“Choreographers Showcase” combines great minds with great feet

Once again, balletic meets Soleil-tic. You can’t help but admire the aesthetic.

Marking their seventh year of artistic hookups, Nevada Ballet Theatre and Cirque du Soleil merged their mojos for their annual “A Choreographers’ Showcase” at Treasure Island’s Mystere Theatre on Sunday (with a repeat performance scheduled for this Sunday).

Genre crossovers are almost always fascinating (if not always successful) for the possibility of creative combustion yielding something you’d have never imagined. (Who would have anticipated the latest dynamic duo in American jazz: Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga?)

“Showcase” features 60-plus performers from Nevada Ballet Theatre and multiple Las Vegas Cirque shows under choreographic direction from members of both troupes. Given that they’re squeezing a dozen original works into 90 minutes — and befitting Cirque’s signature devotion to being inscrutable and untranslatable — the production flits from one fleeting dreamscape to another, rather than risk any narrative journeys.

Three standouts work the heart, mind and gut, two of them relevant commentaries on our culture, another an unshackled expression of euphoria with no agenda other than joy.

Familiar though the complaint may be of technology isolating us even as it links us, the puckishly titled “Cell la Vie,” set to electronically tinged compositions by Max Richter and 20syl, is a clever spin on this spat society is having with itself over our beeping, blinking self-absorption.

In the sole cross-collaboration not only of dancers but of choreographers — most individual works are helmed by members of one troupe or the other — NBT’s Mary LaCroix and “Mystere’s” Greg Pennes construct a tableau of dancers absentmindedly wandering/dancing across a darkened stage, lit only by phone lights resembling flickering fireflies.

As they appear to chat, snap photos and text, a lone dancer, a perplexed visitor from the touch screen-free world, moves through this group that’s really a collection of individuals oblivious to one another, underscoring the absurdist irony. Eventually, they emerge from their electronic cocoons and grow aware of each other, connecting through dance.

Conversely, “Urban Jungle: The Village,” by Ryan Johnson of “The Beatles Love,” is a burst of pure feeling, the most infectious entry of the program. Built around an African village celebration, it enchants with percussive dance, as performers encircle the stage, employing stomps, claps and body slaps to become a human orchestra, laced with exuberant guttural yells. Quickly, they rope the audience into fevered rhythmic clapping that turns the theater into a syncopated love-in.

Using dance as an anti-bullying statement, “Love’s” Tyrell V. Rolle adapts “The Green Flamingo,” a children’s book by 29-year-old autistic author David Pedemonte-Forte, who also composed the music. Both heartbreaking and uplifting, it follows one dancer garbed in green as the Flamingo, fending off prancing bullies who mob her until she collapses in misery. Yet there is respite in sunny choreography that apparently reflects the life she lives in her mind, a shelter of solace.

Elsewhere on the program, “Falling” by “Ka’s” Tori Lubecki, is a dualistic dance between two couples that swings from flirtation to violence (a face slap) and joy to depression. One pair enjoys a loving clinch at the climax; the other disintegrates in despair, fists pounding the stage floor.

Gut-bucket blues, via a recording of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” set the tone for “Won’t Forget” by “Love’s” Jenn Stafford, in which a woman in a long black dress dances between and on the margins of other couples, a lone spirit in search of love. Reflecting the Day-Glo style of “Michael Jackson One,” two of its show members, Alan Medina Narvaez and Lourdes Cuadrado Cruz, offer up a coterie of black-clad dancers wearing luminescent strips, leaping and lunging throughout “Laberinto.”

“Zumanity” dance captain Vanessa Convery directed “The Song Is Ended … But the Melody Lingers On,” a dramatic mosaic set to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s haunting “John Nineteen Forty-One” and “Pie Jesu.” And “Mystere’s” Kent Caldwell explores the dark corners of the imagination in “Arratu,” a surreal allegorical piece highlighted by a towering, ominous Cirque creature with stilts for limbs.

Other pieces are contributed by NBT’s Caroline MacDonald (“Reynadine”) and Braeden Barnes (“Wes &Lee”) and “Mystere’s” Caine Keenan (“Spinning Out of Nothingness”). And in the cheer-worthy finale, “Future Dance,” titled after NBT’s education and outreach program, choreographer and “Love” dance coach Katy Tate floods the zone with the program’s young students and dancers of tomorrow. … Or perhaps even Cirque artists of tomorrow.

Or, for at least one production every year … both.