Toronto Dance Theatre.

When he was leaving Martha Graham's fold in the 1940s, modernist visionary Merce Cunningham noted "that in the modern dance, they used the torso, the back a great deal, the legs not so much. In the ballet, on the other hand, they used the legs a great deal, the arms too ... and the back not so much.... I wondered if there were some ways to put them together."

Toronto Dance Theatre, founded in 1968 by Peter Randazzo, Patricia Beatty, and David Earle, each with a Graham connection, currently showcases the work of Christopher House, its youthful associate artistic director and one of its dancers. On the strength of the three House works that dominated the four-part program given recently in New York City, it appears that even after nearly fifty years of progress, modern dance can still remain fixated on the torso. The accent and import of these creations rests largely in the work of the upper body, leaving the legs and feet mostly as afterthoughts of locomotion.

The most effective of House's dances was Early Departures, a 1992 male quartet addressing, according to a program note, "the uncertainty of relationships in a time of plague." Similarly dressed in oxfords, trousers, shirts, and neckties, the four men cluster, twine, scramble and intermix without achieving anything like a physical resolution. The score, Kubla Khan: Dirge-refrains by John Rea, has the sound and texture of an orchestra tuning up on a mix of Mendelssohn and Mayuzumi. In their street clothes, House's men promise less as dancers and deliver more in theatrical terms. Their interconnections, sometimes shaped by grabbing onto one another's ties, remain mysteriously uneasy. The effect they establish is that of a knot, one ultimately untieable due to endlessly evident loose ends.

Handel Variations and Artemis Madrigals use more traditional scores, both previously associated with well-known choreography: Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Handel and Stravinsky's Duo Concertant, respectively. In the former work more rigorous dance action is employed than in Early Departures. Only a limited theatricality results as a cast of thirteen renders the musical variations by means of diverse physical accents, almost all concentrated above the waist. The accumulated impact is one of slightly anonymous, almost pale, pantomime. Artemis Madrigals adds a scent of drama to similarly motivated action. Here, three women and two men are presented as a series of couples. Tension surfaces from the presence of the fifth dancer as the proverbial outsider.

Related dramatic puzzlements occur in each of these dances. For Handel Variations one dancer (House himself in the performance I saw) is listed separately, above the others, in the printed program but is not particularly featured in the dance itself. In Artemis Madrigals one couple (Pascal Desrosier and Kate Alton) is given a prominence more arbitrary than effective.

Earle's Sacra Conversazione is a full-company work set to seven sections of Mozart's Requiem. Even though its presentation of somber and communal activity includes a goodly amount of torso-dominated movement, this work also employs a fair variety of lower-body articulation. However uplifting and uplifted Earle means his dance to be, his company's legwork remains somewhat lacking in rigor. Few of the turns or jumps employed here possess full shape or power.

The fourteen men and women who make up this company are handsome individuals. Yet, handsome is as handsome does, and the physical force and skill of these dancers tell less of impressive technique than of careful rehearsal--rehearsal that probably dwells heavily on the articulation of the upper body.