldemaro Romero) was a hard-nosed academic exercise that was technically too difficult for its cast of three couples.