Jane Comfort and Company, P.S. 122, New York, New York, February 5-8, 12-15, 1998.

Jane Comfort is a dance-theater maker of unusual range, so if you had looked at the first piece on her splendid concert and thought you were getting the full monty, you'd be badly mistaken. That dance, the witty Three Bagatelles for the Righteous, springs from Comforts abundant sense of outrage, political and otherwise, and is played out against sound bites from such pols as Clinton, Dole, Gingrich, and Robertson.

The first section, "Bites," is Comfort's version of musical chairs, with dancers running from one side of the stage to the other, discovering fewer and fewer chairs; because the sound bite is of Gingrich, the segment becomes a metaphor for disenfranchisement.

The second section, "A Better Man for a Better America" comprises thumbnail character sketches of Dole and Clinton as bunraku puppets with others manipulating them from behind. Dole is stick-like (his "handlers" are cloaked in choir robes), while Clinton, handled by a single suited woman, lusts after the other woman who disrobes between his legs. (A tribute to Comfort's prescience: this piece was made in 1996, well before the country's current obsession with Clinton's zipper.) The coda, "In the Garden of Abundance," is tinged with exoticism, suggesting a worldview, with dancers in Balinese-style silks moving slowly in profile, opening fans that reveal, on one side, the American flag and, on the other, a cross.

In profound contrast is Comfort's new Underground River, a work of great beauty that depicts the drifting senses of a woman in a coma. On the sound track, against Toshi Reagon's music, parents and doctors reach out to the woman, while onstage four dancers in white portray the inner workings of her mind. When the outsiders suggest flash cards, these become white wings in the dancers' hands--a flock of birds in flight. Here, a red fish, there, a blue fish darts on a wire across the top of the stage space, as thoughts might race through the unconscious woman's mind.

In the dance's most extraordinary image, wire and cloth plucked from the bare frame of an umbrella become, brilliantly, a small, lively, white puppet (by Basil Twist) manipulated by the dancers. In the end, blue feathers fall on the umbrella, like snow covering tracks, and the sense of being in one's own world remains--the compelling quality of the inner life, including the artistic life, the underground river that is one's own unconscious, overpowering all else.