MODERN DANCE IN TIMES SQUARE? HARKNESS PROJECT ASKS `Y NOT?'.

What initially looked like a loss actually may benefit New York's 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project. The annual contemporary dance series had been held at Playhouse 91, an Upper East Side venue, since the series began in 1994, but when 92nd Street Y Dance Director Joan Finkelstein went to schedule the 2001 season, she found that Playhouse 91 had been leased to long-running theatrical productions. Finkelstein began casting about for alternate venues; when she saw the Duke Theater at The New 42nd Street Studios, a heavily trafficked tourist area adjacent to blockbusters like The Lion King, she thought to herself, "Wouldn't that be cool--to be on Times Square with modern dance?"

Finkelstein and The New 42nd Street Studios President Cora Cahan struck a deal, earning this year's series the extended title "92 on 42: The Seventh Annual 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project at the Duke on 42nd Street." The series opens February 28 with Israel's Vertigo Dance Company performing Gas Heart/Vertigo On Line.

Finkelstein said she expects that the drawbacks of relocating the series--a more expensive space, with 199 seats as opposed to the Playhouse's 299--will be outweighed by the theater's accessible central location, on what she calls "THE block, a wonderfully flashy block--it's as light at night as it is in the daytime." A longtime midtown resident, Finkelstein shrugs off complaints that Times Square has been hopelessly Disneyfied and believes the series's new home will attract tourist and foot traffic along with more dancers, many of whom, Finkelstein says, live downtown or in Brooklyn and are sometimes reluctant to travel much beyond 14th Street. "[Times Square] was a blight for years," she said. "It's 500 percent better than when it was all porn parlors. Cora [Cahan] has put art on that block--it gives it equal weight with commercial ventures. It's good for art in New York."

Contemporary, noncommercial dance may be novel in Times Square, but it's business as usual for the Y; modern classes and performances have been held there since 1935, the year Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Hanya Holm, Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey hosted their "Symposium on Modern Dance." The Harkness Foundation for Dance has helped finance the Y's dance programs since 1985, including the Dance Project, which began seven years ago in December with a three-and-a-half-week season and nineteen performances. It was later scheduled for spring, to avoid holiday time conflicts, and this year has been expanded to five weeks and twenty-five performances. There is a fund to encourage the development of New York premieres, and the dancers are paid.

As with other modern dance performances, Finkelstein said, about half the audience tends to be other dancers, although she hopes to lure new viewers with a divergent series. The Vertigo Company will be followed by Ben Munisteri's The Day I Learned to Swim (March 7-11), which Finkelstein described as a "highly technical, virtuoso" piece. Return guests to the series include Amy Sue Rosen/Derek Bernstein Projects in the three-part work Triage (March 14-18) and Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks (March 21-25) doing IN GEAR: Reverse Psychology, Agenda II, a collaboration with the Dagdha Dance Company of Ireland. "It explores how cultural idioms clash and blend, and the cacophony of that," Finkelstein said. Zvi Gotheiner and Dancers's Interiors (March 28-April 1) closes the season.