Kansas City Orfeo.

As the newly designated resident company of the French Institute/Alliance Francaise, Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre opened with the French-born choreographer's suitably bicontinental Kansas City Orfeo. It is set to recorded music from the Gluck opera and jazz by Duke Ellington and other luminaries.

The transposition seems promising. The ensemble becomes a group of 1920s gangsters, who (in a dream), jealous of the lover's passion for each other, kidnap Eurydice for her descent to the gangland mythological underworld. A tableau of her death in a shoot-out opens and closes the piece.

The realization of the idea, however, becomes fuzzy. With the jazz, Rioult makes a few nods to period dancing but mostly employs generalized movement and some stylized gestures--settling the hat, wiping the nose. Elsewhere, a limited (Grahamesque) vocabulary continues even through Gluck's minuet.

A highlight is a solo of lament for Matthew Rose's Orfeo, set to the blues. Here the flexible and fluid Rose comes alive as a character through movement, opening his torso in supplication to the slide of a trombone. Otherwise, he and his Eurydice, Alessandra Prosperi, seem closed off, opaque. In truth, they get less stage time than the ensemble and don't have a lot to work with--a quick roll when they meet (they do it with mirrors, providing all the angles), a flailing duet with her dead body. This Orfeo goes Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo one better by butting his head against his dead lover's bloody chest.

Rioult himself and artistic associate Joyce Herring, both former Graham dancers, bring a needed dramatic weight, focus, and maturity to their precisely phrased and controlled dance vignettes. But their roles, designated as "the Poet/Orfeo now" and "the Muse/Eurydice now," seem tacked on to the proceedings.

Upholding the tradition of handsome physical production of both Graham and French contemporary dance, Rioult weaves the action around and through Harry Feiner's freestanding mirror-window-doors set pieces, bathed in the resourceful lighting of David Finley.