Lea Wolf.

There are times when ballet's history as a theatrical form for the delectation of male spectators seems immutable. Such was the case with Central Ballet of China's opening program, which launched the twentieth-anniversary season of Berkeley's Cal Performances series. The company offered a curious double bill consisting of the second act of Giselle and a truncated version of that famous paean to revolution, The Red Detachment of Women.

For us in the West, The Red Detachment has in the past often seemed amusingly earnest in its portrayal of an abused young woman's flight away from an evil landowner and into the safety of a Red Army cadre. The good guys and the bad guys are painted in such extremes after all. Viewed side by side with such a trademark of romanticism as Giselle, however, The Red Detachment seems less innocently revolutionary. Its movement vocabulary is hidebound with tradition, and its depiction of a contemporary woman's anger is wearyingly superficial.

In fact, Wang Shan, as the victim Qionghua, dances with a curious mix of surface delicacy and heroic stamina that actually recalls Giselle. She slugs it out (but with delicate fists) with one of her boss's henchmen one moment, then flees a squad of captors in a beautifully arcing series of Plisetskaya jetes the next. It's the passion of the subject enacted in The Red Detachment that seems to push the full cast to heights of expression well beyond those demonstrated in Giselle, which was danced ably but with a uniform dryness except for Hou Honglan's splendidly imperial Myrtha.

The most dramatically authentic part of The Red Detachment is the dagger dance, where five men with pairs of sharp knives charge one another in a series of marvelously timed misses. This is truly pleasurable; it's like watching the deft acrobatics of Peking Opera performed by ballet-trained bodies.

Appearing in the Bay Area at about the same time as the Central Ballet was a stylish young local choreographer who is really ferociously female. Lea Wolf, in her second season as a dancemaker, showed work that is simultaneously surreal and impressionistic. It makes its impact through a layering of images, both physical and visual.

Her Waiting for It to Happen and Then, which Wolf performed with Alexis Turner, Monique Jenkinson, and Doe Yamashiro, is a portrait of four women alternately languorous and fierce. Dressed in short black skirts and satin-collared shirts, they encounter one another in Sarah Steinberg's dreamy set of a long white wall framing a dark doorway. They burl their bodies violently into dance phrases, refugees from some Amazon sisterhood, needing contact yet prickly and edgy in every interaction that brings them together.

Turner and Wolf stand out easily as the two most sensuously intense performers. The way Turner sits restlessly on a chair or Wolf churns the stage with her big, open-legged lunges suggests intense eroticism turned inward and the physical weightiness the torpor of desire can bring.

These are not women who need men, but rather women for whom emotional release can come in a physical tangle of honey-colored limbs on the floor. At one point Wolf retreats to an upstage corner and, squatting, begins to sensuously peel an orange from a glowing bowl of fruit. At the same time this action is rendered in milky close-up in Todd Ferguson's video.

The repeated images, both live and on video, that form the narrative structure of Waiting function like ricocheting memories. The result is that a close-up on tape of the detailed door frame of an old house jolts us into awareness of the identical doorway as a painted backdrop upstage. This challenge to make visual sense also permeates Wolf's movement vocabulary in Spill. A duet for Wolf and Turner, Spill is intensely feminine, radiating an aura of satisfied completeness in the women's alternately tender and rough pairings with one another.

Spill uses a rhythmically aggressive electronic score by Paul Giger to underlie the female ritual play with the bucket of water that begins this dance. Wolf and Turner's performance presents a subversion of physical technique to dramatic ends. Ever action of dousing each other with water, thrashing their feet in a big metal tub, or simply pedaling their legs ecstatically as they lie in a drippy mess on the floor exudes ecstasy. Amplified. This is the kind of visceral bite the dance of revolutionary women should have.