In Rubies, Balanchine gets jazzy with his Stravinsky score. Dancers dip into chorus-girl poses, jog and prance. Sophie Martin and Adam Blyde show romping energy as the leading couple. Martin shimmies exuberantly, undulating her torso with verve. The rest of the company are too uptight, with prim dancing from the corps. Vassilissa Levtonova, in the other soloist role, looks foursquare and respectable in Balanchine's showgirl attitudes.

The whole company is very much better in Forsythe's Workwithinwork. This work for 16 dancers has an improvisatory quality, spinning lines of movement to match the winding phrases of Berio's violin duet. A dancer steps forward from a group, taking a tentative position. Then he swoops into the dance, arching his back and moving at full stretch. Forsythe, and these dancers, follow movement, finding out where it leads them.

Kershaw, a native of Oxford, England, previously served as music director of Stuttgart Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet. He has been with PNB since 1983. In 1997, he helped found the Auburn Symphony Orchestra in South King County; he plans to remain as music director of that organization.

In a written statement, Kershaw said, "Please understand that I am now 68, have been a professional ballet conductor for the last 43 years, and recently completed 25 seasons as PNB's Music Director.

Pacific Northwest Ballet music director and conductor Stewart Kershaw unexpectedly resigned this morning, surprising staff and leaving the region's premier ballet to replace a man who has directed its music for a quarter century.

"For three or four years I'd been mulling over occasionally about when would be a good time to say goodbye to the ballet world," said Kershaw, whose 43 years in the business began with an appointment to London's Royal Ballet in 1966.

"For the last three or four years, I've been mulling over in my mind as to when I could retire from the ballet world," he said, noting that his career began in 1966 with the Royal Ballet, conducting performances by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Now, he said, "was the right time for me."

The timing, he said, was affected by one piece of PNB orchestra business to complete: finding a replacement for outgoing concertmaster Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi. Of the three finalists for the position, one was not able to try out with the orchestra until the run of Jean-Christophe Maillot's "Roméo et Juliette" (set to the Prokofiev score), which concluded last weekend.

The revival of ballets distant in time and probably in style run the risk of being nothing more than dutiful, dessicated bow to the past. But the revival by Ballet West of "Les Biches", first performed in 1924 and not seen in New York since 1983, showed that Nijinska's ballet is still wonderfully alive. Marie Laurencin's set is both beautiful and transporting. The space of the ballet is dominated by a huge long rectangular window open to a view of a palm tree and the sea. The cream-colored room itself is warm and inviting but not overheated. The costumes in pink, apricot and sky blue, with black accents, elegant and casual, complete our introduction to this afternoon party overlooking the Mediterranean.