New York Baroque Dance Company.

The New York Baroque Dance Company, founded in 1976 by Catherine Turocy and Ann Jacoby, has established itself as an authoritative source of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dance styles. At the company's twentieth-anniversary retrospective (Alice Tully Hall, June 12, 1997) a selection of works from the repertory showed how baroque dance laid the foundations of ballet technique (through its turned-out legs and vertical carriage), yet possessed its own aesthetic and range of conventions.

Highlights of the program, which was accompanied onstage by fumes Richman's excellent Concert Royal ensemble, were the opening "Dances of the Court," which showed popular dance forms of the period (minuet passepied, rigaudon, allemande), and the subsequent "Danses Nobles," a more formal presentation of dances created for theatrical performances. Fittingly, artistic director Turocy summed up much of baroque dance's particularity and charm in Guillaume Louis Pecour's solo from Passacaille d'Armide. Wearing a mask, she suggested an unfamiliar stylized aesthetic distance between performer and role, yet imbued her body with expressive possibility through careful placement of head and neck, skillful use of elaborate hand gestures, and delicate, articulated ankles and feet.