Joyce Theater, New York, New York, January 6-25, 1998.

The Joyce Theater's twelfth annual festival of companies on the brink of wider recognition showed consistently strong dancing and typically high production values. But the dances at Altogether Different (January 6-25, 1998) were--with one exception--far from the cutting edge, in either form or content. Perhaps the choreographers' desire to be on their best behavior for this "major" venue keeps them from taking more artistic risks. And developing dancemakers, now as ever, fail to value conciseness: They don't seem to have the knack of leaving the audience a little hungry for more, or the ability to focus their expressive visions compellingly.

O'DAY DANCES

Illustrious former Twyla Tharp dancer Kevin O'Day has parlayed personal charm and a craft, assimilated from Tharp, Balanchine, and others he's danced for, into a burgeoning choreographic career. He makes the kind of fastpaced, music-driven dances that are breezily entertaining to a wide public. His too-cutely titled Quartet for IV (and sometimes one, two, or three ...), made for the White Oak Dance Project, and Viola Alone ... (with one exception), for New York City Ballet, illustrate his aim to please. A nice touch: all his music was played live.

His premiere, And Like That, is a lighthearted exercise for O'Day, Alexander Kolpin, and Patricia Kenny in jazz oxfords, and Antonia Franceschi and Stacy Caddell on pointe. Music director John King's driving jazz-rock score for strings and guitar sparks some clever kinetic exchanges. One section has each of the trio in oxfords by turns playfully manipulating Franceschi each time she completes a tough balancing phrase. It's an airy work any ballet company could use to complement its repertory.

IRENE HULTMAN DANCE

Fire and Ice, a proposed three-act work, is Irene Hultman's first conscious exploration of her Swedish heritage. Act I is a moody, sparse meander--set to a melange of taped Swedish folk and baroque Albinoni, and live original string music by Robert Een and Bjorn Stabi--in which five skilled dancers (Petter Jacobsson, Chrysa Parkinson, Rebecca Rigert, Jenifer Weaver, and Hultman) move through the gelid landscape of John Lasiter's subtly modulated lighting. They relate casually to each other, never making quite clear who they are or what their gestural language might mean.

Act II, a premiere, is far more choreographically concise and light in spirit. The music by Een and Lena Willemark (who not only chants and yodels in Swedish, but also fiddles a mean streak) is often rollicking. A happy jig segues into duets: Hultman and Parkinson snuggle sisterly; stocky Jacobsson carries wiry string-bean Todd Lawrence Stone around like a pet monkey; Parkinson squirms on all fours like an excited puppy, while Willemark chatters and barks at her. Cellist Een then joins Willemark onstage for more folksy rhythmic partying, and, finally, all participants stroll off, chuckling. After the good-natured "Fire" of Act II, Act I's moody "Ice" seems, perhaps, less ponderous in retrospect.

JOY KELLMAN & COMPANY

The rough-edged raggedness (feet relaxed, knees passively stretched) of Joy Kellman's limb-flung style is refreshingly unelegant. The rambunctious omnigender lifting, one-handed flips, and tumbling of her postmodern lexicon keep the action and energy levels high. The dynamic highlight of Shift is a rigorously structured accumulating canon by eight men and women in men's business suits. But, subsequently, the piece dwells too long on unmoderated angst and slackens when the dancers variously strip to their skivvies and elaborately build a sandbag dike.

The premieres, What You Said Was Was Not and What You Said Was Not Was, a duet and trio, respectively, capture the inventiveness of Kellman's visceral, springy power far more cogently. In the first, a male-female duo, Wilson Mendieta and KT Niehoff nudge, poke, and toss each other's equally massed bodies around like two playmates, cajoling and challenging each other. The music, Meredith Monk's Double Fiesta, is rowdy too, but its underlying poignancy plumbs deeper than the good-natured kinetic roughhousing. The second, a women's trio for Kelly Drummond Cawthon, Kellman, and Holly Hostler-Mathis, again set to Monk's plaintive music, is a gentle, trusting sisterhood.

WALLY CARDONA QUARTET

Velvety mover Wally Cardona has assembled a quartet of impressive dancers: Kimberly Bartosik and Alan Good, long-time Cunningham company members; tall, nimble Kathryn Sanders; plus himself. The continuity (in this case, I think, a more apt term than structure) of Cardona's dances is fluid, and the motion is so dynamically even that it's difficult to hold in memory the moment it's finished.

Several versions of the old popular standard "Ramona," electronically transfigured by composers Ronald Lawrence and Rory Young, accompany the premiere, Four Ramonas. One rendition, a tango, backs a closely twined group phrase, giving the dancing a visual energy we can recall when the section recurs to more amorphous sound.

Most impressive, however, is his 1995/1996 duet, Blood Variations, in which Cardona and Sanders master fierce balances and acrobatic moves with calm concentration, like high-wire artists whose outward serenity masks the mortal peril of a small misstep.

RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE

Ron Brown's dances explore his several identities: male, African American, gay. He has the first category mastered; he's physically beautiful and a luscious mover. Second, he neatly revitalizes a postmodern-meets-Afro-Caribbean movement dialect with constant rhythmic surprises and unpredictable direction changes, and his musical choices reflect black culture: spirituals and disco.

Two new dances distill with great eloquence the same intentions of the infuriatingly overlong Lessons, also performed. Incidents: First Journey, the first premiere, is a tribute to the courage of slave women, set to stirring, traditional spirituals. In the first section, "out of hiding," Angelica Patterson's dramatic, gestural solo longs for release. In "cleaning the place," she joins Cynthia Oliver, Renee Redding-Jones, and Gail Salazar, kinetically limning domestic chores and grooming. The third section, "running," is their heroic flight, silhouetted against the intense glow of lighting designer Brenda Dolan's fierce crimson sky.

The other premiere, Better Days: First Time Through, a dance for six men, tackles the third aspect of Brown's identity. A lonely solo by Steve Washington, set to "His Eye is on the Sparrow," precedes Brown's solo, facing poet G. Winston James, who recites a paean from a man to his lover, dead of AIDS; a tender embrace unites them at the end. Then the five dancers pulse and sweat in unself-conscious homoeroticism in an underground club dance backed by sizzling house music.

NAI-NI CHEN DANCE COMPANY

Nai-Ni Chen is enamored of symmetry, and uses a generic modem vocabulary: skipping, arcing runs, dramatic gazes. Despite its refined texture, the movement is frantically nonstop, as if desperate to hold our drifting attention. Her premieres, Qian Kun and Bamboo Passage, are decorative and utterly predictable. The first, an academic exercise, comprises an athletic male solo, female quartet, and group transition to macho quartet finale. Onstage percussionists try vainly to generate excitement with enthusiastic pounding, but their drums can't muster the necessary volume.

In the second, we see everything you'd expect with bamboo poles. Dancers lever themselves into slow-motion leaps, duel, lay the poles in grids, and jump over them. The only element that captures the imagination is a group of three men self-accompanied by handfuls of rattling chopsticks.

But in an earlier dance, Calligraphy II, accompanied live by Joan La Barbara's haunting, mysterious score, Chen successfully fuses traditional Chinese with modem dance. Dancers swirl vivid streaks in the air with long silk streamers, poetically visualizing the tide image.

MARK DENDY DANCE & THEATER

The only choreographer who stretched conventional definitions of dance was Mark Dendy. [For more about him, see "Fine and Dendy," page 76.] Uniquely zany, indeed, was his Dream Analysis, a comic satire, scripted by Dendy in collaboration with psychiatrist Dr. Ronald L. Vereen and the performers, and directed with help from Dendy's colleague Jane Comfort, in whose work he also performs. The superb cast includes portrayals of two of Dendy's icons, each doubled: Martha Graham (Dendy and the lanky, elegant Richard Move) and Nijinsky (Dendy and look-alike Lawrence Keigwin). The (largely autobiographical) two acts poignantly and pointedly delve into the struggle of Eric Henley (Scott Hess) to accept his gay self, tying to curb a compulsion to impersonate Judy Garland.

The shrink (noted drag artist Varla Jean Merman, a.k.a. Jeffrey T. Roberson) listens to Henley's dreams about Graham and Nijinsky. Scenes are punctuated with spoofs of movie musicals. In one, Merman belts Garland's classic "The Trolley Song" with updated lyrics that endorse psychopharmacological fixes for Henley's problems. Keigwin's Nijinsky does a raucous gloss on Le Spectre de la Rose, rife with Dendy's signature goat kicks and bonerattling plummets from midjump.

In Act II, Henley does "Get Happy" in Garland drag. A sadistic dance class (reference to Dendy's own experience at a southern arts university) turns Henley off a dance career, but he accepts himself, as four satyrs (one female) in bikinis, all with erect penises attached, cavort orgiastically around him to Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. At its best, it was brave, honest, uproarious, and, truly, altogether different.

Gus Solomons directs his own company; bikes everywhere; and has toured nationally for the past two seasons in the title role of Donald Byrd's The Harlem Nutcracker.