Love in Four Acts.

Love in Four Acts, which will be shown on PBS stations this month, was produced by the National Television Production Center at WTTW in Chicago. Claire Bataille, Randy Duncan, Daniel Duell, and Gordon Peirce Schmidt, four Chicago choreographers, were asked to create dances specifically for television. Each worked with a television director and staff to better learn and use the medium. Love, dealt with variously in each piece, ties the segments together. Chicago might have been an equally valid title.

The results are less notable for their choreographic vitality than for the varied settings in which they occur. Without exception, the choreographers were caught up in the "trickery" of the media, forgetting that multiple images, overlays, and fade-ins and -outs do not necessarily clarify the dance image for the viewer, and that they never substitute for coherent choreography. Duncan's Urban Transfers takes place in a lively cityscape beneath the E1 tracks. Director Tom Mother's skittish camera, alternating color with black and white, captures the vibrancy of the locale with a keen sensitivity to moving images--skaters, cyclists, buses, and the E1.

The environment contrasts dramatically with the limited vocabulary Duncan uses to portray a romantic triangle--a young man torn between another man and a woman. The conflict is established after the initial image of the man and woman joyfully chasseing down the street. The other man, seething on a street bench, confronts them. The style is jazzy, but there is nothing in Duncan's alternating duets to distinguish between the two relationships. Repetitive phrases culminate in punctuated poses. The bench becomes a fourth participant as the dancers perform on and around it. Tom Kast's minimal percussion score is relentless, saved by the intrusion of street sounds.

Standing on the Lake Michigan beachfront, Bataille introduces her segment, Lifetimes, by offering recollections about the joys of childbirth, family, and friends. It sounds warm and fuzzy, but the dance is simply a quartet to three pop tunes sung by Carmen MacRae and a rhythmic a capella rendition by Zap-Mama. The performance takes place in an abandoned factory from which the dancers ultimately dash out onto a beach. The lyrical dancing, when it doesn't become self-consciously tricky, is the most sophisticated on the program. In spite of the moving camera, Bataille seems able to convey the spatial context of the dance, and there is a dynamic variety that ventures beyond predictable jazz dance.

Peirce Schmidt's romantic fantasy, Gesualdo, based on composer Don Carlo Gesualdo's murder of his wife and her lover, is so fraught with melodramatic imagery that it becomes comical. In a dark and grand hall at the University of Chicago, Gesualdo remembers his past, as ghosts, young and old versions of the main characters, flit by with increasing angst. Sheet music wafts about, candles burn, and the dancers, accompanied by Bartok's String Quartet No. 3, fade in and out in a blur.

By comparison, Duell's Hellos and Goodbyes, two duets that purport to describe the intense professional and personal relationships between ballet dancers, is set in a sparse studio. Like Bataille's, Duell's discussion of his dance proved unreadable. To be sure, there was an older and a younger couple, but there was little in their pas de deux that distinguished the intricacies of the relationships Duell described. In the stronger moments, the dancing related well to Poulenc's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

Love in Four Acts will air on PBS stations October 26 at 10:00 P.M. (EST). Check local listings.