So In Love.

Lar Lubovitch, who is becoming increasingly busy with Broadway and other commercial projects, presented a selection of his concert dances spanning two decades during his company's fall season, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary as well as its Joyce debut. The popularity of Lubovitch's choreography--as well as much criticism of it--stems from its easy accessibility. It is feel-good, gracious, and unabashedly entertaining dancing, but it sometimes lacks the emotionally nutritional substance of a completely balanced artistic meal.

Lubovitch has a finely honed knack for moving dancers around a stage. The 1976 Marimba, set to Steve Reich's cyclical percussion music, and its clone, the 1978 North Star, to an equally hypnotic Philip Glass score, both send dancers constantly surging in sweeping arcs. Phalanxes melt into circles; momentary couplings emerge magically from complex patterns, like high-tech folk dance. The motion is so relentlessly restless that motion-sensitive viewers might experience some queasiness. Beau Danube (1981) is a one-liner, which gibes at Strauss's eternal On the Beautiful Blue Danube waltz by setting a quartet of dowdy bathers lolling voluptuously in a snowstorm.

The opening movement of the 1986 Mozart Concerto Six Twenty-two is a four-couple romp that subtly paraphrases everyone from Balanchine to Graham to Taylor to Ailey to Michael Kidd, but also includes a few kernels of corn: flexed feet fracturing an elegant line, partners turning a graceful run into a clunky chase. Still, the adagio duet at the heart of the work, with its emotionally touching and inventive male partnering, is a choreographic jewel. Lane Sayles and Jeffrey Hankinson interpret it beautifully, adding resonances of racial harmony.

Lubovitch's typically eclectic vocabulary and Broadway sensibility loom in a New York premiere, So In Love, an acidic take on modern love abetted by wonderfully offbeat recordings of Cole Porter songs from the album Red Hot + Blue. Gravel-throated Tom Waits wails "It's All Right with Me" for Rebecca Rigert as club kid, who's getting no satisfaction and climaxes her funny rubbery tantrum with a barrage of obscene gestures at an invisible antagonist. Aaron Neville swathes Susan Shields and Sayles's lush duet in his velvet voice, doing "In the Still of the Night." As Jimmy Somerville rocks "From This Moment On," Dirk Platzek strides in with Silvia Nevjinsky clinging upside down to his sturdy leg, and they engage in a feisty battle that ends in a jitterbugging truce. With Eurythmics' Annie Lennox cooing "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" Scott Rink teases, then dumps Kelly Slough. And Mia Babalis's lonely, yearning solo ends the suite to k.d. lang's soulful rendition of the title song.

The dancers are uniformly strong, attractive, and well-drilled, and they appear to love doing the generous movement. Lubovitch reminds us that dancing ain't brain surgery, and exhorts us to enjoy his choreographic patisserie. Okay, but one may reasonably ask, "Where's the beef?"