Entertainment

Danish director imports a well-played ballet buffet

While the Republican candidates were duking it out in Arizona Wednesday night, Ballet Arizona visited New York for the first time — and it’s a group worthy of bipartisan support.

The company brought “Play,” a full-evening work by its Danish-born director, Ib Andersen, and the dancing stole the show.

“Play” has seven sections, tenuously connected by the title, but it’s better to think of them as separate courses in a buffet of ballet styles.

Each section is agreeable but familiar. The work opens with a backdrop of a star-speckled night sky as, one by one, the dancers introduce themselves in fluidly classical solos to recordings of the Mozart variations we know best as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

You can see Andersen’s Danish Bournonville training in his gracious dance to Schubert. Four men in yellow-green poet shirts and an elegant lady in red — the lovely Paola Hartley, who is a very good thing in a small package — gambol and dance as if it were the first day of spring.

Andersen was a star at New York City Ballet a generation ago, and his piece to Britten, with its forest of tall, thin women in leotards scurrying mysteriously in the dark, looks like the undiscovered fourth movement of Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements.”

The Stravinsky sections look even more like Balanchine, but not unpleasantly so. Yet the work is predictable, even when Andersen isn’t paying homage to his masters. His modern duet to contemporary composer Arvo Pärt is, unsurprisingly, very earnest and danced in very little clothing.

If the dances are tepid, the dancers are cool — and that’s what makes Ballet Arizona hot. Andersen was one of the most stylish yet unaffected dancers of his day. His company shares many of his best attributes, and his dancers are fleet, with long, beautiful, clean lines.

So even if we’ve seen this “Play” before, the players make it well worth watching.