Altogether Different 2003.

The Joyce Theater New York, New York January 3-19, 2003

ALTHOUGH BALLET COMPANIES sometimes perform at The Joyce Theater, its Altogether Different series traditionally showcases modern dance. "Peter Boal Solos," the highlight of this year's series, represented a departure by featuring a New York City Ballet star. Boal has worked with many independent New York choreographers, including Leigh Witchel, Diane Coburn Bruning, and Francis Patrelle, who are ballet based, as well as Molissa Fenley and Wendy Perron, who are moderns. Both Fenley and Perron created pieces for Boal's Joyce season, while Albert Evans, a NYCB principal who has just begun to choreograph, contributed a third. For the most part, the choreography fell short of the dancing.

The one happy exception was Perron's The Man and the Echo. Set to John Lurie's song "Tuesday Night in Memphis," it was a deeply affecting work, a sleepless night haunted by memory. Perron didn't attempt to challenge Boal technically. Instead she spotlighted his artistry, his ability to infuse movement with feeling, even when stretching into a simple arabesque. The piece opened on a note of reverie. Then came the voices of children--his own, it turns out. "Daddy," they called, and he slipped to the floor, grasping for bodies that weren't there. Back on his feet, he heard them again, but this time, when they stopped, anger as well as anguish drove him through space. ONLY AFTER SEVERAL SECONDS OF STUNNED SILENCE DID THE AUDIENCE FEEL, ABLE TO APPLAUD.

The Doug Elkins Dance Company presented a strong new work, I Hear Mermaids Singing, to a rich trove of Polynesian and South Pacific music collected by David Fanshawe. Elkins found the key to his jubilant choreography in the polyrhythms and dynamic complexities of the score. The relaxed casualness he favors was evident, but it was layered with a kinetic drive and expansive physicality that created a mounting sense of excitement. Shifting groups of dancers, often moving in canon, animated the stage, bonded by a tribal sense of connection, enacting some primitive mystery.

Keely Garfield, on the other hand, works best on an intimate scale. Her witty and affecting My Mother Was a Four-Alarm Fire (1998) was a tiny gem about the erotic pull of motherhood and the emotional hungers of girlhood. By contrast, the new, ambitiously scaled Deep, was a piece in search of a point. The star was an inflatable pool that the seven performers played in, hid in, bounced in, pummeled, and rolled. There were Dorothy look-alikes inspired by The Wizard of Oz, witches with broomsticks, and numerous bits of arbitrary, minimally edited business.

Zvi Gotheiner revels in dancerly skill and in the dynamic possibilities of the ensemble, the groupings and regroupings that design the stage visually. In his new GDP (Gross Domestic Product), much of the excitement sprang from the intricate pathways of the ten dancers, as they crossed and recrossed, split up and lined up, circled, froze, moved in canon and counterpoint. Scott Killian's score darkened even Gotheiner's ostensibly cheery moments.

Butterflies From My Hand--Part I, Donna Uchizono's new piece, was even more of a puzzle. Slow-moving, with the mysterious atmosphere of butoh but not its extreme physical discipline, it presented the shifting relationships among its four dancers. But none of it, alas, seemed inevitable. With much of the material contributed by the dancers (thanked in a program note), the piece needed a stronger editorial hand.

The Return of Lot's Wife, by Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, ended the season on a high note. Pearson, a gifted monologuist, reimagined the Biblical figure as a Jewish-American woman in the 1950s, arguing with God and her husband in old-time, borscht-belt routines. A truly collaborative work, Lot's Wife opened like a concert, with music composed by Carter Burwell and Persian poetry by Hafiz, its mystery and emotional resonance deepened by the live music. Movement revealed the intimacy behind the banter, the anguish that words could not speak. "What's there left to do?" Lot's wife finally asked. And then it began, the company's four dancers turning like dervishes, pouring salt from Morton containers in long, floating arcs, catching the light, to the cadence of unearthly music.