The Pennsylvania Ballet's season-closer stuns

From the opening curtain to the final darkening of the lights, exuberant reactions - both subjectively visceral and objectively profound - rippled through the Merriam Theater at the Pennsylvania Ballet's season closer Thursday night.

Choreographer William Forsythe has returned to the States after decades helming Ballet Frankfurt and then his own company in Dresden. The Philadelphia premiere of his 1991 The Second Detail is his third work from the Pennsylvania Ballet. These decades-old, neoclassical ballets will appeal to lovers of Balanchine, whom Forsythe most admired, and, to my eye, advanced the Balanchine aesthetic.

The set suggests the casual atmosphere of a rehearsal studio - where tentative, pensive dancers start and stop phrases, retry them, dance them backward, lie down, run. Ian Hussey takes the first leaps, landing back to audience in deep plié with arms angled in high fifth position before breaking into a few entrechats.

Ballerinas grind their pointe shoes as though into rosin boxes before going on stage. The women glance, catlike, over their shoulders as they saunter off. Others sit it out along the back wall.

Daniel Cooper, back on stage after an injury, easily matched the other men's soaring sideways grand jetés. Solos by Lauren Fadeley and Mayara Pineiro were arresting, but, curiously, the work's signature entrance of a mysterious female dancer toward its last moments was cut.

Larry Keigwin's lovely 2013 Canvas adds a colorfully lighthearted counterweight to the powerful, memorable works by Forsythe and Nicolo Fonte. It ends with a thrilling jump as James Ihde caught Brooke Moore, swirling her around his waist like his beloved.

Artistic director Angel Corella slipped in an amuse-bouche for next season: The two new Cuban dancers, Pineiro and principal guest artist Arian Molina Soca, spectacularly dance the solos to Marius Petipa's Don Quixote. Her verve and his masculine allure, combined with their skills, are the quintessence of classical ballet.

But the world premiere of Fonte's Grace Action is an instant classic in the contemporary idiom. New company members Russell Ducker and Soca take lead roles. They partner with Marria Cosentino and Lillian Di Piazza, elegant in Martha Chamberlain's midnight-blue leotards slashed with swirls of cameo pink and exquisite in their interpretation of Fonte's intense choreography.

Dancing to a Philip Glass remix, 12 men and women literally share the spotlights with Brad Fields' breathtaking lighting design. Its ghostly fog created a galaxy of searching pinpoint shafts of light that limned the dancers' bodies. Their quicksilver moves often emanated from the small of their backs, driving energy through their limbs like summer lightning.

Near the end, the dancers repeatedly raise their right arms chest-high in first position, a gesture that looks like a salute at curtain or an invitation to a caress - or a dance.