Contemporary Dance Season.

When the Contemporary Dance Season commissioned Portland choreographers Gregg Bielemeier, Keith V. Goodman, and Minh Tran to make new work in collaboration with Choral Cross-Ties, an ensemble of professional singers, it took a political gamble that paid off aesthetically.

These three choreographers are all gifted in stylistically different ways, deserving of representation in a series that has brought such luminaries as Sankai Juku and Trisha Brown before the Portland public while recently neglecting indigenous talent.

The program was uniformly well danced and Choral Cross-Ties, directed by Bruce Browne, performed beautifully, meeting Bielemeier's choreographic demands with great good humor. His Slow Motion Fast Twist, which describes the movement if not the message (choral concerts can be pompous, so let's have a little fun), may be his best work to date. This is also true of Tran's Descending, while Goodman's Exotic Dances: Eternal Partners shows promise but needs considerable editing and tightening.

Slow Motion is a series of solos, using the choir as part of the action, not just as an accompaniment. Bielemeier's first entrance, where he is clad in a black hat and baggy black pants, set a humorous tone with his whole-bodied dancing. He punctuated the suave, gliding movement that is his specialty with sudden shakes and shimmies.

There are many Felliniesque juxtapositions of unexpected images. At one point Bielemeier, with a red apron around his waist and a string of beads around his neck, danced on a table while a singer warbled from a trapeze perch. In another, the barefoot chorus was prone, but still singing.

Bielemeier's energetic dancing and inspired clowning sustained a character who is a witty meld of King Lear's Fool and Harpo Marx. Transitions between the six sections were accomplished with costume changes and the moving around of props.

Tran's Descending, which was much better danced at the beginning of the engagement than at the end, is equally well crafted, but very different from Bielemeier's work. It is a tightly organized piece for three dancers set to music by Guido Lopez Gavilan, Samuel Barber, and Ennio Morricone.

Here Tran goes for pure dance, with three as the magic number: three dancers, three sections, counts of three. Movement and costumes were identical for Katherine Petersen, Sue Brantley, and Tran, suggesting that dancers are dancers, regardless of gender.

Laurel Leverton's gorgeous, shimmering skirts and tops with kimono sleeves were very much part of the action in the first movement, as the dancers leaped and turned joyously, extending their arms in gestures reminiscent of the Chinese opera dancing in which Tran was trained as a child in Vietnam.

The cultural fusion was even more evident in the second, adagio, section, in which the dancers were quite literally stripped for action, wearing tights and nothing else. The hands and arms were still ritualistic from time to time, as the three dancers rolled on the floor, musically waving their limbs, looking like sea anemones.

Descending ends with the dancers in their opening costumes, minus the sleeves, dancing not quite so rapidly as in the first movement, but creating marvelous kaleidoscopic shapes with their leaps and turns.

Goodman's Exotic Dances is more problematic. Part of a longer work in progress, it is about the battle of the sexes--and how! With dancer Linda Johnson, Goodman engages in a series of highly physical duets, beginning with the two locked in an embrace as they slow dance in a way forbidden by prom chaperons.

Kassandra Kelly Stirling's spoken text suggests that there has been a murder, as does some of the dancing bathed in Jeff Forbes's hot red lights. Exotic Dances has its compelling moments, but much of it, especially the penultimate duet, is too long, weakening the impact of the whole,