A swan song with no swans at all

Reforming classical ballet to reflect a heightened sense of how young people actually move in the contemporary world: That’s one legacy of American choreographer William Forsythe’s 20 years as the artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet.

It’s not a matter of becoming temporarily grungy for novelty or crossover appeal; it’s a complete transformation of the art from within. In this country, Eliot Feld and Alonzo King each sought the same goal, but Forsythe’s access to production resources and government funding virtually inconceivable in our turn-of-the-century America set him apart -- and his obsessive creative drive did the rest.

German economics and Forsythe’s need for new artistic horizons will end his Frankfurt era in a matter of months, but over the weekend the company visited the Orange County Performing Arts Center in a four-part swan song -- with, of course, no swans.

Sometimes dominated by long silences or the dancers’ breath rhythms, each piece featured insistent, fragmentary music by Forsythe’s longtime collaborator, Thom Willems, and stark, generalized overhead lighting designed by Forsythe.

He also designed the empty, enclosed black set used for everything except “Duo,” a 1996 piece that was performed on the forestage and also sported a radically different style of costuming from the simulation of ordinary street wear prevalent in the rest of the program.

Wearing transparent net tops over black shorts, Jill Johnson and Natalie Thomas made “Duo” at once an essay in Forsythian glamour (a la his relatively familiar “Herman Schmerman” pas de deux) and an exploration of feminine energy. Complementing each other in passages of mirror synchrony, they executed long, sustained phrases ending in periods of rest.

Willem’s music initially seemed to come from some faraway place and along with the classical extensions accenting the choreography gave the work an aura of remembered elegance. In contrast, Forsythe’s “(N.N.N.N.)” quartet from 2002 suggested primal male competition and bonding rituals in 20 minutes of nonstop athletic roughhousing.

Suggesting lion cubs at play, the Saturday cast featured Ayman Harper as a loose-limbed rebel who initiated changes of mood and attack involving Fabrice Mazliah, Richard Siegal and Sang Jijia. Each stayed an individual: Mazliah fierce, Siegal meek, Jijia wary. But each managed to detonate one powerful energy burst after another (very different from the women’s mastery of flow in “Duo”) until sustained stamina became a display of virtuosity all by itself.

That concept also helped unify “One Flat Thing Reproduced,” a deliberately sprawling 2000 theater piece for 14 dancers and 20 metal tables. Careening over, under and between the tables, the company created the illusion of anarchy to Willems’ most forceful score of the evening. If you looked closely, the impetus seemed to be dramatic rather than physical: Everyone appeared to have a character to play, an agenda to pursue, an emotion to express. So instead of looking at the whole societal spectacle of the work, it helped to think of each of the 20 tables as a separate room in which desires, relationships, whole lives were literally on the table.

In “The Room as It Was” from 2002, Forsythe used four men and four women for what seemed at first an experiment in anti-classical implosion: broken-limbed body shapes and flung-out moves pulled down toward the floor or into the lower torso. The complex, unorthodox pointe-work generated plenty of technical excitement, with the phenomenally inventive duets for Peggy Grelat and Cyril Baldy representing a daring reordering of textbook partnering.

However, Forsythe often seemed to be mocking conventional ballet -- most openly, perhaps, in a solo for Martha Krummenacher that was full of comic falls from grace. And soon, all the broken lines we’d been watching knitted together and began extending upward, outward toward new classical horizons. The ballet ended, believe it or not, in a Forsythe version of a 19th century apotheosis: scene change, loving tableau, climactic music, the works.

Forsythe can afford to be retro. At age 54, he is moving into a new phase of his career (a privately funded company shared by Frankfurt and Dresden) already having won the revolution in ballet form and content that he fought with so many others. Two generations of classical dancers walk differently on the stage because of him -- and other major differences start from there. Audiences see differently too -- even in places where Forsythe imitations are more prevalent than the real thing.

It’s unfortunate for us that he wasn’t able to do it in the country where he was born -- but miraculous that he was able to do it at all.