Carmen de Lavallade makes magic.

NEW YORK City - Carmen de Lavallade is one dancer who doesn't worry about the transition from a performing career to other employment. At sixty-three she continues to dance magically, and an array of choreographic assignments has also come her way.

In November 1993 she staged the dances for the Metropolitan Opera's acclaimed production of Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka, directed by Otto Schenk. Earlier last year, she had worked with Schenk on Die Meistersinger, also at the Met. In both she used the corps, not in formal patterns, but as ordinary people celebrating through dance.

This awareness of movement as part of total theater comes from the eight years she spent, during the late sixties and early seventies, as a performer and teacher of movement for actors at the Yale Repertory Theater. De Lavallade was invited to Yale because she is, as her 1966 Dance Magazine Award citation read: a "total dancer," one whose silken technique is interwoven with dramatic sensibility.

When the Metropolitan Opera engaged director Arvin Brown to recreate Porgy and Bess in 1990, he requested de Lavallade as choreographer. She accepted only if she could include a few dancers her own age. De Lavallade is a great believer in what might be called "dance verismo." This viewpoint also made her a natural for Francesca Zambello's production of Lucia di Lammermoor in 1992.

De Lavallade made her New York debut in 1953 with Lester Horton Company of Los Angeles. One of her most memorable portrayals was Horton's Salome. His concept of the biblical nymphet often crossed her mind recently as she coached actress Miriam Cyr for the Oscar Wilde play, produced at Stamford Center for the Arts in December 1993. During the summer of 1993 she also staged the movement for Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh at Manhattan Theatre Club.

De Lavallade has by no means forsaken the world of pure dance, however. While Rusalka was being readied, she appeared at New York City's Joyce Theater as a guest with Trisler Danscompany in Ain't No Way, which choreographer Milton Myers created for her and five men. She also restaged her own solo, Nightscape, for Danscompany codirector Regina Larkin. This was followed by a trip to Dayton, Ohio, where de Lavallade set Horton's The Beloved on Dayton Contemporary Dance Company together with James Truitte, the company's artist-in-residence.

At this point in her career, de Lavallade's personal style might be termed "expanded gesture." it is typified by a solo, The Creation, set to a poem by James Weldon Johnson and choreographed and costumed by de Lavallade's husband, Geoffrey Holder. The solo emphasizes her vivid sense of timing and the elegance and fluidity of her arms and head.

Horton and her early ballet teacher, Carmelita Maracci, both stressed verbal imagery in their classes. This linking of imagination and movement has taken a new turn in what de Lavallade calls "Body Games," a form of exercise for older people that uses props and stresses handeye coordination.