DETROIT, Mich.–Malandain Ballet Biarritz’s choreographer, Thierry Malandain, is quoted in the Michigan Opera Theatre program notes for the incomparable company’s one-night performance as describing his desire to create “dance that will not only leave a lasting impression of joy, but that will also restore the essence of the sacred things and serve as a response to the difficulty of being.”

Astonishingly, this is exactly the result of their two-and-a-half hour program in Detroit Saturday night.

The company, created in 1998 in Biarritz, is made up of 22 permanent dancers, and is one of 19 National Choreographic Centers in France as well as one of Europe’s most widely-seen companies.

Malandain’s style is firmly rooted in classical ballet yet is interspersed with and slanted by surprising functional, pedestrian movements that bring the ethereal down to earth in a playful, often humorous way—yet without ever compromising the dancers’ phenomenal technique and sheer elegance of the form.

In three unique and distinct dances in a wonderfully balanced program that explores the tensions of aspiration and suffering, love and dying, and the peculiar liberty of confinement, Malandain Ballet Biarritz put on a spectacular performance, treating the audience to the highest of artistic achievement in dance.

“Estro,” a 2014 premiere set to Vivaldi, opened the show with what appeared to be the embodiment of imagination. At turns ebullient and up-tempo, somber and downtrodden, urbane, and pedestrian, the dancers flop and are dragged; they make beautiful shapes with their bodies, often lifted in interesting arabesques; they run and punch the air while undulating their torsos.

They also make use of 25-gallon pails with cut outs lit from within. They toss the props, stack them, lie on them, and sit on them in a cluster center stage as well as in sidelines stage left and right. The lanterns are symbolic, perhaps for the fire of creativity itself—connected to the divine, as in the final moments of the dance, the lantern lights go out at the exact moment of the final tableau when the dancers, in the shape of a tower, are lit starkly from above.

A single dancer, as if the dying Christ himself, lies on his side at various moments throughout the dance, and most indelibly, is held by three women (as if the three Marys in the image of the Pieta) before he tumbles downstage atop a line of dancers lying interconnected on the floor like fallen dominoes.

The exquisite “Nocturnes,” also from 2014, offers a series of unusual pas de deux, pas de trois, and pas de quatres that utterly disregard the dancers’ genders. Set to Chopin, it is often gently acrobatic: one dancer tumbles through another dancer’s legs wide open while he’s standing on his shoulders. They are like moving sculptures: sharing weight, and staying connected, they somersault as one. And yet amid the yogic acrobatics, there are borrowed motifs from historical classical ballets Giselle and La Bayadere; and the dancers’ extensions and arabesques are so refined, they can make you want to weep for their beauty.

In one pas de trois of male dancers, they created such palpable tension in their push-pull interconnectedness, even when their bodies separated in space, it was if we could still see their energetic connection. I’ve never seen anything like it on stage.

And yet somehow, the finale, “Boléro,” was even more mesmerizing. Twelve men and women dressed in nude leotards that made them appear more naked than if they’d been wearing nothing at all for the way they highlighted the sinews of their torsos danced in a militaristic way to the obsessive repetition of Ravel’s familiar orchestral theme.

Within the confines of four imaginary walls created by giant set pieces made to create the illusion of the room’s floor-to ceiling corners, they moved as one in perfectly synchronized balletic movements (a grand rond dejambe with bent knee and flexed foot among them—a stunning example of how Malandain puts a spin on classical technique). They changed direction en masse every four counts of music or fewer—but never went anywhere.

In rare moments, a handful of dancers escaped through the invisible walls, only to rush back into their imprisonment—until the end, in a mad rush they escaped, only to then be locked out.

To have witnessed it—all of the magnificent performance, really—is an experience so exhilarating it practically defies description.