Bella Lewitzky.

Surely no one could watch Bella Lewitzky without feeling envy.

At eighty, she is standing before her company - petite, trim, erect, a perfect muscular specimen. Her steely silver hair, in a pert gamine cut, frames a face that is all strong angles. She wears a short cardigan of knit tweed over black unitard and socks.

The ten dancers taking class on this mild morning at Lewitzky's studio high in the Hollywood hills are sturdy, tall, and beautiful. They seem to tower over her. But like some Delphic presence she utters an unself-conscious stream of wisdom that her class absorbs seemingly through the pores.

"This is like abacus counting," Lewitzky says, her voice modulated by quietly rational enthusiasm. She's describing what the dancers are doing-walking in place while rotating shoulders, then isolating and rolling various other body parts. Later, in another maneuver, she says, "You want this to be biplanal ... bring it only to here," she demonstrates, "because more [of an extension] is not better." By the end of the class every muscle system will have been worked, stretched, and flexed, and alignment given its due concern.

An anatomy graph of the muscular system hangs on one wall. It is a tip-off to the atmosphere of health and educational focus Lewitzky has advocated throughout her teaching career. "Great control of every motion and placement," she says, "is a kind of self-care. It's self-love in the best sense. I make a contract with the dancers (not literally, of course) to keep them alive and well and progressive-doing level best to see that they're not injured." One must bear in mind, she says, that "dancing is not normal, that only a strong, knowledgeable body can protect against damage."

And there is also an aura of down-to-business here, even purism. No one sports chi-chi dancewear or anything trendy or theatrical. The studio, which has no barres, is a testament to traditional modem dance philosophy - although all seem to boast high-arched feet, considerable turnout, no small amount of ballet technique, and marvelous bodies.

Also there's no mirror. The class members fix their gaze straight ahead, appearing to face an imaginary glass. As Lewitzky talks and counts them through a long continuous series of movements, a visitor sees how these studies bring harmony, balance, symmetry, and, yes, beauty to the task. Now she can be heard using terms like tendu, noting that the ballet vocabulary has become a tool, but only a tool.

"I was taken aback," she says, "the first time a ballet-trained person cam to class and ave names to each of my steps. Her names were still points, a contradiction to my movements, which were not. Here we keep the arms flowing, the action continuous'"

When the encomiums start pouring in, however - for Lewitzky is giving up her company next year - a great roar will be heard, no doubt, and not only for her aesthetic positions or creative output, but also for the valor of her humanitarianism.

That concern for others is both global and indigenous. So it's hardly surprising that she wants to arm her dancers with the equipment to earn a living - through teaching - when their performing careers end; thus, this class is more than a class. Some of her dancers who have gone on to open their own companies are: Fred Stickler (Eyes Wide Open), Loretta Livingston (Loretta Livingston & Dancers), Susan Rose (Danceworks), Alonzo King (Lines Contemporary Ballet), and Nora Reynolds (Nora Reynolds Dance). What's more, over the thirty years of its duration the Lewitzky Dance Company has found a way to offer its members health insurance and such, including higher benefits than most other troupes of comparable size and budget.

But her reach goes quite beyond those dancers standing here now. Always a moral force as much as anything, Lewitzky noisily protested the left-baiting political witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others of the House Committee on Un-american Activities during the 1950s. More recently she made just as big a commotion over a current brand of censorship, successfully suing the National Endowment for the Arts for violating grantees' First Amendment rights.

"I'm no one to sit and contemplate vibrations in the air," she says. "There's nothing mystical about my actions. I simply do ... and analyze later." To understand where this social conscience comes from, one must know that Lewitzky is the product of a unique environment, having belonged with her secular Jewish parents to the Socialist Utopian Colony in the Mojave Desert. A native Californian, she chose to ignore the New York fray "where people step over bodies like they do over garbage") and pursue her art here in the land of orange groves an freeways. Together with Lester Horton she cofounded Dance Theatre of Los Angeles in 1946, the springboard for her own most enduring troupe, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year.

Along the way Lewitzky's lofty goals fueled a spirited activism. A major project of the 80s was to erect a downtown building expressly for dance, an adjunct to the Los Angeles Music Center complex. It was to be a community center for dance that would feed Professional practitioners, the public, and those in between. But no matter how hard she labored, successfully enlisting a good number of Hollywood celebrities and business leaders in her campaign, the Dance Gallery, as it was to be called, never happened. It went the way of so many arts enterprises.

Other events that she has spearheaded have met with rousing success. In 1984 there was Lewitzky as impresario, finding and bringing dance troupes to the Olympic Arts Festival. In her typical spirit of inclusion she sought out companies from I over the world to present for Los Angeles's international audiences, here for the games. It was she Who presided over the American debut of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. Generally, though, she resisted bringing the most glamorous companies to the festival in favor of those that would not be seen otherwise.

Since the money picture has grown more dire, company directors everywhere have had to curtail their plans. When Lewitzky realized how much energy was being consumed by chasing support, rounding up boards of directors, and staging fund-raisers, the option of continuing seemed unreasonable. Hence the announced disbanding of the Lewitzky Dance Company, even with the last three seasons running in the black and a cross-country and international touring schedule that runs six months a year.

The burden is not a new one for artists.

"It was Orson Welles," she recalls, "who said that he spent two percent of his time making art and the other ninety-eight percent hustling for dollars. Well, that's the sort of thing to make a person reconsider her options. It's not any way to live a life. It leaves no space for reflection.

"But there are other ways to reaffirm one's priorities," she says. Concert dance will not be a closed book for Lewitzky. Neither will teaching, a special program for which she plans to take into the public schools.

Right now this small dynamo of a woman has a new piece she's putting together and new company members to replace those who have scattered to find permanent positions before the end comes. There's hardly a moment to spare and the calendar is bursting with dates from Los Angeles to Rovereto, Italy..

The class is just about over, but a small detail catches the teacher's eye. "We still need to work on chugs," she says, referring to a low, shuffling step. "They're not quite right."

Surely no one who knows her believes that Bella Lewitzky would stop doing what she has always done.