Vampire Follies: La Cage des Vampyres.

After Dallas Ballet folded due to overwhelming debts in 1988, a handful of its dancers and artistic staff decided to try again. Within a year, Ballet Dallas emerged under artistic director Thom Clower and has grown steadily for five consecutive seasons.

During Halloween weekend the company premiered James Clouser's Vampire Follies: La Cage des Vampyres, an evening-length ballet noir that could become an annual event for Dallas. The title brings to mind B-movie melodrama or Addams Family shtick, but Vampire contains, neither. Clouser presents his vampires with subtle, and sometimes dark, humor. No slapstick here, just a quirky, entertaining study of bloodsucking desire versus guilt.

Set to music by Shostakovich, the ballet depicts a retired vampire choreographer, Vladimir Acular, who auditions and rehearses (then kills or seduces) dancers for a Halloween cabaret show. The ballet-within-a-ballet scenario, set in 1930s Paris, showcases the acting and dancing abilities of the company's young dancers in a Dracula-meets-Ballets-Russes atmosphere. Overall, the company performs well, except in the ballroom dances, where the women seem clumsy in their heels.

Clouser creates several vivid moments. In the audition, dancers mimic Acular (Jacob Sparso) biting a woman's neck as though it were part of the audition choreography. Later, Marie Moreau (Victoria Lee), the ingenue heroine, naively evades Acular's overtures, while fellow auditioners are victimized. Sparso and Lee shine in their roles, as does John Johnson, Acular's eccentric retainer.

In a hilarious, albeit macabre, pas de six, two ballerina dummies are slung about by male partners, while a "dead" ballerina (Christy Currey) performs as limply as the dolls.

Clouser has handcrafted the work, his third ballet in the company's repertoire, for the eighteen-member troupe. While vampires may not be typical ballet fare except at Halloween, they are, in many ways, cousins to wilis. Somehow, the combination works out nicely.