Boston Ballet Company.

How do you attract new audiences to ballet? How do you keep old ones coming back for more? Artistic director Bruce Marks found out that opposites attract.

You can just imagine Boston Ballet's artistic director, Bruce Marks, exacting the following pledge from choreographers Danny Buraczeski, Daniel Pelzig, and Lila York before setting them loose to produce new works for the troupe's Hot & Cool program: "No Tchaikovsky, keep it upbeat, and make it sizzle!" In search of a ploy to lure audiences more comfortable at a rock concert than at the ballet, and seeking a way to attract regular dancegoers to a mixed-repertoire program, Boston Ballet discarded its traditional springtime format of Choreographer Competitions for a strictly contemporary--and carefully chosen--creative team.

As further enticement, costumes were commissioned from three Boston-based clothing designers who are making their mark with the funky and new: Pam Graham, Nong Tumsutipong, and Tunji Dada (a recent entrant on the Paris fashion scene). And the choreographers chose contemporary music that already existed on tape, which had the added dividend of trimming the budget.

Happily, the strategy paid off in three new works--each different in tone if not in decibel level--that are likely candidates for permanent spots in the company's repertoire. Hot & Cool was presented March 21 through April 7 at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Boston.

Although Buraczeski's By the Horns is the most demure of the group in terms of music--by Jon Faddis, the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, and the Lee Morgan Quintet--the work is an elegantly detailed abstract ballet of elongated, smooth moves to classic jazz sounds. The piece opens with and periodically returns to dark silhouettes against a scarlet backdrop; nothing original there, but it was a striking image with which to launch the evening. Six couples, led by a stunningly sinuous Lazlo Berdo and Marjorie Grundvig, worked in various configurations, breaking the space in swift entrances and exits. At one point the women paced in hip-jutting formation, as if they lived only to pivot on a fashion show runway, while the men slithered in beneath them. Graham's unisex silk pants and vests of many colors seemed to be a 1990s revision of the "practice clothes" worn in leotard ballets.

Pelzig's Nine Lives: Songs of Lyle Lovett, set to songs written and performed by the composer, is choreographed in the manner of a country-and-western hoedown, with line dancing and fancy hoofing at its core. Pelzig corraled some of the slickest men in the company to act as cowboys: Paul Thrussell, as an aw-shucks show-off; Patrick Armand, tailoring his most awesome leaps and multiple turns to the western motif; Devon Carney, in some securely romantic partnering; and the Russian-born Viktor Plotnikov, cutting loose in frantic fashion. Marie-Christine Mouis and Alexander Srb brought a lushness to a melancholy pas de deux set to "All My Love Is Gone." Larissa Ponomarenko and Armand drove through "Nobody Knows Me" in a series of swooping lifts. Pollyana Ribeiro picked her way on pointe across the stage as if wearing the highest pair of stiletto heels. Tumsutipong clothed the four women in thigh-high disco frocks, the five men in the tightest of bun-displaying satin jeans.

And as if to say, "can you top this?" Lila York's Celts--in a town where thinking Irish is akin to sainthood--caused a sensation from beginning to end in its melange of Irish step dancing, allusions to that country's dark history, and a modern thrust that encompasses pop movements along with the most pristine aspects of the ballet vocabulary. The music is a compilation of recordings by the Chieftains, William J. Ruyle, Bill Whelan, and Celtic Thunder and Dan Ar Braz, allowing York to distill a succession of different moods. Robert Wallace was a dark Druid god brought to life in a display of intricate footwork and astonishing emotive power; Laszlo Berdo, a wild pagan priest leading a sextet of bare-chested men in a pounding war dance, then returning for a frenzied solo to drums. Roger Cunningham is the young man to watch, now a member of the corps--but not for long.

York is a master at stage pictures, as well as a choreographer who inhabits every moment of the music--nothing is slurred over or slowed down for the dancers. Dada's dun-colored short dresses on the women and doublets over tights for the men proved to be the most successful costume ensemble of the evening

Hot & Cool provided an oasis of new ideas in a season otherwise packed with a succession of story ballets tied to the nineteenth-century tradition. As always, when contemporary works are introduced into a classical company, dancers otherwise overlooked have an opportunity to shine with a new luster, and all members of the company are pushed to looking at technique in different ways. Exceeding its expectations for single-ticket sales, the program entranced the Boston Ballet stalwarts and made new friends. Perhaps it is time to reassess the notion that audiences are only interested in familiar works. For Boston Ballet, at least, a mixed bill of brand-new works brought a breath of fresh air to the box office as well as to the repertory.