Peter Pucci Plus Dancers.

The seven-part bill Peter Pucci programmed for his New York season split into work of two kinds: lively solos for himself and shadowy rituals for his six fellow dancers.

Sing, his new solo, had the engaging and bold Pucci pacing, pausing, and posturing, all colored by a Middle Eastern sinuousness and set to a recording of Scottish mouth music. Bare-chested, in handsomely draped red trousers by Ginger Blake, the bright-eyed dancer made his forthright body language sing with an immediacy that matched the modulated color of the wordlike sounds of the singer. Some hip and pelvic isolations spiced his little foray with signature Pucci sass.

Ayego, another new work, told of Pucci's taste for ritual happenings. This one, with a variously brooding score by Nana Simopoulos (played live by a quartet of musicians), had a New Age aura with its quartet of dancers in softly gathered, old-gold coveralls (Blake again). The stately and somber air maintained by this foursome, sometimes moving as individuals and sometimes as couples, was fortified by the stiff geometrics of Pucci's movement designs. Essentially, however, this piece, like the other ritualistic works on the program, disallowed the individuality that Pucci projects so potently in his own solo performing.

The exception to the either/or split defining this mixed bill was Hoop-La. This 1992 work included Pucci himself among its cast of six. The hoop envoked by the title is the Hula-Hoop. Pucci's dance suite (to selections by Rachmaninoff, Palmgren, Bach, Schumann and Moskowski) includes a colorful rainbow of the once faddish plaything in a happy variety of inventive configurations. Pucci doesn't set himself apart in the work, but his singular, foxy personality lights up the proceedings, and the dancers who elsewhere partake in largely sedate works reflect his brightness winningly.

Hoop-La bubbles with life, almost literally so, as the plastic hoops hang or float in the air like so many giddily hued soap bubbles. The sly yet artful arrangements the dancers make with their rings of color refer at times to hoop dances by early moderns, such as Doris Humphrey, at other times to the likes of fan dancer Sally Rand. Here, Pucci's Pilobolus roots and the connections they have to the aesthetics of Denishawn come through indelibly. Some moments, such as when the dancers frame their grinning faces with the hoops as though they're looking through a window, are cloyingly self-aware, but more often the toy is wielded with childlike freshness.

Love Duets (1992) also enriched the program by tempering its presentation of linked couples with an unforced and unsentimental sensuality. Marc Farre's commissioned score for Then All Is Still Again helped enliven the somewhat dry arrangements of choreography. With its lighting (by Howell Binkley) and costume design (by Christine Joly) of aqueous blues, Pucci's ritual trio floated confidently on Farre's atmospheric music, which sounded the way Wagner's Rhine might if sound bites were taken at its source.