Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.

Programming is a fine art. It can make or break a company, especially on a flying visit to New York City. For its Joyce Theater debut, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company put its best foot forward, with a program that showed off the dancers and what the company is about.

Founded in 1968 by Jeraldyne; Blunden, who remains the company's artistic director, DCDC has accumulated over the years a rich store of classics by choreographers of color. Not all the dances shown in New York dipped into this repertory, but those that did--Eleo Pomare's Las Desenamoradas ("The Unloved," 1967) and Talley Beatty's "Congo Tango Palace" (excerpted from Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot, 1960)--gave the season a genuine historical dimension.

Pomare's retelling of Federico Garcia Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba, is a splendid piece of dance theater. Everything about it is powerful--the blood-red lights, the howlings of John Coltrane's cool jazz score, the grand-scaled movements of the old Martha Graham vocabulary, the convulsive lungings of a matriarch transfigured by rage. With her staff, DeShona Pepper's Mother recalls Tiresias in Graham's Night Journey But what depth this DCDC artist brings to the familiar contractions and spirals! Like her fellow dancers, she finds the drama of a movement in its "juice"--in the textures, rhythms, and phrasings that create dance meaning. Today, it is easy to forget how expressive Graham technique can be.

"Congo Tango Palace" dates from an era when popular dance was a fertile source of material for black concert choreographers. The piece has its obligatory dudes and flirts, but there is also a spate of thrilling diagonals and a subtly blended Spanish-ballet-jazz idiom.

Of the newer pieces, Alejandro Cervera's Tango Vitrola (1987) is on amiable curtain-raiser, while Bebe Miller's Things I Have Not Forgotten (1993), which juxtaposes scenes of remembered passion with those of female community, doesn't quite add up. Astonishing, however, is Dwight Rhoden's solo, Growth, for Sheri Williams, a dancer with the musculature of a body builder and the litheness of a cat, who moves with the elemental power of a force of nature.

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With a sound complement of nicely schooled dancers in the English vein, the Queensland Ballet made a well-mannered local debut (Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, November 24, 1996). Its double bill opened with Jacqui Carroll's Schcherazade, a declamatory Soviet-style rendering of music made famous by Fokine's ballet of the same name. English carefulness, however, is no substitute for Russian abandon, and the effects of this Scheherazade arrived haltingly. Artistic Director Harold Collins's A Midsummer Night's Dream owes some debt to Frederick Ashton's rendering of the same material. Unfortunately, Collins works too hard to be scrupulous to the play's scheme. His mimetic enactment of the Rustics' playlet follows a dance climax and causes the ballet's momentum to sag. As Puck Shane Weatherby showed impressive airborne strength. Anthony Lewis's Oberon was most regal and impressive from the waist up; Michelle Giammichele's Titania had strong but stolid legwork.

Robert Greskovic

At the dramatic center of Meryl Tankard's Furioso, couples on ropes swing across the stage. To the sound of an improbably celestial choir (music by Arvo Part), the women, with their long hair flying like angels', gently enfold the men and are enfolded by them in a rare moment of peace and tenderness in this pressure-cooker piece. Is Tankard, a former member of Pina Bausch's troupe, asking, "What's wrong with this picture?" Given that the men provide all the physical push and guidance for this climax, have the much-buffeted women really been liberated from their earlier passivity? The work, performed by Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre in its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival (October 23-26 1996), deals with gender politics in poetic and pleasingly ambiguous images. On their own, the men, prisoners too, swing by their upstretched arms, looking at once ecstatic and shackled. The women end the piece, literally climbing the wall and gazing out at us upside down.

Marilyn Hunt