Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith.

The joint choreography of Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith is distinguished by playfulness and by daring athleticism. While the physical demands they make on their well-chosen dancers--and on themselves--are ingenious, a certain predictability has gradually set in. It's encouraging, therefore, to report that this program found them exploring a change in direction.

Earlier this season, their Fathers and Sons for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater began the trend by exchanging humor for a touch of irony. The two newest pieces go deeper than Fathers and Sons: Both deal with family memories; both take off from the dark ruminations of actor-playwright David Greenspan.

In her solo The Picture of Its Flashes Through My Mind, Smith journeyed through a phantasmagoria about her invalid mother. She confined her sequence of taut, sometimes fetal, shapes to the limited expanse of a carpet. Doris Humphrey always said, "All dances are too long." With this perhaps echoing in her ears, Smith made one that was actually too short to lodge a full impact. It was as though she had been jolted from the nightmare before its conclusion.

Shapiro and Smith collaborated on What Dark/Falling into Light. Deeply stirred by a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and by the concentration camp experiences of Shapiro's great-grandparents, they experimented with turning dramatic reality into abstraction. Perhaps they should have ventured a step farther and eliminated the verbal commentary, which seemed at odds with the momentum of the dance; and perhaps they should even have done without Scott Killian's somewhat sentimental score for small ensemble. Silence or near silence would have underscored the starkness of the work.

Initially the emphasis was on the dancers' upper bodies. Anonymously garbed in black, they would their bare arms, like restless vines, around their heads. Some of the participants fell to the floor; a woman used her foot to roll them away. There was nothing frenetic about the action. All emotion had been drained away.

Midori Satoh, who combines delicacy and ferocity in a single flame of energy, threw herself mindlessly and repeatedly at Shapiro, who caught her as though his arm muscles were magnets. One dancer sat and simply shuddered. All seven, now clad only in flesh-colored trunks, stood, like tired paper dolls, in an inescapable line and then piled, one upon the other. Satoh backed slowly away.

Despite the sources of its imagery, What Darkness/Falling into Light did not resort to melodrama. Instead it sought to find perspective in the experience. Further performances of the work will undoubtedly draw this quality into fuller focus.