Shobana Jayasingh Dance Company, Joyce Theater, April 29-May 4, 1997; Mallika Sarabhai, Miller Theatre, Columbia University, May 5, 1997.

India's sophisticated dance heritage gives contemporary choreographers plenty to draw from and disagree with. For Londoner Shobana Jeyasingh and India-based Mallika Sarabhai, their revisions of old ways also seem to affirm the old.

True, Jeyasingh eschews much of her bharata natyam training in the ensemble pieces she creates for her small, nine-year-old company of women. Her rejections are conspicuous in Palimpsest (1997) and Romance ... with Footnotes (1993), the dances she presented in New York City. For example, her dancers mostly abandon the tradition's ritualized gestural language, taking care to keep their faces neutral and their line uncluttered by bharata natyam's splendid imagery of ornament. Their physical stance and style are angular; they suggest a quietly martial quality.

Unlike the mythological goddesses often portrayed in classical Indian dance, Jeyasingh's performers don't tell love stories. Rather than seduce the audience with their eyes, they offer a guardedly direct gaze. The dancers also use the entire stage space, departing again from bharata natyam custom, and seem to share it as a team. Despite classical emphasis on solitary virtuosity, there are really no soloists here.

Still, Jeyasingh's decision not to do the usual thing is expressed while making reference to the tradition she's revising or rejecting. The necessary context for anything new may be its precedents. Versions of newness, touched 6y oldness, haunt Jeyasingh's dances and give her work a poignancy, implying that the new is always relative and subject to change. For instance, Jeyasingh's feminism, commanding part of its strength from the authority of goddesses, is subtle, intimate, and pervasive -- a generational statement of independent intention by women who don't wish to be mythic, only real.

For Mallika Sarabhai, the daughter of renowned dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai, feminism is a family matter, as well as an artistic concern, translated by the younger Sarabhai now into theater pieces that depend, at times, on dance. V for ... A Reflection on Violence (1997), directed by John Martin from a script which he wrote with Sarabhai, offers her as the central narrative figure, one who is meant to challenge and agitate the audience about our human predisposition to violence. So she tells the story of a man who rapes his wife and a woman who runs over her daughter-in-law with a car, among many other tales. Sarabbai's undeniable theatrical power can be appealingly overwhelming -- she's a matriarch manquee from the Hindu pantheon who turns everything upside down with an inspired truculence. But the clumsy script and the understaged production at the Miller Theatre meant that Sarabkai's need for old-fashioned grandeur was more or less throttled. Like any rebel goddess, she needs to build a new cosmos to her own specifications.