The Architecture of Seeing.

Dressed as noble savages in tawdry Goodwill leftovers, Patricia Hoffbauer and George Emilio Sanchez pick their way through the Dance Theater Workshop audience. A classic Santana guitar solo prepares us for the Latin iconography to come, as The Architecture of Seeing begins with a clash of worldliness and innocence.

An accomplished comedienne, the Brazilian Hoffbauer has choreographed Architecture's dances, which are interspersed liberally with dialogue, monologue, mime, voice-over, film, and theatrical imagery. Written by Sanchez, a first-generation American of Ecuadoran descent, the performance piece explores Latin stereotypes with unexpected insight and humor. Playing with personas, the performers allow the audience to join in as they laugh at themselves. But there is an edge. In presenting stock ethnic guises, the piece lampoons them savagely.

The fast-talking Hoffbauer rants articulately in a coup de the&be in lecture form. Sanchez counters with affecting portrayals of lost indigenous souls in the worlds of academe, commerce, and multinationalism. His painful inability to communicate is eloquent. A variation on this basic character, sometimes referred to as Mr. Chief Half Breed, appears in a film by Tal Yarden, shot in black and white with a newsreel feel.

Hoffbauer's choreography is well crafted and executed, lout it lacks the crackling edge of her performance and of Sanchez's writing. There are moments of physical imagery that speak clearly, like the repeated motif of the Indigenous Hunter, and a series of supported embraces that evoke a pieta. But such clarity is rare and mostly benign. The work finds its visual bite in the use of masks, costumes, ersatz tribal gear, and the repetition of thematic gestures. Together these elements create a world of pre-Columbian and post-NAFTA confusion, from which a cluster of controversial characters emerges. When Sanchez leads Hoffbauer offstage at the end, we are not quite sure why the piece is over, hut we sense their interdependence, their vulnerability, and our implicit involvement in their search for identity.

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On two feet, upside down, tumbling with antigravitational aplomb, Lisa Race is a wonder to behold. A member of David Doriman's company, she dances with a lusty, graceful abandon that conjures an emotional terrain. In her own work (DTW's Bessie Schonberg Theater, October 24-27, 1996), Race is less completely evolved. She often concentrates on movement for movement's sake--its incursions into space, its mesmerizing ebbs and flows, its arresting impossibilities. Though delightful for their beauty and humor, such pieces as Drop and Marked have little subtext, the dramatic life that anchors a dance in the audience's imagination. And even the fleeting references to the personal relationship underlying Two Strong Girls Dancing have riffle staying power, losing out to Race's unquenchable inquiry into action. But Race has the capability, perhaps not yet consistent, to see beyond the dancing. Catching at suspended ropes, the four figures in Tether swoop to death-defying altitudes and inevitably come to rest, hanging, inert, mortal.

Anne Tobias

The first thing to catch the eye about the memorable In-Young Sohn Dance Company, a Korean troupe making its American debut (American Museum of Natural History, September 27-29, 1996), is its amazing color sense. [ones you haven't seen before--an indescribably rarefied hot pink, a fiery light green--seem to teeter on the verge of extinction by force of their purity. In the Buddhist-inspired Sungmu, a solo danced by Sohn, the white, blue, and red of her hooded long-sleeved costume gave the ritualistically repetitive motion an intensely floral and martial bloom-like that of a warrior lost in meditation. The exquisite burn of precision in the mixed bill of dance and musical works, each one traditionally Korean, suggested passion dependent on restraint for its character (as with flamenco), as well as a startling version of classicism that tells us, "Listen to my terms, and forges your own." Sohn, formerly a member of the Korean National Dance Company, may have a good deal to teach the West, particularly our habitually eclectic modem dancers.

Molly McQuade

Indiana's Dance Kaleidoscope bills itself as the state's only professional contemporary dance company, and the program notes for its first visit to New York City in more than a decade (Sylvia & Danny Kaye Playhouse, October 25-27 1996) boast of the company's exploration of "a broad spectrum of styles and influences." It seems, however, that the company--a compact troupe of eight energetic and buoyant dancers--has been visited by the curse of the director as choreographer. David Hochoy, a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and at the head of Dance Kaleidoscope since 1991, presented a repertory consisting solely of his own works: Jimson Weed; Girl at the Piano: Recording Sound; the "Summer" section of Seasons (set to Beatles songs); and a solo, For Martha. Excepting the last--a Graham special set to Puccini's "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca (emoted aR over the place by Ricardo Melendez)--all the works offered an empty-calorie, blandly generic contemporary style wrapped in bonbon-bright costumes. If Dance Kaleidoscope is all that Indiana is seeing by way of contemporary dance, its audiences are getting an unbalanced diet.

Roslyn Sulcas