Kylián’s ‘Black and White’ comes alive

Stringing together the pieces is an unlikely leitmotif: multilayered period ball gowns that skitter across the stage on casters, hover overhead with bell skirts gaping, or are “worn’’ by the dancers, as they slip behind the dresses’ rigid folds.

The night begins with “No More Play’’ (1988), a dance for five set to the discordant strains of Anton Webern. The gown featured here is poufy and green, and zips across the stage like a scampering mouse. Geometry is the order of the day: Three dancers lean forward, their backsides meeting as the hub of a wheel, their flat backs and outstretched arms the spokes. Kathleen Breen Combes’s limbs, in particular, seem to extend from here to tomorrow. A man and a woman smack belly to belly, then sink to the ground and curl inward. Erica Cornejo is at once lithe and crackling; held upside down, she pedals the air. At the end, all five dancers sit and arc back at the stage edge till their heads dangle above the orchestra pit. Game over.

In 1991’s “Petite Mort’’ (a French euphenism for orgasm), set to Mozart, the lights — impeccably done throughout by Joop Caboort — come up on six men, in goldish briefs, brandishing fencing foils. They grasp the foils in the crook of their knees and rub their necks with them — Freud would have had a field day. But the piece comes most alive when six women enter and duets begin. John Lam runs his foil up the leg of Rie Ichikawa as she pushes into an arabesque. Her legs bending and folding become a Rorschach inkblot. Men lift women from underneath their thighs. Whitney Jensen, a corps member, is a lanky, leggy surprise. As Boyko Dossev’s hand reaches through her legs, she turns almost inside out.