THIRD BENEFIT FOR ERIC HAMPTON.

THIRD BENEFIT FOR ERIC HAMPTON MARYLAND YOUTH BALLET AND FRIENDS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER MONTGOMERY COLLEGE, ROCKVlLLE CAMPUS ROCKVlLLE, MARYLAND OCTOBER 21, 2000

Washington, D.C., has been blessed with ballet choreographers: Choo San Goh and Eric Hampton both had craft plus imagination. Neither, though, had luck in matters of health. Goh made thirty-eight pieces, not just for the Washington Ballet where he was resident choreographer, but for companies around the globe, before he died of AIDS at age 39 in 1987. Hampton, who came here to dance for Goh, choreographed (most often for Maryland Youth Ballet and his own Eric Hampton Dance) before being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). He continued making new work until 1997. Even now, he remains involved in dance with the help of a loyal circle of artists, family and friends.

The one Hampton piece on the program, Notturno, is a joy. Like its Franz Schubert music, Nocturne in E-flat for Piano, Violin and Cello, D. 897, there is about it a breath of nature in a meditative, summer evening's mood. Into this mindset, Hampton places a pair of lovers between erotic peaks. The emotions stirring their movement--attraction, withdrawal, seclusion, impulsiveness, harmony--are intimate. Hampton deploys nuanced balletic adagio and explores the expressive potential of technique. Dancers Austin St. John and Natalie Moffett Smith were good at this, besides being good-looking. The guardian of Hampton's opus, Harriet Moncure Williams, staged his work faithfully and with insight.

Participating in the benefit were four of Hampton's dancers who now have their own companies. Lucy Bowen McCauley's Foot Fetish, the opener, shows her comic vein. Performed to I. Paolo Conti and J. Scott music by three men from Bowen McCauley Dance, it caricatures concepts of masculinity. The star of the male trio is the weakling--balletic Peter Stark as a Chaplinesque sissy. With rapid-fire footwork (meticulously delivered by Stark), the sissy means to placate the bluster of the two other men who are beefcake boys. The piece is brief and doesn't overstay its welcome.

Juan Carlos Rincones, also ex-Eric Hampton Dance, who now runs Rincones & Company Dance Theater, has become a romantic, uncovering mystery and magic in goings-on that others might see as sleazy or mundane. For the benefit, his A Fuego Lento is a tango for two men (music by Horacio Salgan). Like Bowen McCauley's trio, this dance deals with aspects of masculinity, although without a grin. Rincones conveys with intensity the thrill of sexual cruising, the pride of territoriality, the miracle of touch and the naked truth of unmasking. Both performers--the teddy bear butch Bruno Augusto, and Rincones, who is handsome and suave--danced their hearts out.

Tony Powell, of Tony Powell/Music & Movement, the third Hampton alumnus, has a reputation for drill-team tactics and rush-hour choreograph), ,done to bracing music he composes. He started using other composers' scores a couple of seasons ago. Romantique, on this bill, is proof that he's also diversifying his approach to movement. Two sections of a work-in-progress are set to Chopin. Unlike Fokine, Robbins or, lately, Mark Morris, Powell ignores the pianist/composer's poignancies and reveries to focus exclusively on the music's classical backbone. A mazurka pas de trois for Neli Beliakaite, Carissa Hart and Steven Lumadue and a waltz for Suzanne Bryant and Don Love show off the dancers' academic skills and deportment with--for Powell--surprising severity.

Permeating excerpts from The Silk Road (The Seidenstrasse 2000) by Dana Tai Soon Burgess, from the Hampton company in its early years, are foldings of the body, limb and torso elongations and suspensions, and also spiral weavings. These movements are delivered with pliancy and arranged sensually in minimalist sequences. Part of a project that intertwines sculpture and dance, the dancing alone (by six members of the Burgess Company/Moving Forward) on this occasion established a seductive, hypnotic, unisex ambiance.

Alvin Mayes showed two distinct pieces--a duet for grown-up partners and a workout for young bodies. The first, The Color of Passion: Topaz to Ginastera music, is for himself and his partner in the Karen & Alvin team. Shown is an inherently turbulent relationship that's affected, too, by another consideration--the disparity between Karen Bernstein's dancer's body and Mayes's bulk. When he serves as anchor for her darting about or as launching and landing pad for her excursions off the floor, Mayes seems reliability incarnate; as a soloist, though, one fears for him. His other work, Eireann Kente, is an Afro-Celtic celebration of ballet that starts as a ritual, but soon its ten young Maryland Youth dancers turn it into a jamboree--just the right up-note to conclude the benefit.