Royal Ballet of Flanders, Opera House, Antwerp, February 17, 1998; Luna Theater, Brussels, February 20-21, 1998.

The Antwerp dance public loves the Royal Ballet of Flanders's evening-length productions--excellent, good, or mediocre. The mixed bills, while artistically more rewarding, are less popular with audiences raised on Maurice Bejart's spectaculars. The greatest merit of these programs has been the nurturing of such local talent as Antwerp-born choreographer Danny Rosseel and the bond that artistic director Robert Denvers has forged with American choreographer Christopher d'Amboise, who has created a ballet every season for the past three years and is the best thing to come from New York City to these shores in a long time.

In addition to Rosseel and d'Amboise this season's mixed bill featured Argentinean Mauricio Wainrot, a skilled craftsman of ensemble pieces who is also a frequent contributor, and another Antwerp native, Marc Bogaerts.

Bogaerts's Now and Then, supposedly a character study of people from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries set to music by Schubert, suggests neither period. But it's always a pleasure to watch Xiomara Reyes, who danced the role of the Romantic Woman, even when she valiantly deals with irrelevant choreography.

In Rosseel's Silent Night, Still We Dream, a woman staggers painfully on stiletto heels while the grating sound of Alfred Schnittke's sarcastic Silent Night adds an ominous overtone. The elegant shoes, the white chair that she knocks down, the dissonant Christmas carol--all suggest the shaky values she is trying to escape.

A man slides slowly down a chromium pole; he possesses strength, passion, and control, and their duet to Arvo Part's magnificent Fratres conveys both her dependency on and rejection of the support he offers her. In the end, she rebuffs his help. The viewer is left to decide whether or not the woman will make it on her own. Ninon Neyt and the company's most impressive male dancer, Pascal Molat, are superb in their reading of Rosseel's disquieting tale.

Prokofiev's music has inspired Christopher d'Amboise with a dance based on the myth of Pygmalion, titled Violin Concerto No. 1. In the first movement we see the Greek sculptor fascinated by the statue he is creating; her coming to life is almost a paraphrase of Coppelia. Aysem Sunal is admirable in her virginal discovery of her own womanhood and Priit Kripson is an intrigued and intriguing Pygmalion.

In the second movement, fast paced and briskly percussive, d'Amboise shows another image of woman--willful, easily dominating the two men who partner her. Then in the third, more romantic movement he shows yet another aspect of womanhood; as the music grows quieter and more lyrical, all seven dancers return to the stage for a strange, poetic finale, with Pygmalion dreamily repeating his gestures of shaping a woman's body.

Mauricio Wainrot's Looking Through Glass is a sunny translation in movement of Philip Glass's extraordinary Violin Concerto. The whole company dances in a constantly changing landscape of groupings, some as stately as folk dancers, others hitting the stage like gale-force winds. Occasionally Wainrot goes for the obvious, but the energy is infectious, while Carlos Gallardo's costumes in warm tones of brown and ochre add an earthy note. Long live mixed bills in Antwerp!