Between men: with the stateside arrival of two British dance companies, male eroticism takes center stage.

Did healthy homoeroticism make inroads on the American dance scene in 1997? In fact, men dancing with men has been there among the modernists since Ted Shawn's muscular spectaculars at Jacob's Pillow more than half a century ago, and one recalls that Isadora Duncan's Isadorables were all female. What has happened over the past year has been wide commercial acceptance of same-sex choreography that deals, often without metaphorical obstruction, with gender issues.

Consider the two-month engagement at Los Angeles's Ahmanson Theatre of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, fresh from a runaway six-month engagement in London's West End. Conservative subscribers apparently couldn't get enough of this ingenious and musically sophisticated updating of the Russian classic, with its male swans and its deeply touching relationship between an affection-starved princeling and the feathered leader of the pack. A love story, even one that ends mystically, is still a love story.

The year also witnessed another British import, one that made fewer concessions to popular tastes. Last fall the first American tour of DV8 Physical Theatre (it played Brooklyn briefly in 1988) brought crowds to their feet with founding artistic director Lloyd Newson's all-male Enter Achilles, a 70-minute descent into the hell of solitude and nonconformity within the setting of an English pub. The outsider is attacked; imagination is stifled; tenderness is rejected. Both Australian-born Newson and his designer Ian MacNeil are gay, but in a recent conversation, the choreographer denied that the 1995 work is targeted at any specific audience.

"DV8," says Newson, "questions conventional behavior among men. When they don't follow the standard line, they are assumed to be queer. Should dance not offer something more than nice bodies moving in nice patterns to nice music? Is dance nothing more than a display of youth, beauty, and vitality? Not everyone in our audience is between 18 and 35, slender, and carrying a full head of hair. Shouldn't dance reflect that reality? "

Newson's constant challenging of his audience has won him accolades and sponsorship at home, where most modem dance still adheres to the old American models. "No serious issue," he observes, "is free of controversy."

Gay choreographers in this country seem to have passed through their shock-effect period to a more integrated aesthetic. Stephen Petronio, for example, once cavorted in bawdy-house corsets and now sees gender issues in more universal terms. The most revealing moment in the new homoerotic dance in 1997 happened during the Mark Morris Dance Group's fall tour. In the exhilarating romp Lucky Charms, Kraig Patterson donned a pleated skirt and a wig to join a group of women cheerleaders. Most of the audience didn't even notice or care. We have come a long way.

Ulrich is the dance- and classical- music critic for the San Francisco Examiner.