LYON OPERA BRINGS EK TO BROOKLYN.

NEW YORK CITY--As festivals and dance companies go, few are better matched than Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival and Lyon Opera Ballet. Both are committed to contemporary work and offer productions that are grand-scale, often atypical collaborations. Lyon Opera Ballet enlists the freshest voices from ballet and modern dance to choreograph for its classically trained company.

Next Wave has presented the companies of several dancemakers who appear in Lyon's repertory, including William Forsythe, Angelin Preljocaj, and Ralph Lemon. But this October marks the first appearance of the Lyon Opera Ballet at BAM's Harvey Theater. From October 19 to 24, the French troupe performs Mats Ek's Solo for Two and Carmen.

At first glance, Ek seems like an unlikely candidate for Next Wave. At 54, he has been commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet, his works have titles like Giselle, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty, and his creations have been documented in dance history books. Yet Ek is anything but conservative or decorous. His Carmen features a cigar-smoking woman who slithers and struts through a male corps de ballet. In Solo for Two, a pair of dancers glide through space, connect and disconnect. "It's not a duet. It really is a dance work about the male and female solos," says Joseph V. Melillo, BAM's executive producer. The two pieces usually appear together: When Melillo saw the program in Lyons, he chose the works for Next Wave because of "the formalism of Solo for Two and the narrative of Carmen."

Next Wave's mission, to present "contemporary work that repositions our understanding of these specific art forms," is attained by the union of Ek and Lyon Opera Ballet dancers, who, despite ballet training, are accustomed to assimilating the different styles of contemporary choreographers. "[Ek] takes that raw resource," says Melillo, "and melds it and sculpts it into this narrative and this formal abstract piece."