ELECTRIFIED IN THE BIG EASY.

ELECTRIFIED IN THE BIG EASY COMPANIA NACIONAL DE DANZA MAHALIA JACKSON THEATRE OF THE PERFORMING ARTS NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA JUNE 9, 2001

The tropical storms that had battered the Gulf Coast all week were an even match for the forces of nature unleashed onstage when the New Orleans Ballet Association presented Nacho Duato's Compania Nacional de Danza. In its only Deep South engagement, the company won a rapturous reception that confirmed the overwhelming appeal of Duato's unique and visionary style and the technical prowess of his Madrid-based dancers.

Rassemblement was an appropriate curtain raiser. Set to the music of Toto Bissainthe and drawn from slave songs, Haitian culture, and voodoo, it began as a keening lament for the oppressed. Yet when the once-suppliant dancers suddenly reached for the skies, it became a moving affirmation of liberty. It also prepared the audience for what was to come: dancing both elegant and earthy, often simultaneously, and inventive ideas firmly grounded in classical traditions.

Duato's theatricality can be downright eye-popping. Por vos muero, set to a suite of Spanish Renaissance music, opened with the dancers, their backs to the audience and scantily clad in white, suspended in a slow-motion and heavenly flight, seducing the spectator with compositional beauty, gestural grace, and celebration of the human form. Duato's dancers may look like gymnasts, but they move like a band of angels. Their virtuosity is clearly steeped in ballet training: You don't get away with the seemingly effortless swoops, leaps, and showoff extensions without years at the barre and a security in sure-footed form and placement.

After this startling opening vignette, the scene hurtled suddenly into passionate courtly dances, where women appeared in Renaissance gowns with a few futurist flourishes and the men swept in bare-legged, wearing scarlet capes and swinging smoking pots of incense. Here, the royal court of seventeenth-century Spain met High Mass met the fashion runways of next season's Milan. It was crazymaking and stunning and even a little breathtaking. And it worked.

The evening's centerpiece was Duato's lovely Remansos. Duato has added three segments to the work, originally staged for American Ballet Theatre in 1997. Set to piano music by Enrique Granados, and inspired, the program notes told us, by "the world of [Spanish poet Federico Garcia] Lorca," the work offers a marriage of music and muscle.

The opening "Danza Oriental" was sensually and effortlessly performed by Emilija Jovanovic and Luis Martin Oya, two of the company's most gifted and hardest-working members. But the work's original section, "Valses Poeticos," concluded the piece and stopped the show. For this, Oya, Rafael Rivero, and Nicolas Maire maneuvered their way through a series of lifts, leaps, and couplings--both rapid and languid--that defied space and gravity and yet were the perfect counterpart to Granados's late nineteenth-century waltzes.

The performance concluded New Orleans Ballet Association's admirable Visionary Voices season, presented in a region still very fond of dying swans and swooning sylphs. And as there are few choreographers working today who are as visionary as Nacho Duato, it is appropriate to say that for just one night, he took the South by storm.