BY ARPINO, DEAN : JOFFREY CO. IN BALLET NOVELTIES

Don’t believe what you hear. The young, bright, eager, attractive members of the Joffrey Ballet can’t do everything.

They can’t perform brain surgery. They can’t walk a tightrope. They can’t lower taxes.

But they seem to be able to do just about everything else, especially if it involves moves and music.

Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, for instance, they flew through the spiffy classical cliches of Gerald Arpino’s new “Birthday Variations.” Then, for a change of pace, they executed the mock-erotic ersatz -ethereal contortions of Arpino’s too-familiar “Round of Angels.”

Then, for another change of pace, they offered a mod-mechanical orgy of balletic minimalism in Laura Dean’s new “Force Field.” Then, for a final change of pace, they turned to the cheeky, red-blooded Americana of Agnes de Mille’s all-too-familiar “Rodeo.”

It may not have been a great night for the dance. But the dancing was terrific.

One approached Arpino’s latest addition to the repertory with a certain trepidation. Would this be another of his kitsch indulgences, another of his trendy rituals, another of his trash orgies? It wouldn’t.

“Birthday Offering,” commissioned as a natal-day celebration for the founder of the Chicago Civic Center, is a fleet, speedy and harmless Gebrauchsballett that picks up some worthy oom-pah-pah Verdi from the cutting-room floor.

Arpino’s only apparent purpose in this well-crafted exercise is to engage his dancers--five mini-ballerinas and one earnest porteur --in a speedy, intricate network of bravura maneuvers, from fouette to fishdive.

The deja-vu variations reveal a secure, picturesque command of a very pretty idiom. The Joffrey ensemble--led by Dawn Caccamo and Glenn Edgerton--looks very pretty. Nevertheless, Arpino’s best efforts are compromised by a certain structural insensitivity.

The choreography repeatedly provides steps to match accompaniment figures--which may be fast--but not to match the basic melody, which may be slow. Consequently, this “Offering” seems frenzied even when the music is calm. At least it is an elegant frenzy.

“Force Field,” Dean’s third and busiest contribution to Joffrey’s with-it warehouse, utilizes nine tireless women in identical casual attire, nine tireless men in identical casual attire and--surprise--a tireless solo couple (Beatriz Rodriguez and Philip Jerry) in identical casual attire.

Everything, by the way, is white, white, white.

Dean utilizes “Six Pianos,” a headache-inducing taped score by Steve Reich that blares the same six-note themelet, and a few primitive permutations thereof, at the audience for 23 minutes. It seems like 23 hours.

Dean exalts the simplistic virtues, and vices, of repetition.

The title refers, we are told, to physics: a space under a magnetic or electric influence. The space in question is set a-quiver with a series of gestural patterns--half of them new-fangled experimental, half of them old-fangled balletic.

The women wear toe shoes. Amid the expected trademarks--unison spinning rituals, leaping chains and crouching spasms--we find shades of “La Bayadere.”

The fusion of dissimilar elements is initially intriguing. The athletic demands are obviously intense. The energy level is benumbing.

The motivic imitations--everybody jump, everybody slink, everybody bend, everybody flail--create their own dynamic intensity.

Sometimes 20 people take methodical turns doing the same thing. Sometimes, when things really get exciting, a new chain of movement is begun before the old one has been exhausted. The result--sigh--is counterpoint.

Counterpoint!

It is as if Dean had reinvented the wheel.

A lot of people like this sort of thing. The less-than-capacity audience at the Music Center was enthusiastic. So was much of the enlightened Eastern press.

This hopeless fossil, unfortunately, prefers not to be bludgeoned at the ballet.