To be sure, there is nothing even slightly provincial about Weiss. After a distinguished career as a principal dancer of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, he washed out his tights and ran Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years. But you simply don’t expect to see a two-year-old company located in a medium-size city dancing a brand-new ballet half as good as his “Carmen,” which was premiered May 18 at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium.Weiss retells the tale of the proud Gypsy and her desperate lover in traditional style, without clever kinks or trendy twists. This “Carmen” is set in Seville, not Hollywood or Northern Ireland or Nazi Germany, and the music has not been rewritten for drum machines or bagpipes, but is heard in Glenn Mehrbach’s faithful adaptation of Georges Bizet’s original operatic score (to which a concertante violin part borrowed from Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy” has been added, a truly imaginative touch). If you hadn’t seen any full-length ballets other than, say, “Giselle,” you probably wouldn’t notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren’t any boring parts and that’s the point.Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson’s “Dracula” (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I’ve lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself, the results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.Weiss has chosen a different model for “Carmen,” as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful “Romeo and Juliet” that Carolina Ballet premiered last year.Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine’s 1962 adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. “I don’t like seeing a lot of people standing around onstage doing nothing,” Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet. As a result, “Carmen” moves, in every sense of the word. It runs for three hours, but feels half that long.School-of-Balanchine choreographers typically specialize in plotless ballets. Not Weiss. He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but it is always to make specific narrative points. When Carmen seduces Don José, for example, her hands are tied behind her back, a neat piece of symbolism that makes their pas de deux more theatrically interesting (not to mention sexier). At the same time, the big ensemble numbers have a near symphonic clarity of structure that keeps the eye engaged. Though the second-act tavern scene consists of a half-hour of virtually nonstop dancing the opening Gypsy dance is eight minutes long-the dramatic tension builds fast and stays high.As for the company, Carolina Ballet is a canny mixture of seasoned veterans and newly hatched novices who are committed, well drilled and full of promise. Melissa Podcasy and Timour Bourtasenkov, the resident prima ballerina and her cavalier, were close to perfect as Carmen and Don José they knew exactly what Bizet’s doom-drunk lovers were all about while Isanusi Garcia, formerly of Havana’s Cuban National Ballet, was positively electrifying as Escamillo. And Daphne Falcone, a young School of American Ballet graduate who had previously been dancing with Miami City Ballet, was a lively, witty Mercedes; I expect she’ll make a fine Carmen herself one of these days. The Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, alas, is a big, boomy, ill-proportioned box devoid of atmosphere, but Carolina Ballet will be dancing in a new theater next season, and is already drawing excited crowds who seem to understand instinctively what Weiss is trying to do.

To have tamed two dozen freshly hired dancers into a company capable of bringing off so ambitious a project is no small feat. But the really big news out of Raleigh is that after a seemingly endless dry spell, America now has a world-class choreographer who is making story ballets worth watching. If American Ballet Theatre’s Kevin McKenzie is smart, he’ll beg Robert Weiss to let ABT dance this “Carmen.” It is at long last the real deal.