Smuin Ballets/SF.

During his twelve years as codirector of San Francisco Ballet, Michael Smuin was the lovable bad boy: he skidded across the art spectrum from pop to highbrow and usually came to a screeching halt in a flashy, emotionally accessible middle ground. His ouster by the ballet board a decade ago was bitter and nasty, and by the look of his new company, Smuin has neither forgotten nor forgiven.

The program, "Dances with Songs" (twenty-two of them), opened with a flash of ironic wit. The portentous first notes of Beethoven's Fifth sounded, then the company name was splashed in blocky Superman-style lettering across the backdrop. Next came a medley of love song fragments that seemed to jab coyly at the Ballet the way a callow Romeo, spurned by an icy Juliet, might do.

Allusions to Romeo and Juliet riddled the program, and if you missed the not-so-subtle references in the listed numbers, Smuin beat home the point with an unannounced performance of his own balcony scene. This was not by accident. The following night San Francisco Ballet's Helgi Tomasson was to premiere his nearly million-dollar Romeo, and Smuin seemed to be spilling out a wounded, but brazen, "Oh, yeah? So there."

Smuin seems to know his audience. Few in the cold new Center for the Arts Theater appeared to mind the short, digestible dances about love that had more in common with television variety shows than anything else, even Broadway hoofing. No one seemed to care that the work was monotonously similar and wearyingly predictable, set to wonderful pop music that in this artistic soup all began to sound the same. No one minded the view of woman as angel, sexpot, or cowgirl. That's because Smuin fashions a world where even the sex is cute. He gives comfort a shape.

Yet he also brings dance to life for lots of folks. He dares to set an angelic Pascale Leroy dancing to Aaron Neville's "Ave Maria" or acrobatically wrestling a ballet barre to Nat "King" Cole's "Unforgettable." He lets Tiffany Heft flirt with us as a latter-day Ginger as she merges with the music. He gives us Pierrot, the lovelorn clown, as soap opera. And he shows in the flashy chorus-line finale that sex, dance,and entertainment can live happily ever after.