Lifted By Love.

Lifted by Love, a premiere by New York City's Peter Pucci, is a pop ballet with a difference: streamlined and sensual, but soulful in its depiction of human relationships.

Pucci's elegant style and contemporary sensibility find a compatible match with the forward-thinking Alberta Ballet. Under the encouraging direction of Ali Pourfarrokh, Canada's only prairie ballet company has emerged to give the Big Three (National Ballet of Canada, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and Royal Winnipeg Ballet) a run for their money. The thirty-six-year-old troupe is fast outdistancing the competition with programming that is eclectic, bold, and youthful in outlook. No angst-ridden James Kudelka ballets here; rather, vibrant dances that celebrate life as a quest of the spirit.

Inspired by a medley of songs by Alberta-born pop chanteuse k.d. lang, Lifted by Love is an energetic exploration of emotional truths. Sixteen dancers wearing electric blue and green, life-affirming colors of sea and earth, exude a vigor both sexual and sophisticated. Moving to the pounding bass line of lang's music, they are like a tribe of young warriors fully alive in Pucci's choreography, which fits them like a second skin.

Pucci favors a less-is-more approach to choreography. He moves dancers in simple formations, walking, running, jumping, skipping in lines that neatly crisscross the stage. The look is pristine, cool, but underlying the technique is an aggressiveness of attack. The minimalist movement never seems antiseptic; the beat of the human heart sounds loudly in passages where the dancers explode through space. The dancing in Lifted by Love is infectiously joyous and confident.

The coltish energy of the Alberta Ballet dancers suits Pucci, who last year gained wider recognition as one of the creators of Billboards for Joffrey Ballet. Suffice it to say, Lifted by Love is the pop ballet Billboards should have been: powerful, passionate, and visually pleasing.

Sharing billing with the Pucci premiere was a new work by Pourfarrokh, Butterfly Dreams, and a revival of Brian Macdonald's Time Out of Mind, a contemporary classic created for the Joffrey in 1962. Butterfly Dreams was serene and contemplative, the result of a controlled study of line, placement, and harmony as inspired by Marjan Mozetich's neoclassical score.