Busting a move.

Nearly five years after losing his lover, former club kid Ben Munisteri continues to put a special twist on dance

In the unlikely event that choreographer George Balanchine and famed DJ Susan Morabito had spawned a love child, the newborn probably would have been 34-year-old dancer-choreographer Ben Munisteri.

In his latest concert, "Don't Stop `Til You Get Enough," which runs in late January and early February at New York's Performance Space 122, Munisteri will make the sort of moves that led Ballet Review magazine to dub him "a choreographic visionary" who combines sleek neoclassical and postmodern structure with the sassy club-kid moves of his youth. The title, taken from the Michael Jackson song that, Munisteri says, "was on his last album before he went crazy," also refers to Munisteri's own career as a dancer, which shows no sign of letting up.

The program features four concise 15-minute works that focus on Munisteri's signature style--spacious, energetic, go-for-broke dancing with an emphasis on strong technique and an adherence to impeccable balletic line.

Munisteri learned to love dancing in his early teens--not in the ballet studio, but on the Manhattan dance floors of the punk club era (Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and the Peppermint Lounge) at a time when the drinking age was lower and bouncers seldom carded 16-year-olds. "We'd sweat all night and come out into the dawn with our noses stinging from cigarette smoke," he says.

After studying ballet and modern dance at Oberlin College and learning codified hip-hop and break-dancing movement from choreographer Doug Elkins, Munisteri gave his first concert at P.S. 122 in New York's East Village in 1992: The piece was a solo danced to the narration of a passage from the book Gay Spirit on how to be a happy homosexual. Mark Russell, P.S. 122 executive director, remembers that Munisteri's sense of humor was integral to "choreography with a really compelling and rich dance vocabulary. He brought club dancing to the stage in a really fresh way."

In 1995 Munisteri managed to stage his own company's concert while his lover, Steven Powsner (a founder and former president of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center), was dying of AIDS. "No one knew how impossible it was to walk a few blocks to dance a performance and leave him alone for four hours," Munisteri says. He offers a prime argument for gay marriage as he remembers how his co-op apartment building's board made him reapply for residence after Powsner had died.

After taking a year off, Munisteri would soon hit his full stride, achieving high-profile recognition with his Late-Night Sugar Flight in 1998. Tiffs full-company dance piece was performed each night to different music, with the dancing accompanied by impromptu narration from Munisteri, who may have gotten his humor genes from his great-grandfather Billy Marx, a vaudeville comic.

Playwright Paul Rudnick, who first saw Munisteri perform in that concert, became an instant fan. "His pieces are pure pleasure," Rudnick says. "He manages to combine enormous physical passion and verbal wit, which is so rare, particularly in the dance world. You can't wait to see what that mind might come up with."

Carman also writes for The New York Times.