Pina Bausch's "Orpheus and Eurydice" From Paris Opera Ballet The myth of Orpheus, though it has been told many ways, is primarily about an artist and art's capacity to transcend. The heroic poet-musician Orpheus, after losing his wife, Eurydice, calms the deities of the Underworld with his lyre playing and singing. They permit him to lead her back to the world of the living. After he loses her a second time, he goes on invoking her. And, as many treatments show, his art continues after his death. The composer Gluck wrote three versions of his three-act Orpheus opera between 1762 and 1774. Each had a happy ending, with Eurydice restored to Orpheus by the god Love, and with successive group dances to celebrate Love's triumph. Such matters did not detain the German choreographer Pina Bausch. In her danced version of Gluck's opera, performed over the weekend by the Paris Opera Ballet as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Orpheus knows one art alone: grief. He shows no bravery in entering the realm of the dead, bears no lyre, demonstrates no wonder on beholding the Elysian Fields. You wonder why this Orpheus needs to be told not to look at Eurydice; he never looks at anyone anyway. After the final aria, widely known as Orpheus" Lament, he dies. To accommodate this, Bausch, who died in 2009, drastically altered the musical text. In these and other ways this production deconstructs the Orpheus myth and Gluck's opera. To Bausch, it seems, love and art mattered far less than incoherent suffering. Her program retitles Gluck's three named characters: Orpheus becomes Love, Love Youth, Eurydice Death. You may be sure that Youth is stuff that will not endure; Bausch cut the second half of the role. Gluck's scenes also receive new names: "Mourning," "Violence," "Peace," "Death." It's striking that, wherever Gluck used a dancelike rhythm, Bausch ignored or contradicted it, usually stressing upper-body gestures in dynamics opposed to the music's. Still, even if you knew that the scene for the Furies and Orpheus is one of the most imaginative sequences in all music drama, the musical playing of this production made you hear it anew. I attended both Friday's and Saturday's performances and was shaken by the music each time. Thomas Hengelbrock conducted the Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble und Chor, all in the pit: sonorities for brass and strings were electrifying. The three vocal soloists, eloquent, shared the stage with the dancers. Thus Orpheus/Love was a woman singing in a black dress (Maria Riccarda Wesseling) and a man near-naked in flesh-colored briefs (Stéphane Bullion or Nicolas Paul); likewise there were two Eurydices/Deaths and two Loves/ Youths. Ms. Wesseling, kneeling, motionless, sang the Lament to the corpses of both Eurydices (the dancer, Marie-Agnès Gillot or Alice Renavand, had been tenderly deposited across the singer Yun Jung Choi), while the male Orpheus knelt at the back of the stage on the opposite side, his head in the same posture but with his back to us. Saturday's dance cast, featuring Mr. Paul and Ms. Renavand, was far the more riveting in its dynamic subtlety and unbroken intensity. But why does this Paris production use a German translation? This may have made sense when Bausch first staged her version in Wuppertal in 1975. The Paris Opera Ballet, however, acquired this staging in 2005. No surtitles are shown. Only if you know the words may the full measure of Bausch's deconstruction be understood. As Orpheus enters the Elysian Fields, he sings of light, birds, water, breezes. Bausch's Orpheus beholds a realm walled by glass under a black sky. The image of Orpheus entering the realm of the dead made an immense impression on ballet. That entrance aria, "Quel nouveau ciel" in French, was the musical model for the entrance of Albrecht in Act 2 of "Giselle"; the two main male entrances in George Balanchine's "Serenade" evoke both Orpheus and Albrecht. Bausch's "Orpheus," in turn, evokes a few "Giselle" and "Serenade" images. This version owes, however, far more to the choreographers Antony Tudor (who taught Bausch) and Martha Graham. As in Tudor's "Dark Elegies," dancers do big ballet jumps but with arms clenched by their sides: closed and outgoing at the same time. Several gestures and motifs recall Graham. It's probable that Bausch, here and elsewhere, intended to restore to dance some of the poetic ambiguity that was so striking and baffling in Graham's choreography in the 1940s. Yet whereas ambiguity in Graham was charged by expressionist urgency, Bausch's language is physically softer, expressively more evasive, structurally devoid of progress. Graham's dance theater, with the body at war with itself, forces you to consider meaning; Bausch dance theater encourages you to think there must be meanings you can never understand. Each scene initially looks impressively serious, modern or timeless. A felled tree lying across the stage in "Mourning" opposite a veiled shrine, giant wooden chairs (one on its side) and white threads variously pulled in "Violence" (three Cerberus-like men wear butcher's aprons), the long stasis that follows the heroine's second death in "Death": these all make a theatrical impact. The dances employ a very narrow vocabulary of mimelike motifs. The following images are recycled throughout the four scenes: the wrapping of one arm across the torso to clutch the opposite elbow; the placing of one or two hands onto the face (suggesting both grief and blindness); a stance in which, with both knees bent, the supporting leg is turned in, the other is turned out to present the inner thigh to the audience; the opening of both arms into a steeple above the head. There isn't much variation. The difference between mourners of "Mourning" and the Elysian spirits of "Peace" is depressingly, deliberately, small.