Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

REVIEWED BY AMANDA SMITH

One of the many pleasures of Jacob's Pillow is the opportunity to watch dance up close in the small, intimate space of the Studio/Theatre. Opened in 1990, the flexible-seating house--accommodating between 160 and 220 and situated down the hill from the larger, original "barn" theater constructed in the forties by Pillow founder Ted Shawn--is a congenial enclosed space amid the lush summer greenery of the Berkshire Hills.

This season it was particularly pleasing to see there Malavika Sarukkai and Musicians, led by the Indian solo dancer whose technique and vocabulary are those of bharata natyam but who choreographs her own work. Sarukkai is a marvelous entertainer and no insignificant psychologist, spinning for us tales of love and passion and rage. Accompanied by four instrumentalists and a narrator, Sarukkai performed several illuminating, charming, and witty introductory precis, in words and gestures, of dances she then realized more fully. In her gold and purple costume, with bells on her ankles, she rippled hands, evoked birds in flight and lotus blossoms, and used the raised eyebrows and exaggerated eye movements of bharata natyam to convey a variety of emotions. In Neematalu, javali, for example, she mimed applying makeup, playing a woman contemptuous of her paramour knocking at the door. In all, she is a superbly confident dancer in an especially satisfying evening of work.

A privilege, too, was seeing Chan Moly Sam's beautiful Cambodian court dance up close, with its extraordinary technique of articulated, bent-back fingers, wrists, and elbows and its exceptional images of sorrow and flight. That often almost stationary court dance (performed by Sam and Sam-Oeun Tes) was the centerpiece of Removed from the Palace, a collaboration between Sam, her husband, instrumentalist Sam-Ang Sam, and British modern dance choreographer Jonathan Lunn. The two Cambodian women seemed to be encircled in movement by two modern dancers, the long-limbed Lunn and Gwyneth Jones. But Lunn's generic modern dance looked haphazard, slapdash, frenetic compared to the slow, considered Cambodian dance with its refinement and delicacy, its profundity. The single striking image of the collaboration was struck by Sam in profile in a running pose, with Lunn, also in profile, on the floor behind her, his hand held gently under her liked foot, two worlds connecting, her image of flight compassionately acknowledged and extended by his position and presence.

Later in the season, it was interesting and almost surprising, in contrast, to watch Danny Buraczeski's company Jazzdance, move across that same floor. This very American form of dance we call jazz often utilizes our expansive national sense of space, and Buraczeski's dancers surged across the space in waves in such works as Fuerza Viva and Swing Concerto, which opened and closed the program. Fuerza Viva was a jazzy elaboration of the mambo, and Swing Concerto, which began with a brief solo by Buraczeski la kind of Israeli folk dance to klezmer music), ended with a wonderful upbeat, bouncy, almost lindy hop finale. In between these pieces were his new Points on a Curve, a jazz dance with a quirky humor and the elegance of suddenly held ballroom positions ( but bad costumes, however), and Lost Life, his narrative look at the tragic life of alto sax player Art Pepper. Buraczeski has range and a good company of young, enthusiastic dancers to show off his works, especially Joanne M. Horn, the big blonde he often partners and the small, dark-haired Maria Lynn Vignone. He's a deeply intelligent dancemaker with a complex sense of composition. It's always a pleasure to watch someone like that up close.