In Defense of the Bump and Grind.

YES, TIMES SQUARE'S peep shows and porn theaters are disappearing, as brand-name restaurants, gleaming office towers and touristy shops transform the streets. (How did visitors entertain themselves before the World Wrestling Federation opened a store in the neighborhood?) And yes, families are being served on Broadway as never before, with cartoons, fairy tales and Dr. Seuss providing the inspiration for a number of splashy, big-ticket musicals.

But sex--and I mean the raunchy kind, not the romantic kind--hasn't entirely disappeared from the crossroads of the world. And for that, we owe a debt of thanks to the choreographers of such decidedly R-rated musicals as Cabaret, Chicago, Contact, Dirty Blonde, Fosse, The Full Monty and The Rocky Horror Show. These shows would not exactly be kiddie fare even if their dances were borrowed from The Music Man; they treat subjects like abortion, impotence and sex itself, sometimes seriously (Cabaret) and sometimes in fun (Rocky Horror). But the dance moves in these shows--from Contact's uninhibited couple on a swing to Fosse's come-hither dance-hall hostesses purring, "Do you wanna have fun?"--help propel these shows from the merely adult to the frankly erotic.

There's nothing new about this, of course. From the time can-can dancers started kicking up their legs in Parisian revues in the middle of the nineteenth century, theater producers have known that naughty dancing sells tickets. And American musical theater, a form that owes as much to the unfettered entertainment ethos of New World minstrelsy and vaudeville as it does to the Old World esthetics of operetta, has always counted on the flash of a well-turned ankle or the pop of a shapely hip to lend it some sex appeal--not to say notoriety.

But what appears scandalous to one generation inevitably ends up as the jumping-off point for the next, and by the time flappers showed up in the '20s, opening and closing their knees and swinging their arms in the briefest of outfits, the can-can and the shimmy looked positively quaint. Then the loose limbs of the Jazz Age gave way, thanks largely to Bob Fosse, to tight bumps and grinds and the rotation of a carefully controlled shoulder as the preferred way of conveying lust on the Broadway stage. And it's only a matter of time before some musical arrives with choreography incorporating the overtly raw moves of rap videos, and augments further the ever-expanding lexicon of acceptable ways to raise theatergoers' temperatures.

What's interesting is that the new moves don't eliminate the old. In fact, good sexy choreography stays sexy (and good): just look at the high-kick and backbend combination devised by George Balanchine in 1936 for the Strip Tease Girl in "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue," from On Your Toes. What does keep changing is our sense of when a sexy dance crosses the line and becomes indecent. And two recent shows have been pushing that line without quite stepping over it. In the opening minutes of The Full Monty, a Chippendales-type dancer strips to a very skimpy brief to the catcalls and wolf whistles of screaming female fans. And as everyone by now knows, at the end, a chorus line of six ordinary Joes goes him one better, albeit with some bright lighting effects to provide strategic coverage. And in The Rocky Horror Show, the leather-and-metal-clad followers of Frank `N' Furter, the show's bisexual transvestite hero, grab at themselves and each other as they sing about the Time Warp, a far more genteel dance: "First a jump to the left, then a step to the right." The routines in both shows are the work of Jerry Mitchell, who earned his racy stripes working on Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the annual benefit burlesque Broadway Bares.

It's a long way from the can-can, but not all that far. "Dance is sex; sex is dance," says choreographer John Carrafa. A former Twyla Tharp dancer, Carrafa arranged the musical numbers in Dirty Blonde, which pays homage to Mae West and her pioneering sexual frankness. West made her reputation for gaminess in the early years of the last century by appropriating the dance moves she saw in black clubs and putting them on the vaudeville stage. "Now they're all part of our theatrical vocabulary," says Carrafa.

Using photos, descriptions and archival footage, he choreographed movements for Claudia Shear, who conceived the piece with James Lapine, that would convey some of the bawdy West style. In one of the more notorious events of her career, West performed the song "Cuddle Up" in New Haven while seated in a chair. West "moved in such suggestive ways," says Carrafa, "that the Yale guys went crazy and they had to close the theater.

"It's not about What you do, it's how you do it," says Carrafa. Sometimes his choreography consists of small details, like an eye movement. "Sex in theatrical dance is so much about attitude," he says, "looking at the audience in a certain way. You can make something so much more sexy by doing less. It's the classic thing that Fosse knew: Less is more. When you don't move, when you don't do anything--Fosse knew how to choreograph stillness."

The marquee for the revival of what is perhaps Fosse's best show, Chicago, quotes a line from one of its songs, "Class," asking passersby on West 44th Street the presumably rhetorical question, "Ain't there no decency left?" And the answer for today's Broadway theatergoers may well be, "Sure there is--but it's optional."

Sylviane Gold is the former arts editor of The Boston Phoenix and Newsday/New York Newsday.