When Youth and Experience Add Up to Freshness
Ellen Tharp's Staten Island Ballet
Kaye Playhouse

Yes, there is a Staten Island Ballet. And it is full of good dancers, with an odd but interesting repertory.

The troupe, which includes veterans from other companies as well as young newcomers, is poised and deft, with a refreshing directness. These performers look as if they love to dance.

Ellen Tharp, the founder, director and choreographer of the three-year-old troupe, was at her best in ''Gershwin in Hollywood,'' a series of pretty, mostly breezy dances for a mournful couple and a cheerful corps. The solo performers were Yuka Kawazu, Frank Dellapolla, Janet White and the very promising young Brian Letendre.

It was hard to tell what was going on in Ms. Tharp's ''Eternal Return,'' danced to music by Ennio Morricone and anonymous 14th-century composers. But the ritual, both sensuous and fierce, was never dull, in part because of the choreographer's somewhat bizarre imagination.

The cast, which also included well-trained children from the company school, was headed by Ms. White, Allison Rose Ciccolella, Jose Almonte, Robert Medina, Manolo Molina and Victoria Lebedeva, formerly of the Kirov Ballet, who is the company's ballet mistress. Young Anna Litvinova stood out in the corps for the purity of her dancing.

The program also included ''The Divine,'' a plodding ballet by Ms. Tharp and Tim Kasper, and a duet from Roland Petit's ''Notre Dame de Paris,'' danced broodingly by Sergei Bergnoi and Alexandra Koltun. JENNIFER DUNNING