Mary Anthony Dance Theatre.

To celebrate her eightieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of her company, the highly respected modern dance teacher Mary Anthony offered a retrospective program of her dances. Appropriately, the choreography ranged from Anthony's strongest works, those of 1956, to a premiere. Two dances were offered from the company's initial year: Songs, a beautiful paean to youth and lyricism, and Threnody, which depicts the suffering engendered by war--all war, any war. While the works from the early seventies, A Ceremony of Carols and Cain and Abel, are less successful, Tabula Rasa, the premiere shows the continuing creativity of this remarkable woman.

A Ceremony of Carols opened the evening. It is a work of piety, appropriate for the Christmas season but not very stirring. Cain and Abel was the weakest entry on the program, although it is, as are all the works, very well crafted. Songs is, quite simply, a glorious display of impassioned dancing; I cannot imagine why the work has not been snatched up by repertory companies across the country. Threnody, Anthony's classic, is an early example of her intelligent, meaningful use of symbolic movement and props.

Anthony's choreography is very much rooted in the Graham tradition; on occasion, it is a bit too derivative. The vocabulary no longer has the ability to shock surprise, or delight us in and of itself, and Anthony knows it. Tabula Rasa seeks a newer voice, with some success. The movement vocabulary is much more idiosyncratic, and the work's subject matter, encapsulated in the Euripidean quote "For who knows if the thing that we call death is our life, and our life, dying," is explored with taste.

Throughout the evening the dancers performed with an inner glow. Notable were Ru-Ping Wang, Gwendolyn Bye, Pamela Luedtke, and, most particularly, Kun-Yang Lin. In fact, the entire company danced well, with a few unfortunate exceptions.

Anthony's choreographic strengths lie in the clarity of exposition of her ideas, the clean, secure structure of all of the dances, and, most of all, her extraordinary musical sensitivity. The requisite angst of early modern dance, as well as its shaped, well-defined movement, is very much in evidence in several of the dances in her repertory. It is a posture that nowadays is out of favor; in its place we have substituted untrammeled energy and unending, unfocused movement. While Anthony's aesthetic is no longer in the forefront of today's dance, such purposeful vision and unambiguous exposition will always be welcome.