“After You” is a dance of civil behavior, of good manners that include good humor. Its courtesy is the courtesy of ballet, of orderly entrances and exits and the sharing of stage space, but also of classical music. The music is the piano septet in C by Johann Neopuk Hummel, a student of Mozart and contemporary of Beethoven. Apart from its inclusion of a trumpet in a chamber setting (the source of the septet’s “military” label), the score is conventional, distinguished mainly by the balance among its instruments, politely passing around thematic material like dishes at a dinner party. Even the trumpet is modest. It is this balance that Mr. Morris mirrors.

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Elegance Revisited The thought of a contemporary ballet can cause trepidation, but Mark Morris’s “After You” for American Ballet Theater honored both the art form and its dancers. Subtle and refined, “After You” is a modern ballet worth saving.

If you look beyond steps to structure, you see in After You idiosyncrasies of Morris’s method of building a dance shared with almost all his work. The foundation is a small array of motifs—individual gestures and poses, phrases (in this ballet, all short, but in other works sometimes much longer), geometric spatial configurations. The curious thing is Morris’s way of recombining these elements throughout the dance independently of the music’s own development (the way the composer explores his ideas for melody, harmony, rhythm, and so on). The choreography fits the music’s phrasing neatly moment by moment, but the pattern it unfolds through time is its own. Morris also wants you to really see his structural ideas: near the end of After You, for example, he shows us a little partnered duet a few times, then has Gillian Murphy (in the first cast) do the same phrase of three stabbing low développés all by herself—Look, Ma, no hands!

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For all the nonverbal grace of ballet, a studio rehearsal with choreographer Mark Morris is a hyper-verbal affair.

Some comments are direct: “Facial expression! You’re looking at the inside of your heads?!”
Some are counterintuitive: “More and less.”
Others are morsels of praise: “He doesn’t look like an a—hole!”

The occasion for the rehearsal was American Ballet Theatre’s upcoming presentation of Mr. Morris’s “After You,” which the company will dance Wednesday night and throughout its fall season at the David H. Koch Theater.