Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

TED SHAWN THEATRE AND STUDIO/THEATRE, BECKET, MASSACHUSETTS JUNE 24-AUGUST 24, 1997 REVIEWED BY AMANDA SMITH

At Jacob's Pillow this year, the spirits of some of those who paused here and left their marks seemed in evidence everywhere. This sixty-fifth Pillow season, the final one with Sali Ann Kriegsman as director, was itself dedicated to Bessie Schonberg, who taught composition at the outdoor dance festival. A parry in the charming tea garden paid homage to Jess Meeker long the Pillow's music director, while inside "the barn," Ted Shawn's original theater, John Lindquist's photos showed Meeker in 1938, dapper in an era when men still wore white suits. Both Schonberg and Meeker died this year.

Fittingly, loss and the coming to terms with loss were the subjects of the finest piece by far, Susan Marshall's moving, magnificent Central Figure, a major work, substantial in anyone's season. The genesis of the dance was the loss of Arthur Armijo, the dancer with whom the choreographer had worked the longest. Made on and presented here by the experimental Lyons National Opera Ballet, the work was rightly the centerpiece of the French company's program.

Set against Donald Baechler's drop of black dots on a gray field and Philip Glass's churning String Quartet No. 5, the dance focuses on a central figure representing Armijo, well danced by Stanislas Wisniewski, consoled and supported by Pierre Advokatoff. The ten other dancers who surround them represent not only a dance company but the presence and sweep of humanity itself surrounding the vortex of personal crisis. As the dead do not completely leave us--their spirits linger on--the Central Figure disappears and reappears throughout the course of the dance, once waltzing with his solacing friend. In the end, the Figure runs on, then is caught by the light as he walks off.

What is so fine about this work is its clarity and the complexity of its structure, its balance between the Platonic and the Aristotelian--that which is felt and that which is structure--its complicated and often prismatic floor patterns, and, finally, its profound portrayal of grief and empathy.

Standing in the shadow of Central Figure were the other works from Lyons, Maguy Marin's Contrastes, a comic-dramatic piece from the raincoat school of French choreography, and Herve Robbe's abstract, absurdist Miss K., to Mozart.

The late American choreographer Ulysses Dove was beautifully represented by Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, performed by Stockholm 59 [degrees] North, in the debut of this troupe comprised of soloists from the Royal Swedish Ballet. In a company unusually full of wonderful men, Anders Nordstrom particularly caught the eye. Dancing first with Anna Valev to Rachmaninoff in Mats Ek's playful but slightly dark duet, Grass, and then to a pounding score by Martinu in Nils Christe's Before Nightfall, a dance of European angst and mass movement reminiscent of Jiri Kylian's work, Nordstrom distinguished himself by his form and flow, his varied dramatic performing, and his partnering.

Elsewhere came echoes of ocher presences. Eiko & Koma (their work always suggests anguish and loss) brought indoors River, inspired in part by the "black river" that ran through Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb. Minus a real river as their partner, the two performers in shallow water onstage still suggested images of desperate escape from near-drowning, Hamlet regarding Ophelia's body, refugees exhausted on a rain, a fish floundering onto shore and, thus, evolution. And throughout the season, in Blake's Barn, a dance resource center dedicated to the memory of Marge Champion's son, hung Lindquist's photographs of the parade of greats who have trod these lawns and walked these gravel paths.