Bavarian National Ballet.

Bavarian National Ballet opened its annual Ballet Week festival with an American program that was enthusiastically received by the Munich audience. There were two widely differing premieres: In Rags, New York City Ballet dancer Robert LaFosse presented a witty, fast-moving sequence of dances to six of Scott Joplin's best-known pieces, using ballet with jazzy rhythms in much the way Balanchine did in the forties. Judith Turos with Mark Pace, Tina-Kay Bohnstedt with Udo Kersten, Elena Pankova with Patrick Teschner, and Natalja Trokaj with Alen Bottaini made the most of the funny twists and gags in their solos and pas de deux.

Lucinda Childs's Chamber Symphony is set to the John Adams composition of Schoenbergian, hauntingly repetitive (dis)harmonies of the same name. It is a work of strangely fascinating beauty, especially in the slow, enigmatic second movement for two couples, Kiki Lammersen with Stephen Moser and Anna Villadolid with Norbert Graf. With a limited number of movement sequences used in contrapuntal repetitions, Childs creates imaginative patterns in space that hold the audience spellbound. The costumes in shimmering white (by Ronaldus Shamask) and lighting design (by Johann Darchinger) enhance the magic of the work.

With the special permission of Jerome Robbins, Evelyn Hart and Paris Opera Ballet etoile Manuel Legris danced a marvelously fluid performance of Other Dances, which was being performed for the first time in Germany. Another local premiere, Twyla Tharp's Brief Fling, provided fine entertainment with its ironic twists by what seem to be street dancers improvising with the glamour of neoclassicla ballet. The juicy roles of the street gang were served up with gusto by Turos, Oliver Wehe, Kirill Melnikov, and Guido Schimanski. Christina McDermott and Wes Chapman relished the bravura pas de deux.