Once Again Ins Cabaret: "Fall[en] Angels"

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AFTER WORLD WAR I devastated much of Europe and sent stunned and damaged Americans home, but before World War II did the same, there was the music and dance. The art emerging from that lull — the product of postwar anxiety and celebration — is partially the subject of a collaboration between the Washington Ballet and the In Series, "Fall[en] Angels."

Melancholy meets hope, prosperity bumps up against privation, and nationalism seems both more necessary and more absurd as the world took stock of the damage from what was then called the Great War. The nomenclature is telling — no one spotted it as the first of more than one so-called world wars, and the emergence of Weimar-era Germany's modes of popular entertainment — from art-song to naughty cabaret to experimental theater — signaled relief as well as unease.

The Washington Ballet taps this tricky mood using music from German icon Marlene Dietrich, mixed with that of, well, German icons Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner, in a dance-theater piece opening on Saturday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center's Lang Theater.

Pre-WWII art-song and cabaret performances from a troupe of international dancer pairs with live vocal performances from Laura Lewis, Michelle Rice, Richard Tappen and Stanley Webber. The collaboration, headed up by always-inventive artistic director Septime Webre, is anything but a stereotypical song-and-dance routine.

» Lang Theater, 1333 H St. NE; Fri., 8 p.m; Sun., 3 p.m., $30; 202-399-7993. (free shuttle from Union Station)