Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

JOYCE THEATER JUNE 1 1-23, 1996 REVIEWED BY GUS SOLOMONS JR

Like the proverbial nine-hundred-pound primate, Bill T. Jones has a well-deserved reputation for doing anything he wants, on- and offstage. Winning a MacArthur"genius" Fellowship, being a darling--and devil--of the media, and having more than his share of genuine charisma are enough to make anyone feel invincible. Jones's Joyce Theater season marks his return to dancing after a hiatus during the busy year of Still/Here, in which he appeared only as a video image. And he's dancing invincibly. Unfortunately, stress and injury have retired the wonderful company regulars Gabri Christa, Gordon White, and Arthur Aviles and sidelined Larry Goldhuber temporarily. But newcomers Lelani Barrett and Alexandra Beller affirm Jones's more-than-token commitment to alternative physiques. Both, like Goldhuber, are endowed with proportions ample enough to bar them from a chance to display their prodigious dancing talent in most other troupes. Here they're allowed to let their dancing speak for itself.

Movement spills out of Jones's powerful, instinctual body, driven by a fecund imagination. The forty-five-minute Ursonate is credited as Jones's first choreographic collaboration since the death of his partner, Arnie Zane, in 1988. Jones has donned the postmodernist noodling of his collaborator Boston dancer-musician Darla Villani, and nipped and tucked it to fit his own kinetic sensibility. Her wispy-limbed, angular movement style in duet passages with Jones is grounded by his weightedness, which infuses its flippancy with a suggestion of purpose. The company fashionably attired in silky midriff tunics by high fashion's Byron Lars, romps with wacky abandon, belting out pop songs, while inflated mattresses shuttle across the stage. A watermelon-size light bulb beams down relentlessly, and billowy scrim curtains zip back and forth, delineating sections.

All this madcap action, compositionally arranged with Jones's customary skill, dazzles our eyes with clever patterns and groupings, while daffy grimacing and gestural semaphore tickles our taste for the absurd. Ursonate owes much of its impact to Christopher Butterfield's machine-gun delivery of a Kurt Schwitters 1928 dadaist sound poem, repetitive phonemes that parody the lofty language of verse--an astonishing tour de force of impassioned elocution.

Ballad, set to Dylan Thomas's resonant recitations of his own poetry, and double-cast, all male or all female (I saw the women), metes out beautifully understated gestural phrases, led by Odile Reine-Adelaide in a narrow band of glowing white light, framed by the silhouettes of her mates at its edges. Robert Wierzel's consistently marvelous lighting lends mood, vivid color, even definition to Jones's facile invention. But Thomas's prolix poetry all but strangles the spare, subtly detailed movement with its dense verbal imagery. The dance is more legible between poems, when Celtic songs and Japanese flute music accompany it.

Sur la Place, a work in progress, is a trio for Jones, Reine-Adelaide, and Goldhuber (currently replaced by Barrett). Set to a suite of Jacques Brel's indulgently brooding ballads, the piece affords an occasion for the three to parade their wonderfully larger-than-life personae. In its most emotionally compelling moment his partners on the ground support a staggering Jones, as he teeters along the sturdy bench, which acts as a mobile boundary of the rectangle of light that circumscribes the dancing space. He is at once victim, hero, martyr: a metaphor for his own fragility as an HlV-positive person--though, happily, his robust presence obliterates all traces of potential mortality.

"Blue Phrase," alternately performed by Beller and Josie Coyoc (whom I saw) to Eric Dolphy's saxophone ruminations on "God Bless the Child," is notable chiefly for Wierzel's extraordinary lighting: ethereally blue with projected skyblue squares that might be windows to the outside world, or a geometric sun and moon shining over an alien planet. Jones's knack for choosing brilliant designers and challenging accompaniments adds emotional resonance, even to unremarkable movement, which his amazing dancers always imbue with breathtaking urgency. Also in repertory are a reconstruction of Jones's 1983 solo Twenty-One and reworkings of the 1992 Love Defined, retitled Love ReDefined, and by Zane's 1985 duet, Black Room, now called After Black Room and expanded to four couples.