Netherlands Dance Theater.

As Jiri Kylian, artistic director of Netherlands Dance Theater, approaches his creative zenith, the vitality of his choreography and its full-hearted search for the roots and nuggets of existence place him above the majority of today's choreographers. When he is in harmony with himself, as in Whereabouts Unknown and Double You, he makes the expressive potential of dance seem infinite; and even in his less-disciplined moments, when he is mesmerized by energy for its own sake, he does not fail to interest.

This four-program season marked the Netherlands organization's first American appearance in seven years. Repertoire for NDT 1, the thirty-two-member main company, was entirely by Kylian. NDT 2, consisting of fourteen dancers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, and NDT 3, a quartet of artists over forty, both performed pas de deux by resident choreographer Hans van Manen as well as ballets by guest choreographers.

There is something uniquely nourishing about being able to share in an artist's emotional and intellectual growth. During the all-Kylian bill for NDT 1, these opportunities abounded.

Kylian is intrigued by the play of opposites so prevalent in life. In Whereabouts Unknown, with its gently sloping, two-level setting by Michael Simon, he juxtaposed the stillness of death with a stream of couples dancing by turns violently and tenderly. As in Dark Meadow, Martha Graham's meditation on mortality and rebirth, Kylian used choral passages to give sweep and comment to the contrasting elements.

His No More Play and Petite Mort ("Orgasm"), performed with only the briefest of pauses between them, contrasted the growing awareness of passion with its shimmering fulfillment; and in Sarabande he found menace in the supposedly innocent world of children. Eighteenth-century gowns hovered like ominous ancestors; dancers shook their fingers admonishingly; men dropped their pants and continued to perform with their ankles encircled. Antics and anger swirled side by side.

During Falling Angels, which concluded the program, Kylian's use of duality deteriorated into pure conflict. Eight women engaged in a ferocious drill, which came close to suggesting a choreographer out of control of his medium.

A similar hyperactivity pulled Kylian's evening-long Kaguyahime (which opened the engagement) in too many directions. Here the underlying duality--how the worship of beauty can cause destruction--was ironic. Red roses in silver vases, gleaming motorcycles, scenery battens festooned with lights: into this sensory melange, men portraying villagers forcefully strode. A moon goddess, danced with chilly angularity by Fiona Lummis, cast her spell. Energy flared as each man tried to entice her, only to fall prone. Drums rivaled the bowels of the earth. A mikado tried to snare the goddess in a billowing golden cloth. Untouched, she returned to her orb. Despite its musical and scenic extravagance, Kaguyahime remained oddly lacking in poetry.

While far more modest in format, the NDT 3 program reached an almost consistently poetic dimension. The group was like a fine string quartet: rich in texture, intelligent in communication. Its participants were Gary Chryst, Sabine Kupferberg, Gerard Lemaitre, and Martine van Hamel.

In Double You, for Chryst, Kylian evoked a whole life's journey in one taut solo. Like a child unwilling to be born, Chryst struggled to keep the curtain from parting at the outset. When he did yield, he was alone in a space dominated by two pendulums. Again in a play of opposites, he alternately plunged and withdrew along an invisible path. As the pendulums' arcs began to narrow, he walked downstage and resolutely closed the curtain.

Kylian is fascinated by primitive symbolism, and like early twentieth-century painters (Picasso and Modigliani come easily to mind), he likes to translate the symbols into a contemporary context. I found the device a little forced in No Sleep Till Dawn of Day. A plaintive four-note lullaby from the Solomon Islands was heard repeatedly. Van Hamel and Kupferberg sat at opposite ends of a row of twenty art deco chairs. Like Nikes, they seemed larger than life as they contracted their torsos and stretched their sleek legs. They were unaware of each other and remained so even when they had drawn closer together. Isolation seemed to be the theme, but somehow the simple melody dominated the complex duet.

Hans van Manen and Ohad Naharin both dealt with the ennui that sometimes assails middle-aged couples. Two chairs were the habitat of van Manen's Evergreens, for Kupferberg and Lemaitre. She repeatedly escaped into tragedienne dreams, while her mate strutted like a boulevardier. But reality prevailed. She slid her chair a bit closer to his.

In Off White, Chryst and Kupferberg disappeared behind the wall of their tacky parlor. The wall came clattering down, revealing them on a bedtrampoline, where life became a lot more interesting. The duet was that rarest of rare--as funny as it was deftly performed. Chryst's concentrated acting helped keep Martha Clarke's Dammerung ("Twilight") from slipping into melodrama. He struggled through the fear-laden throes of a seemingly ordinary citizen. Van Hamel joined him and yet eluded him. Was she a memory or a dream? He removed his jacket to reveal a huge bloodstain on his shirt and then fell dead.

Paul Lightfoot's Susto ("Fright") found the entire group cavorting in sand that poured from a suspended hourglass. It was a trivial conclusion to an otherwise richly made and performed program.

With the exception of Kylian's Un Ballo ("A Dance"), the choreography for NDT 2 lacked substance. Un Ballo had an appealing, dreamy quality enhanced by the Ravel accompaniment and by a decor consisting of banks of candles suspended in midair.

Stamping Ground, a second Kylian essay into contemporay primitivism, this time with aboriginal dance as the inspiration, seemed to vacillate between authenticity and satire, and yet it did not lack invention. Gideon Obarzanek's Petrol-Head Lover used the devices of MTV but offered little comment of its own; although van Manen's Two was soundly made, it proved a bit bland.

In all, Netherlands Dance Theater brought us fifty dancers, all beautifully integrated into an organization whose artistic vitality was more than welcome, despite Kylian's occasional lapses into choreographic excess.