A Culinary Pas de Deux.

DANCE AND COOKING share common ground, deeply rooted in primal human experience: Movement is the expression of life, and food, the fuel.

For Geoffrey Holder--dancer, actor, choreographer, director, costume designer, cookbook writer, painter--the parallels are almost too obvious: The kitchen is a stage, he intones with wonder, and cooking is a theatrical presentation, more about illusion and sensuality than it is about nutrition. For Mercedes Ellington--dancer, choreographer and granddaughter of the late great Duke Ellington--the "performance process" of preparing food is also, like dance, "an evanescent art," the memory of which lasts a relatively short while.

"Harmony in the Kitchen" was a series of programs staged in a studio-classroom on Twenty-Third Street in Peter Kump's New York Cooking School early this summer; about eighty people, friends from the dance and food worlds, attended. Although watching Geoffrey Holder and Mercedes Ellington perform on the range in this kind of space was new entertainment for most of us, they were very much at home, on their separate evenings, with the raw ingredients of our dinners, a chopping block and a hot stove. And an appreciative audience that became increasingly tipsy on generous servings of Sicilian and Tuscan wine as the evening progressed and the guests were bidden to eat and enjoy.

The host for these events (which may eventually find their way onto one of the proliferating foodie shows on TV) was Michel Nischan, a chef with a folksy Southern banter who began his performing career as a rock guitarist. Before that, Nischan said, his mom taught him about the "deeper meaning of food" and encouraged him to get a job in a truck-stop kitchen because he would always have something to eat. Good advice. Nischan later developed what he calls a "healthful haute cuisine," meaning low-fat, although his enthusiasm over the saucing and basting of Mercedes Ellington's favorite recipe, Roasted Short Ribs in Barbecue Sauce, must cause some conflict of conscience, at least momentarily. (Preparing ribs with a citrus marinade cuts the fat, apologizes Ellington, whose grandfather's "most favorite food" was steak--grilled, rare--"except when we were on tour in the Caribbean, when he became compulsive about conch cakes.")

Geoffrey Holder, too, has links to the islands, as a cook and as a dancer (for Katherine Dunham, on Broadway, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ailey, his own companies, among many). His mother in Trinidad never had much money for food, he explains with succulent mangoes uplifted in each hand, but she was very adaptable. A fresh yellow home-raised chicken, a little brown sugar, some oil, you caramelize, you marinate, you roast. Food fit for the island gods! The three inside fingers of Holder's right hand now spin bubbles of delight from memory's fragrant cupboard; a deep, spiraling, hissing sigh lets you know where he thinks heaven resides. Those yellow chickens.

He encourages his rapt audience to "cross over into the kitchen" from dance and discover the deepest satisfactions. Always the performance artist defying ordinary definitions, Holder has a passion for food preparation that is confirmed by his amplitude of girth and imagination. He speaks of food in rhapsodic movement metaphors while progressing across the kitchen stage in large, broken, crablike phrases while supporting himself on tabletops and chairs. This is the performance of a man who promotes the idea of risk in all human endeavors, of projecting beyond the physical limitations of technique, beyond dance, beyond the witchcraft of food. In his flickering fingers, food becomes an incantation of fragrance, shape, charms and color. It becomes an adventure into the unknown, with unforeseen results, and nothing less than the soul's deepest satisfaction is at the end of this mysterious tunnel.

Holder begins today's adventure in choreography with the simplest ingredients--fresh tarragon, chopped onions, garlic, peppers, green mangoes, allspice, cumin, lemon, salt, some ground pork. Improvising always, risking, he conjures combinations of a "lovely mush." Holder feels that the greatest gift in both dance and cookery is becoming free to improvise, improvise, improvise. "I have learned to throw things together in two minutes in order to satisfy many people!" Referring with great affection to his wife, the equally distinguished dancer Carmen de Lavallade, Holder warns, with tongue in cheek, that they may have been able to perform together as dancers onstage--but a pas de deux in the kitchen? Never, never, never.

The reason dancers cook so often and so well? Ellington insists she learned to cook out of frustration while on many tours as a dancer. A student of Antony Tudor, who emphasized story line in his ballets, Ellington points out that both dance and food preparation have "maps," if you want them. To be successful, you have to study character, the character you are dancing, as well as the character of the food you are preparing--as well as the character of the people you're creating for. "Then you have something real," she concludes somewhat mysteriously, while demonstrating the proper way to peel ginger (with a spoon).

Holder recalls that, when he came to the United States in 1953 from Port-of-Spain in order to sell his paintings, he could not afford eating in restaurants; he had to eat at home. But "all the sons of Trinidad learned to cook," he whistles with a rippling emphasis on all. From their mothers! And you learned to make do with what you had at hand. The results could be alarming. Or sometimes sublime.

Holder's greatest kitchen passion at times seems to be for the fresh herb thyme, which he urges using in great quantities in everything--everything, perhaps, except ice cream. (The dessert he demonstrated that evening at the cooking school consisted of raisins soaked in Mount Gay Jamaican rum mounded over scoops of vanilla ice cream--handy, quick, simple--above all, delicious.) He also seems to have a particular fondness for kitchen knives, sharp ones--undoubtedly a parallel interest to his sense of balance and composition as a choreographer. (Well, maybe that's a bit of a stretch....)

Both food and dance are celebratory activities. You create dances that include (you hope) some nourishment; food, too, is choreographed, staged, scrutinized, absorbed and (you hope) nourishing. Both must be made with the freshest ingredients. And the kitchen, like the stage, is a place of explorations about who we are, where we came from, where we're going. Speaking personally, as I do so often in this column, some of the happiest times of my life have been spent with friends over the preparation of food while talking about dance--and everything else. I don't really know why the combination works, but it must have something to do with timing and technique. Perhaps, as Holder puts it with reverence, cooking is illusion, "like dance or love." So what? It all goes so naturally together. If you don't know about that now, perhaps some day you'll discover. Illusion. Magic.

It makes us go.