Doug Elkins Dance Company.

DTW'S BESSIE SCHONBERG THEATER DECEMBER 11-29, 1996 REVIEWED BY DORIS HERING

My notes about Doug Elkins's 1995 concert ended with this plaint: "Elkins's facility with movement, his pure imagination, make one eager to see what he does in the future. When will he begin to dig more deeply than he is currently doing?"

His most recent program, which bore the summarizing title "Fruitcake Follies," could have prompted the same conclusion. As agreeable as choreographic facility can be, it is a curse when its roots meander too close to the surface.

In Center My Heart, a premiere, the Near Eastern tone of the accompaniment by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan imparted a hypnotic caress to the couplings and partings of the company members, led by Richard Siegal, Eddie Buggie, and Susan Moran (all three dancers of unusual finesse). Elkins does not choose to have his dancers relate emotionally, it is enough that they come together physically and create a brief interlude in some imagined larger flow.

When he involves the dancers in a work derived from contact improvisation, he knows how to round off the found shapes, how to give them rhythm and momentum. In The Stuff of Recoiling (1992), for example, the partnering was enlivened by sudden shifts in direction and by the men appearing deceptively casual as they caught their women. The action resembled that of mercury gliding and rebounding in a petri dish.

As testified by his titles, Elkins loves to mess with metaphors. The best of last year's were Bite the Wax Tadpole and Narcoleptic Lovers. This year he again gave us the 1991 Where Was Yvonne Rainer When I Had Saturday Night Fever? (Very White Vignettes). It was a patchwork of quotes from Rainer's dancing days along with some ribaldry about the rituals of teenagers--with a hilariously bewigged cameo appearance by David Dorfman.

Of the three works, Center My Heart came closest to revealing a choreographer capable of extending his talent toward a poetic purpose. Again, one looks to the future.