DOWNTOWN DANCE GOES UPTOWN.

Downtown dance has a new outpost on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Symphony Space, on Broadway at 95th Street, is expanding its dance programming as part of a larger transformation. The architectural plans involve renovating the 800-seat mainstage space and reviving the adjacent, now-defunct Thalia movie theater as an art-house cinema and cabaret-style performance venue.

Originally an open-air market erected in 1915, the Symphony Space building was converted into the Crystal Palace skating rink before becoming the Symphony movie theater. The Thalia had been the market's fish section; it became the Sunken Gardens restaurant, and then a repertory cinema that showed foreign films, including old ballet footage. By the 1970s, the decaying and mostly dark Symphony occasionally housed boxing and wrestling matches. In 1978, Isaiah Sheffer, now Symphony Space's artistic director, and Allan Miller, a conductor, rented the space to produce "Wall to Wall Bach," an all-day concert featuring professional musicians and amateurs from the neighborhood. A great success, it became an annual event and the idea of Symphony Space as a community-oriented arts organization took hold. Sheffer's Selected Shorts, an NPR series, is still produced there.

Since the mid-1980s, the World Music Institute has regularly produced concerts there, featuring dance troupes from every inch of the planet. (On April 21 the WMI presents Sacred Music and Dance from Tibet.) Though the space has always had good acoustics, its sight lines for dance were poor until the theater was reraked in 1998. This improvement came about after an eleven-year battle over ownership of the site. With the litigation over, Symphony Space was able to raise $10 million by selling the rights to build above the building. Those funds, and a $5 million gift from philanthropist Peter Norton, are funding current construction.

Kay Cummings, chair of the Dance Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, was brought in last year as dance curator. In keeping with the "Wall to Wall" theme, she introduced the "Dance Sampler" last season. This year's Sampler is set for April 28. The four-hour performance marathon will feature a stylistically diverse array of fifteen choreographers, including such veterans as Irene Hultman, Zvi Gotheiner & Dancers and James Cunningham, as well as up-and-comers Avila/Weeks, Jeanine Durning, Ben Munisteri and Karen Love. Cummings aims to expose audience members, who may have come to see a particular artist, to the rich range of choreographic talent in New York. Other Symphony Space dance programs include "Face the Music and Dance," a choreographer/composer series that recently paired hipster choreographer David Neumann and avant-garde pop sensation Laurie Anderson. In the refurbished Thalia, Cummings plans to present performance artists, such as Ann Carlson and John Kelly. Is Cummings worried about attracting a modern dance audience to a space so far uptown? No: The great thing about New Yorkers, she says, is that they know how to get on the subway.