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Dance

Lukewarm

The Reassuring Effects (Of Form and Poetry), for four men and four women, the ladies in toe shoes, is supposed to be McIntyre’s serious salute to (ballet) dancing, but it’s merely dull, starting with the music, Antonín Dvorák’s Serenade for Strings in E minor, a poor cousin of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C. Cirio leads it off with the four men, who lift and spread-eagle and generally manhandle her (the ballerina stripped bare by her bachelors — but costume jewelry alongside the similar section in Balanchine’s Rubies). The rest of the half-hour work is done mostly in couples (and mostly the same couples), with the odd “Hey, we can do tours à la seconde and piqué-chaîné sequences and everything!” — which they can, but to no gratifying end. Cirio and Schert got the slow duet; Schert, who’s danced with Alonzo King and ABT, looks to be the company’s best male dancer, but he doesn’t have much to do here beyond presenting Cirio. And though Cirio evinced a lyric line that I didn’t always observe during her four years with Boston Ballet, she, like the program, left me wanting more.