Dance - Dancing Dane

As the second act of the Atlanta Ballet’s Hamlet opens, a grid of dancers, their backs and buttocks turned toward us, move like marionettes through a series of synchronized poses: elbows raised as though on strings, then hands high, arms ratcheting through robotic repetitions. They wear black on a white stage. A relentless violin six-count drives them on like a galley drum.

Then, from this figure of cold mechanics erupts a man in full flight. Laertes (Christian Clark) performs an asymmetric spiral six feet off the ground, looking like the last thing you’d see before Jet Li gave you to the gravediggers. He crashes flat out in the middle of the grid, which parts to parallel lines. His body roars with revenge.

Hamlet (double cast with John Welker and Joe Roesner) appears, and the two men throw themselves at one another, completely off balance, relying entirely on the collision to hold them up.

Ballet brawls too often appear as petulant duets, the combatants expressing their anger with assertive jetes and peevish pirouettes. But choreographer Stephen Mills, artistic director of Ballet Austin, brings real violence to this adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The show’s flashes of rage, love and despair are all the more vivid for the spare geometries of sound, set and motion behind them. The score is a collection of works by Philip Glass — the master of the metronome. Hypnotically rhythmic and starkly minimalist, Glass’ compositions amplify the persistent tempos of life: heartbeats, breathing, seasons and cycles of life.

Left alone, such mesmerizing rhythms could easily descend into New Age mediocrity, but Glass establishes repetitive themes in order to combine them and see what emerges. The excitement comes when a collection of cold regularities in an ordered mathematical dialogue create something wild and irrational, when life leaps savagely out of polygons of patterned dust.

Mills’ choreography applies the same technique. Dancers wander the stage in abstract studies, interacting as though by the simple reiterated computations of cellular automata. But from these sterile parts emerge fully fleshed lovers, a deceiving king, a distraught mother and vengeful sons, all hot and pulsing with life.

The Atlanta Ballet presents Hamlet March 27-30. Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 and 7 p.m. $22-$66. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. 404-817-8700. www.atlantaballet.com.