From Prague, Artistry With Unaffected Grace

When most foreign ballet companies come to Washington, it's with a big, showy, geared-to-please production, performed on a grand stage, most likely at the Kennedy Center. The Czech National Theatre Ballet offered a more intimate and revealing experience Saturday night, making a thoroughly winning local debut at the Harman Center for the Arts.

The Harman's inviting layout and snug proportions hug you to the stage, but it was the dancers' naturalness and clean, unaffected energy that drew their audience all the closer. This wasn't a troupe that labored to charm or overreached in any way. It didn't underscore with a grin or add ironic winks or wrestle itself into technical tricks. Watching these dancers, you realized how rare their honesty has come to be in the ballet world.

The company, which emerged from a national theater establishment that encompassed drama and opera, dates from 1868. The weekend's program, part of an effort to mark the Czech Republic's turn at holding the presidency of the European Union, was a showcase of Czech arts -- music, with recorded selections by Dvorak, Bohuslav Martinu and Leos Janacek; choreography, with a work by Artistic Director Petr Zuska and two by Jiri Kylian, long a fixture on the international scene; and the weighted, muscular dancing of 19 compact and healthy-looking performers. Fortunately, the vogue of scary-thinness does not seem to have taken hold in Prague.

If you wanted to draw conclusions about a national style, you'd have to say it's firmly Kylianesque, that is, earthy and plain (as opposed to, say, the pulled-up, technique-driven style of American ballet) with a subtle theatricality. Kylian, who spent the bulk of his career in Germany and Holland, where he was the longtime director of the Netherlands Dance Theater, is best known for seeding stark, spare movement with moments of expressive theater. His barefoot ballet "Petite Mort," from 1991, which formed the centerpiece of the Czech program, is a sterling example.

In this work, a corps of men engage in silent, ritualistic play with fencing foils, and are followed by five women who scoot onstage in voluminous ball gowns that are -- surprise -- not garments at all but one-sided, hard-shell facades. The dancers emerge from behind them and roll them about the stage like push-toys, in a bit of clever gimmickry made wittier because the ladies are swirling around poker-faced to a sober Mozart piano concerto. Given the current economic climate, the props seemed less a commentary on the false trappings of social convention -- which is what I saw in the work at my first encounter with it, years ago -- than a condemnation of spiritually empty vanity and materialism.

"Sinfonietta," one of Kylian's earliest hits, from 1978, showed a more conventional, lyrical side of the choreographer. Program notes explain that the piece is meant to evoke a "modern, free Czech." Accompanied by Janacek's 1926 composition of the same name, the work felt more like a warmed-over treatment of generic mid-'70s, post-Balanchine contemporary ballet -- the aerial lifts, the swirliness, the vague sense of yearning and triumph. Much to their credit, the Czech dancers didn't try to oversell it and lent it a light touch; the piece came across as more appealing than it had any right to be.

This was also true in "D.M.J. 1953-1977," which again and again veered close to expressionistic melodrama but avoided that trap by virtue of the dancers' artlessness -- in the best sense of the term. Zuska, who came up through the ranks of the company, has obviously been influenced by Kylian -- no surprises there -- but he focused more on an intense relationship between two of the dancers than either of the ensemble-based Kylian pieces had, and he displayed a flair for inventive partnering as well as for set design. The dancers used large, black rectangular boxes to reconfigure the space with walls, ramps and platforms in the work's three sections, each accompanied by the music of one of the Czech composers whose initials form the title (Dvorak, Martinu and Janacek). From the dancers' point of view, those big boxes may not have been the most accommodating decor, especially when they had to tumble around on those hard surfaces, but Zuska's eye for visual and theatrical effect produced a welcome change from the plain-Jane stages of most contemporary works. Here's hoping Prague finds another excuse to send its dancers here, and soon.