By Tresca Weinstein

BECKET, Mass. The season at Jacob’s Pillow has brought us American children doing African dance, Chinese dance set to the music of Indonesia and a Brazilian troupe that’s just as comfortable performing mambos as pirouettes.

So it is fitting that the last production of the summer in the Ted Shawn Theatre should offer up yet another golden nugget mined from the rich vein of cross-culturalism - Russian ballet dancers performing choreography influenced by Japanese Kabuki theater.

The Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina Nina Ananiashvili, known in this country for her performances with American Ballet Theatre, joins six principals of the Bolshoi this week to present an exclusive Pillow-produced program that will probably not be seen anywhere else. The centerpiece of the evening is Alexei Ratmansky’s 1998 ballet «Dreams of Japan», which attempts to reflect the simplicity and depth of Japanese art and to enrich classical ballet with elements of Japanese movement.

The result is nothing less than astounding. The two forms do wonderful things for each other. The stylized, staccato influence of Kabuki and martial - arts movement strips the ballet of sentimentality, while the power and expressiveness of ballet soften the stark Japanese style and take it to another level.

The spellbinding score by the Japanese Taiko drum group Kodo is performed live by the instrumental ensemble of the orchestra of the State Bolshoi Theatre of Russia. The driving percussion creates a charged atmosphere intensified by dramatic lighting, flowing costumes in vivid colors and Japanese calligraphy that glows above the dancers like a rising sun.

Four of the ballet’s six movements are inspired by Kabuki plays, including a pas de deux between Dmitri Belogolovstev and Ananiashvili that is literally red - hot.

Dressed in skin - tight scarlet and bathed in ruby light, the ballerina is both coy and lissome in the role of a maiden transformed by thwarted love into a Fire Snake out for revenge.

Dancing the role of a young girl in mourning, Dmitri Gudanov gives emotional weight to every achingly controlled gesture, from folded hands to ever - so - slow leg extensions. Andrei Uvarov, possessed by the spirit of a lion, tears up the floor with a solo that combines leaps and pirouettes with loose hips and angular arms.