The first two depict harmonious pairs, who move as one in steps and lifts, travelling swiftly, cleanly, across the stage, their confidence in the other’s location and timing a reflection of their relationship.  In the first dance, the evident youth of Bianca Scudamore and Guillaume Diop (named étoile this March) adds greatly to our sense of an emerging relationship. In the duet’s final moment, the only moment that makes a show of technique, Diop lifts her, she slowly curves around him, and so they exit. By contrast, the sense of harmony that Héloïse Bourdon and Audric Bezard establish for much of the second dance develops into faster movements and turns until, suddenly, she is held straight upside down by him. Gradually he releases her. One wonders about the possible meanings. Their exit, also on a lift, keeps one wondering, she held overhead and he walking backwards. The third dance is tempestuous from the beginning, Bleuenn Battistoni and Thomas Docquir excelling in the many steps in which they strain against each other. Smoldering anger, rejecting yet together, together yet rejecting. The end is a reconciliation that seems as much about spent emotions as about possibility. An enigmatic coda brings on the three pairs of dancers; the women briefly connect, the men briefly connect, then each pair leaves.

The program closes on a lighter note: the 1956 “The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody)”). Also to Chopin and acquired by POB in 1992, this comic piece about a piano concert and audience members who come on stage one or two at a time, open up their chairs, and sit down to listen—or not—still feels fresh. It was especially nice to hear the laughter at the start as some in the Garnier audience realize that this is going to be funny. In fact, the witty intent is set even before the beginning, with Paul Steinberg’s stage curtain, a sketch of a theater proscenium from far enough back that it shows the backs of audience heads facing the stage, rows that we flesh-and-blood audience members continue.