The show, organized by associate director of BB II Peter Stark, was built to show off the talents and challenge the performing chops of the young dancers.

BB@HOME: up close and personal, staged by the Boston Ballet at 19 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA, on February 1 and 2.

Boston Ballet School trainees in Peter Stark’s “Gopak.” Photo: Sabi Varga.

By Marcia B. Siegel

Boston Ballet’s apprentice company performs at the Opera House alongside the main company in big ballets, but it gets its own showcase in the studio series BB@home.Thursday night’s first program of the new year, danced by BB II, trainees and students, offered small and ingratiating works, nothing heavy. The show, organized by associate director of BB II Peter Stark, was built to show off the talents and challenge the performing chops of the young dancers. As its title indicated, the intimate setting gave the audience a close look at the aspirants. With a good grasp of the technical demands, they were a little shakier on differentiating between styles.

The program began with Yury Yanowsky’s Trazom (Mozart spelled backwards, get it?), commissioned in 2014 for the 60th anniversary of  the Boston Ballet school. Set to movements from three Mozart horn concertos, the dance was engineered to make five couples look like a lot more, with small costume changes and strategic redeployments of the forces. Without abandoning the classical movement vocabulary, Yanowsky incorporated everyday gestures, to personalize what was essentially a pure-dance piece.

Gopak, based on what’s usually a solo, was expanded for six men by Peter Stark. In the classical Russian ballets, movements from folk dances were often theatricalized to make the most of their native enthusiasm and stuntwork. Stark’s abbreviated version barely made time for flying leaps and surprising squats by the six BB School trainees, and gasps by the audience.

George Balanchine’s roots lay in the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian school. He left Russia in 1924 and joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where he began the long development that flowered in the New York City Ballet and his incomparable repertory of neo-classical ballets. Balanchine didn’t stop choreographing new things until his final illness in the early 1980s. Stars and Stripes premiered in 1958, at the peak of his career. It’s a grand parade of a ballet set to selections by John Philip Sousa arranged by Hershy Kay. Boston Ballet first adopted Stars and Stripes in 1974 and they’ve performed the whole work many times.

Peter Stark introduced Miranda Weese, the former NYCB principal dancer, who came to Boston last fall as Children’s Ballet Master. She staged Stars and Stripes’  Fourth Campaign, the Pas de Deux, for Gabriela Schiefer and Christian Pforr of BB II. The ballet uses a vocabulary of classical steps, set to familiar marches and refrains, laced with flirtatious salutes, cocky drum-major walks and tricky behaviors.

Schiefer and Pforr carried off the pyrotechnics of the choreography nicely, if not quite taking on its customary allegro speed. Pforr sailed through his lofty jetés and stomach-churning sinks into plié; Schiefer whirled across the space in dizzy spins. The bravura aspects of Stars and Stripes can get to the audience’s kinesthetic nerves and induce applause worthy of the biggest plays in spectator sports. Balanchine understood this, but he also understood the appeal of the feminine head-tilt and the way the man struts to show off.

The pas de deux was followed on Thursday night with a vintage classical number, the Pastorale from Marius Petipa’s Nutcracker. There are so many versions of this ballet, you can’t really tell who choreographed any one of its parts. Thursday’s excerpt certainly isn’t the cute Shepherdess and her little lambs version that Boston Ballet does now, nor the Marzipan Shepherdesses of George Balanchine’s version, but it is Tchaikovsky’s authentic “Dance of the Reed Flutes” music.

Peter Stark introduced the work by explaining that it had been created for teenage dancers, and last week it was performed by three young students, Georgia Barnes, Aiva Berrigan, and Owen Flacke. They were beautifully clear in their steps and their composure. No tricks, just a display of exquisite manners, academic steps, and a bit of partnering. I liked it better than the overstuffed, updated, trendily reshaped versions that have overtaken Nutcracker land.

Christopher Wheeldon’s The American from 2007 ended the program. This  work from Wheeldon anticipates the complicated partner work that he later perfected. Five couples support a principal pair (Catherine Livingston and Derek Drilon). Michele Gifford staged the work for BB II. Set to Antonin Dvorak’s string quartet, it doesn’t have anything to do with Wheeldon’s two recent takes on Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” one for Broadway and one for the NYCB. But it does connect, musically, with the composer’s very well-known Fifth Symphony, the “New World.”

The movement is mostly partner work, which the dancers handled well. I noticed how lyrical it was, the body often working in curves and rocking motions, not like the military geometrics of Stars and Stripes, another expatriate view of Americana. Wheeldon is English; bred in the Royal Ballet, he came to the States in 1993 and danced with New York City Ballet before starting to choreograph. By 2001 he was NYCB’s resident choreographer, and he’s been so prolific ever since that The American hardly makes his biography lists.

It was danced by the Carolina and Sarasota Ballets before being acquired by BB II. I thought it was a fine choice for the young dancers, a rare opportunity to express sweetness instead of the rough, raw brilliance or snarky sarcasm that pervades the contemporary ballet stage.

Internationally known writer, lecturer, and teacher Marcia B. Siegel covered dance for 16 years at The Boston Phoenix. She is a contributing editor for The Hudson Review. The fourth collection of Siegel’s reviews and essays, Mirrors and Scrims—The Life and Afterlife of Ballet, won the 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen prize from the American Society for Aesthetics. Her other books include studies of Twyla Tharp, Doris Humphrey, and American choreography. From 1983 to 1996, Siegel was a member of the resident faculty of the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.