What do you get when you set a ballet to salsa music?

The answer, of course, is just a ballet set to salsa music, like the Milwaukee Ballet's "Vital Sensations." Unfortunately for the Ballet, the answer is not "a salsa-flavored, highly physical, contemporary piece" as it would like the viewer to believe.

Therein lies the problem with the Ballet's latest installment of its Milwaukee Ballet at the Pabst series: Choreography can be unusual and nontraditional, music can be unexpected and unorthodox, but it doesn't add up to successful presentation of modern ballet. For that, you'd need a company of dancers able to completely readapt itself to something out of the ordinary, and the Milwaukee Ballet company is just too rooted in its classical traditions to do that.

A hit-and-miss collection of four dances, the portfolio wants so badly to be hypermodern and edgy that it foregoes the Ballet's classical strengths (and even those of ballet as an art form) and instead invests heavily in ideas and contraptions not wholly adaptable to the genre.

"Vital Sensations" is the most obvious example of the collection's shortcomings. A relentlessly high-energy dance, "Sensations" puts its dancers in bright, raggedy costumes against a holographic backdrop of shifting colors and patterns — no problem there. But when it asks them to dance to prerecorded Latin music by Tito Puente and Bebo & Cigala, among others, the flaws become apparent. The cast of 14 can't summon the fluidity and sensuality so inherent in talented samba and flamenco dancers.

Accustomed to deliberate and artistic performances, their attempt at capturing the passionate and impulsive nature of Latin dance is jerky, labored and thoroughly studied. The dance is also interestingly gender-skewed; its heavy emphasis on leaps and jumps gives the male dancers athletic, energetic performances but leaves the women with little to do but gyrate around. Indeed, most of the burden of challenged choreography falls on them.

"Passage," a more traditional piece, suffers from lesser versions of the same problems that afflict "Vital Sensations." Accompanied by a sprightly live violin and piano piece, the four dancers in this selection are somehow expected to depict the motivations of illegal Mexican immigrants crossing into U.S. territory. In this gentle, pastel-hued piece (which is making its world premiere), they instead look like three aggressive daffodils and a frantic crocus bobbing around in a hurricane. Were the dancers aware of Carrasco's intent? If they were, they weren't able to execute it.

The Ballet gets it right with "Don't Touch," the world premiere of artistic director Michael Pink's comic and deliberately overbaked pas de trios between a melodramatic siren and her two nervous suitors. The choreography here is purposefully overdone, with great flourishing gestures and wide-spreading movements, and the dancers take to the simple story line and more basic dance steps wholeheartedly.

"Between Physical and Celestial" is another world premiere and another story. White-clad dancers are bathed in blue light and set against a backdrop of pillar-like curtains that evokes an ancient Greek temple. The dancers are serenaded by on-stage soprano Valerie Errante as they slide, crab-walk and crawl over the floor like robots gone haywire.

Pink said he chose a more modern collection of dances instead of a more classic ballet because he likes the thrill of presenting something new and unique.

The Milwaukee Ballet is one of the most reliable performers in the Milwaukee arts scene, and several of its productions (including the Halloween offerings "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" in 2004 and "Dracula" in 2005) have been well-executed showcases of versatility and originality (it takes an original mind to put Esmeralda and Quasimodo in a pas de duex that's entirely in character). The key to those successful performances was working around the dancers' classical training, not working against it. The Milwaukee Ballet has a talented corps, but modern ballet and classical ballet are two entirely different things. When a company is asked to transfer wholesale from one genre to another, as is the case here, something definitely gets lost in translation or never shows up at all.

Grade: CD