The triumph was the final piece, Festival Dance, set to a piano trio by Johann Hummel, who as a young boy had been taught (for free) and even housed by Mozart, and who grew up to be a close friend of Beethoven's; admired by Haydn (and his successor at Esterházy); a teacher of Czerny and Mendelssohn; and a friend of Schubert's. Hummel's trio embodies both the classical discipline of Haydn and Mozart and the early romanticism of their successors, giving Morris an opportunity to create what is perhaps his most classically structured work, yet one that also avails itself of the ease and flow of the Romantics.

First, there's an affectionate couple in a modest duet, then a formal arrangement of one woman (Laurel Lynch) against a quartet of men, and one man (William Smith III) against a quartet of women. This formality is never abandoned through the piece's extended three movements (Waltz, March, Polka), but the groups splinter and reform, the six couples in constant realignment and interaction. Morris shows us that he can choreograph a conventionally put together dance in a way that both contains and unleashes his personal vision. It's charming, it's exhilarating, it's unexpected--and what a rousing finale!

The Muir gives us three couples dancing to a series of Beethoven's settings of Irish and Scottish folk songs, "Sally in Our Alley" the best known of them. This is Mark Morris working--in a very reduced way--in his "L'Allegro, il Penseroso" mode. It holds its own, it's coherent and pleasing, but it seemed to me not much more than elevated filler.

Petrichor takes on a beautiful but not necessarily dancey Villa-Lobos quartet. It's unique to Morris in that it utilizes eight women and no men, showing off the exceptional quality of his current female dancers. Lynch, as in Festival Dance, is especially open, strong, intelligent, appealing; in a very few years, she's made herself an important element of the company. Julie Worden and Maile Okamura are as beautiful and committed as ever. The new young men (a number of the senior males have retired) are working well, and Morris is giving them opportunities. Petrichor has a colorful urgency--it's very much a group work, highly propulsive and even gripping. But it has to take a back seat to Festival Dance, which may not be on Morris' highest level, but comes close. That's good enough for eyes starved for work of large merit.

 Two less famous but still highly visible choreographers have been at the Joyce in the past two weeks, both with mixed results. First, Larry Keigwin, with an hour-long piece called Exit. Keigwin works all over the place, usually with fresh New Yorkerish wit and a real grasp of how to handle groups both large and small. Alas, Exit is one of what I think of as "infernal disco" ballets, all sleaze, aggression, camp and relentless in-your-faceness. Lighting to match. Yes, there's invention here, and gallant dancers, but all I wanted was to get out of that disco.

Doug Varone followed Keigwin into the Joyce, and though I very much admire his work, his hour-plus Chapters From a Broken Novel was also something of a disappointment. The "Chapters" are 20 fragments with titles like "Ron Tells the Truth" and "Ruby Throated Sparrows," suggesting some kind of hidden narrative, but it all seemed arbitrary to me. There was a handsome silver cloth billowing above, and an effective original score (by David Van Tieghem), and as always Varone marries visceral dance movement to intense human feeling, but for me it didn't add up. Too much was going on, and too little was making sense.

 Out of the past came the work of two important women. Trisha Brown is still with us, of course, but her program at Dance Theater Workshop featured three old pieces, to the great delight of her admirers in the audience. I've seen too little of her work (I was hanging out at City Ballet when she was at her peak) to have strong connections to it or nostalgia for it, and must report that these pieces--at least as currently performed--have no resonance for me. Foray Forêt, for nine dancers, has interesting effects--the playful Robert Rauschenberg costumes; an out-of-tune marching band that passes by offstage a couple of times--but the minimalist movement just baffles me. People stroll around and fall to the floor. Hands are raised, elbows are bent, feet flex inwards. People pop in and out of the wings, often ingeniously, with surprise jumps and catches, but Twyla does this better. (In fact, the whole piece made me think of Twyla underwater.) Everything's distanced and pallid, at least as danced by these capable but generally anonymous dancers.

For M.G.: The Movie opens with a guy running and/or jogging around the stage--many times. Another guy stands with his back to the audience throughout the entire piece. People roll into the wings. There are offstage shrieks and explosions. The runner is back, mostly going backward now. I wish I found all this involving, but what I find in it is a choreographer who's so interested in her own vocabulary that she just assumes we are, too.

Her famous solo Watermotor, from 1978, was performed by Neal Beasley--the first time a man has danced it; in fact, the first time anyone but Brown has danced it. He's a talented dancer, but as he performs it, it seems without a point. Only when you watch a video of Brown herself does everything become clear: She was a strong yet lyrical dancer, compelling, beautiful. She is her dance, and without her, the work melts away. Unlike Graham, Cunningham, Taylor, Tharp or Morris, she doesn't transcend herself.

And speaking of Martha Graham, her company, too, was back in town, at the Rose, with several programs of varying levels of interest. I managed to avoid Robert Wilson's Snow on the Mesa--my instincts of self-preservation are still in play. Instead, I chose the program honoring her collaboration with the celebrated artist Isamu Noguchi: Embattled Garden, Cave of the Heart, Appalachian Spring. These, unlike the Trisha Brown repertory, are pieces I grew up on and love. How effective are the current performances? More than they were a few years back. Embattled Garden has remembered that it's not only dramatic-erotic but also comedic. Yes, Graham's garden is Eden, but it's also us. What plays itself out there among Adam and Eve, Lilith and the Stranger, is what's always happened and always will happen. Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch as Lilith got the sardonic edge just right. And of course Noguchi's tree (of knowledge) and bed of dangerous reeds are eternally perfect.

Cave of the Heart isn't easy--Medea can be underplayed or overplayed. Miki Orihara didn't reveal her unbounded malevolence until late in the game, but then she was utterly convincing as she shuddered inside Noguchi's burst of golden filaments that somehow turn into a vile insect. Tadej Brdnik is the right Jason--masculine, arrogant and stupid. Unfortunately, Katherine Crockett is now overdoing and coarsening her "Chorus."

She was simpler and more convincing as the Pioneering Woman in Appalachian Spring, Graham's most famous piece. What a beauty it is, and how moving! Mau
rizio Nardi is not, for me, the Revivalist--he's too suave, even a touch cute. (The original, back in 1944, was Merce Cunningham.) Blakeley White-McGuire as the Bride was appropriately restrained and ecstatic. And Brdnik, again outstanding, was virile and filled with hope as the Husbandman. The performance as a whole, though far from exalted, succeeded in suggesting the greatness of the work. Appalachian Spring was there--and that's what matters. Graham may no longer be in fashion, but we can't afford to lose the best of her; what has American modern dance produced that's finer?

editorial@observer.com

To begin with: You're going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce.

First up, Larry Keigwin, from the 8th through the 13th, with a full-evening work called Dark Habits. Keigwin is always smart, witty, New Yorky. Not everyone likes him as much as I do, but here's your chance to judge for yourself. (He's also a charming dancer.)

Next, from the 15th through the 20th: One of my favorite choreographers, Doug Varone, also with a full-evening work, Chapters From a Broken Novel. Six years ago, I wrote here that his new work, Castles, was the best new dance piece I'd seen in a long time, and nothing that's come along since has changed my mind. What's so special? His unusual gift for combining kinetic excitement with humanity and highly charged emotion. I guess you could call it expressive excitement.

And then, from the 22nd though the 27th, the return of the Merce Cunningham Company, deep into its Legacy Tour--everything's moving inexorably to its self-imposed dissolution at the end of the year. This is absolutely required seeing for admirers of the late, great Merce; soon his work will be solely in the hands (feet?) of other companies.

And let's not forget the Foundress: The Martha Graham company is going to be at the Rose from March 15 to March 20. The novelties will be a revival of the Robert Wilson Snow on the Mesa (1995) and a new piece by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, but the most emotional program for many of us will be the one on the 17th celebrating Martha's collaboration with Isamu Noguchi: Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart and Embattled Garden.

Mark Morris? Yes, March 17 to March 27, at the Morris Dance Center, his studio across from BAM, with its intimate theater that can only accommodate under 200 people. He's bringing us a world premiere--Festival Dance, to a Hummel trio--and two New York Premieres: The Muir, to a group of Beethoven's arrangements of Scottish and Irish songs, and Petrichor, to a Villa-Lobos string quartet. Small pieces in a small space, but with big expectations. This, of course, is a must.

Trisha Brown? At the Dance Theater Workshop, on and off from the 15th to the 26th.

Yvonne Rainer? At the Baryshnikov Arts Center from the 16th to the 19th.

After all this, I give you permission to relax for a little while, to gear up for the return of New York City Ballet (May 4) and ABT (May 16).

At NYCB, a new version of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and featuring Patti LuPone. (Not, alas, Allegra Kent and Lotte Lenya, who starred in Balanchine's 1958 version.) Also Vienna Waltzes, La Sonnambula and Jewels. To be avoided if possible: Peter Martins' Thou Swell and Susan Stroman's For the Love of Duke.

At ABT: Don't miss the company premiere of Ratmansky's brilliant and hilarious The Bright Stream (a triumph when the Bolshoi brought it here several years ago). Also new works by Ratmansky and Wheeldon (oh yes, and by Benjamin Millepied). Plus an important revival: Tudor's Shadowplay.

As for the full-evening spectacles, it would be hard to say which is the bigger yawn, James Kudelka's Cinderella or John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camelias. Avoid both. But the old standbys will be up and running: Giselle, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty. Try to see Cojocaru in Don Q, Giselle or Beauty, Osipova in Coppélia or Beauty. And Murphy and/or Hallberg in just about anything--except Cinderella. Don't say I didn't warn you!

                        rgottlieb@observer.com

No, the fascination lies in watching the progress—or lack of it—of the ceaseless procession of talented dancers who emerge from the School of American Ballet and try to break into the repertory. And in tracking, step by step, the arc of each major career: a Farrell, a McBride, a Kent; an Ashley, a Nichols, a Kistler; a Villella, a Boal, a Woetzel. It’s like following your favorite characters in an endless saga novel. We spend 20, 25, 30 years with these characters: know them, love them, regret them. And watch the new boys and girls turn up and bravely try to replace them. (Let’s turn a forgiving eye on those who misfire, and a sorrowful eye on those whose large talents are defeated by circumstance: illness, injury, failure of nerve or ambition.)

Today the company is in far better shape than it was, say, 15 years ago. There’s no one genius—no Farrell, for instance—around whom the whole enterprise seems to revolve; no one whom you have to see in every role and every performance. But there’s a very high level of talent spread across a score of dancers that demands, and repays, attention. I may, for example, find pint-size Megan Fairchild irritatingly cute, all clever footwork and no depth (her busy performance in the central role in Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 was so uncommanding that this great ballet had a hole in the middle), but I find Janie Taylor stunningly expressive in everything she does.

The disaster of Darci Kistler’s recent years (she was appalling in the final section of Vienna Waltzes) will soon be forgotten or at least forgiven when her announced upcoming retirement takes place and we’re free to celebrate her youthful glory. Too bad, though, that Peter Martins (her husband), clearly desperate to find ways to present her onstage, had to revive his own vacuous Papillons and turgid and pretentious Stabat Mater to accomplish it.

The admirable Wendy Whelan, who’s been a rock of strength these past 20 years, remains at her best in those works created for her by Christopher Wheeldon (After the Rain) and Alexei Ratmansky (Concerto DSCH). In classic Balanchine roles, she’s less convincing. But hasn’t she done enough for the company to be spared a return to the overwrought and worthless Slice to Sharp, City Ballet’s obligatory Jorma Elo ballet? Just about every other company has one, so why not NYCB, too? Can you tell them apart? Is your Jorma bigger than mine?

At the top of the heap these days is Maria Kowroski, that magnificent beauty who remains an enigma, at least to me. Her body, her legs, her face promise so much, and often she delivers—elegant and persuasive in Monumentum/Movements, for instance. But there’s something missing. Her first appearance in Chaconne was tentative and unrealized, certainly not helped by her partner, Sébastien Marcovici, who looked ungainly and danced ungainly. Her Swan Lake was gorgeous to look at, but there’s a lack of imaginative investment in the steps. Is it failure of confidence? She has it as Titania, she has it as the Stripper in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, she’s growing it in “Diamonds.” Unfortunately, she’s so embedded in the Farrell roles that we expect her to be Farrell.

It’s the young crop that’s really exciting. Tiler Peck was not only brilliant in Coppélia but conquered the fiercely exacting Theme and Variations with seeming ease. Ashley Bouder, out with an injury for too much of the season, is a phenomenon of ebullient technique. Sterling Hyltin has charm and lightness and attack; she always pleases. The large-scale Savannah Lowery is developing a lovely musicality, and she never stops working. She shouldn’t, however, be cast as “Sanguinic” in The Four Temperaments, which demands clarity, decisiveness, gleam. “Sanguinic” is Maria Tallchief, she’s Merrill Ashley. Lowery’s quality is plushier. And it’s unfair to her (and us) to put her in front of a row of short corps girls—she towers over them, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. But that wasn’t Balanchine’s point.

And then there’s Sara Mearns, eating up the repertory. I still have mixed feelings about her, mostly about the look of her upper body, but her dancing is deeply appealing, and she has remarkable range. She could do nothing for Peter Martins’ Chichester Psalms, the featured ballet of the opening-night gala, but then no one could do anything for this interminable dud. Once the Psalms were re-interred, her season was book-ended by two radically dissimilar roles. She was remarkably fresh and touching in the “Tales from the Vienna Woods” section of Vienna Waltzes, very different from the original European sophistication of Karin von Aroldingen but wholly valid—and helped by her partner, the utterly reliable and appealing Tyler Angle, brother of the equally reliable and appealing Jared Angle. And then, at the tail end of the season, she let rip as Slaughter’s Stripper—juicy and sexy and vivid. Fittingly, her Hoofer was Robert Fairchild, for whom this was a breakthrough season. He not only dances full out, he’s consistently expressive—he knows how to bring steps alive, and his concentration doesn’t falter.

Questions for Peter Martins: When is he going to give up the idea that Abi Stafford, a pleasant if bland dancer, is a potential ballerina? And when is he going to acknowledge that Teresa Reichlin already is one?

There’s not much to say about the two new works of the season. Melissa Barak’s A Simple Symphony (to Benjamin Britten) was a conventional exercise in classicism—pretty tutus, pretty patterns, agreeably anodyne but a waste of Mearns and the others. Douglas Lee’s Lifecasting (Steve Reich and Ryoji Ikeda) was more ambitious in a familiar Eurocentric way—all push and agitation, with nothing distinguished or distinguishable for the dancers to do. Ballets by Bigonzetti, Preljocaj and Taylor-Corbett were brought back, to no greater effect than when first seen. Peter Martins’ Hallelujah Junction, to a pleasing two-piano score by John Adams, was the most effective of these resurrections; at least it’s firmly organized and fluent.

All in all, a rich season for Balanchine, a thin season for Robbins, plus a lot of clutter. The dancers made it all worthwhile.

AT THE JOYCE, meanwhile, we were graced with Doug Varone’s annual visit. The big new piece sounded dire—Alchemy, music by Steve Reich, a reflection on the death of Daniel Pearl. Varone is too smart, though, to give us a narrative; rather, he presents four beleaguered men against a powerful image of a prison stone wall, and four women who rally to them, try to protect them and grieve for them. What makes it work is his profound humanity—the way his women and men touch, engage, respond. Somehow, although his eight highly individual dancers are all superbly trained, they come across, at least to me, less as “dancers” than as “people who dance.” In other words, I take them personally. Alchemy is in no way a political statement. The death of Pearl is not the subject of this work but the inspiration for a tragic consideration of life and death.

The same eight dancers, the same kind of propulsive minimalist score (“The Light,” by Philip Glass), and yet Lux is in total contrast to Alchemy. The latter piece is all anxiety and anguish; the former all celebration—of life and hope. It’s a nonstop rush of energy, of connection. These dancers really do suggest a single organism combining and recombining, totally abandoned to the thrill of movement. The Glass score immediately reminds us of Tharp’s In the Upper Room, and not to Varone’s disadvantage.

Finally, Varone brought back a lovely work from 2000 called Tomorrow, to seven ravishing songs by Reynaldo Hahn. I only wish he had placed Tomorrow between Lux and Alchemy: The contrast would have helped all three pieces and given the audience some calm between the storms.

rgottlieb@observer.com

The piece opens with the company’s most exciting dancer, the ravishing blond Natalie Desch, alone on the stage. She’s in a simple white dress—all the performers are in white—and Varone exploits the fervent emotion of the opening adagio to give her an extended, anguished solo. What haunts her we don’t know, but Desch dances with such conviction that, as she falls again and again to the ground, prostrating herself, we feel with her even if we don’t understand her. The following duet, for a man and a woman, is equally emotional. And then three men, in the ballet’s most original and striking section, confront and comfort each other until the entire company of eight comes together for an ending that brings, if not resolution, a stirring final image of Desch rushing forward toward us, having survived and, perhaps, prevailed: Victorious—the name of this enigmatic, challenging piece. How fascinating it would be to see it grouped with two previous undeniable masterpieces set to Elgar: Ashton’s Enigma Variations and Paul Taylor’s Sunset.

Framing Victorious were two earlier Varone works. First, Castles, which I liked so much when it was first performed in New York, in 2004, that I saw it three nights in a row. This is a tumultuous group work, set to Prokofiev waltzes, that blazes with excitement and humanity. Some of the music echoes the composer’s Cinderella, and there are echoes of his Romeo and Juliet as well. Are there specific references to those ballets in Varone’s choreography? Perhaps. But what matters is the passionate fluent invention, reflecting a heightened vision of men and women interacting and separating, in constant flux between intimacy and isolation.

Last on the program was Lux, which was first shown last year at the Joyce. The music is by Philip Glass, at times almost over-familiar because of its similarities to the score of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. This piece is dressed all in black, with a stark and beautiful background of dark sky, a small moon slowly and steadily rising from the bottom to the top of the stage. There’s a highly charged duet for two men, another for a man and a woman, and throughout, what we can identify as Varone’s basic impulse as a choreographer: using the uninhibited kinetic brilliance of his dancers to explore the sometimes violent, sometimes embracing way people deal with each other. Perhaps because his work is so unabashedly full of feeling, so human, the choreographer I most associate him with is Taylor, although his background is actually with José Limón and Lar Lubovitch.

One of the most striking things about Varone’s repertory is the beauty and elegance of the décor. Liz Prince, the costume designer, has a faultless eye, as with the black costumes for Lux, which are subtly punctuated by a streak of silver down one leg. She’s currently the finest costume designer in dance. Varone not only has impeccable taste, but his intelligence gives his pieces solid structure beneath their free-flowing surface. If he lacks anything, it’s variety of approach—you could say that this Bard program was too much at the same emotional temperature. But I, for one, can never get too much of a good thing.

UNLESS IT'S A GOOD THING that gets on my nerves. Alas, I have a limited capacity to enjoy Savion Glover concerts. There’s no denying his mastery of his medium—his technical genius—and there’s nothing like the way he makes music with the sound of his tapping. But after a while I just don’t want to be watching someone tap-tap-tapping on a rectangular box, all feet and very little body. And so much self-absorption! Glover is currently at the Joyce with two other male tappers spelling him in the first half of the program. They’re superbly synchronized, they’re devoted, but enough is enough.

Unfortunately, in an effort to provide variety—or relief—he’s chosen to bring on several dancers from different disciplines for the second half of his program, and the result is disaster. Let’s draw a veil over the deficiencies of these dancers and the material they provided themselves with and just quote from their program bios to suggest the self-delusional quality of their work.

One of the girls “has choreographed and performed over 35 original classical and modern ballet vignettes, each one a jewel of many depths and colors unto itself. Industry professionals, seasoned dancegoers and newcomers alike have praised Suzana’s work for its incredible beauty, intensely felt life and spirituality.” Another girl “began dancing at age three and continued to study multiple dance techniques, which eventually landed her next to Paula Abdul on The Howie Mandel Show.” More recently she “appeared in extra video work for Britney Spears’ 2004 Onyx Hotel Tour.” You could tell.

YOU MAY WONDER WHY A RATIONAL dance critic (which somewhat narrows the field) would choose to go back to A.B.T. to revisit the James Kudelka Cinderella that paralyzed him with boredom a year ago. Extra-hazard pay? Not from The Observer! Intellectual curiosity? Hardly. Masochism? Not my thing. No, it was love—love of a particular pair of dancers. I’d walk a mile (and actually I did, all the way up to the Met) to see Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg in just about anything.

They did their best, but although they’re both up to any challenge, Kudelka doesn’t offer any: Since he doesn’t go in for steps, there’s almost nothing for the dancers to do. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I remembered Cinderella’s role as mostly sweeping; I’d forgotten that she also mops.) I’d also forgotten how dreary the work for the corps is—they just noodle. I’d even forgotten how wrong-minded most of the costumes are. The “garden creatures”—all those pretty young women got up as autumn leaves—are flattened and thickened; it’s unconscionable. The poor corps guys in the garden scene have to jump around with pumpkins on their heads—you try it and see how it feels. And in the ball scene, Prince Charming is straitjacketed by his white tie and tails. (Perhaps you don’t remember that this Cinderella is set in the far-from-roaring 20’s.) To do that to Hallberg, with his thrillingly expansive movement, is a crime against humanity. Somebody call The Hague.

There are exactly three rousing dance moments. 1) Murphy of the steely technique has a dazzling series of traveling pirouettes. 2) She makes the most of a pleasant little barefoot solo in her kitchen at one of the rare moments when she isn’t sweeping, mopping, putting dishes away or mooning by the fire. 3) Hallberg, searching the world for the owner of the glass slipper, sails across the stage in a series of immense bounds—it’s not just his elevation that’s so remarkable but the way his big body and endless legs fill space; they still seem to be moving straight ahead through the air while he’s already coming down. As for the rest, let’s put Cinderella behind us, with a vow never to go near it again.

The end of the A.B.T. season seems a good moment to salute a few of its high points: The pairing of Stella Abrera and Maria Riccetto in Symphonie Concertante—both of them looking like Balanchine dancers performing in the same ballet. Riccetto has had a good season—she’s working hard and steadily improving. And Abrera goes from strength to strength: In the Swan Lake Act I pas de trois, she showed us elegant, precise entrechats and a charming musicality. Kristi Boone, always impressive, bringing a breath of life to Othello with a passionate tarantella. The swift rise through the company of petite Sarah Lane with her strong technique and focused determination.

Boone and Lane have just been rewarded with promotion to soloist, joining Riccetto and Abrera, and so have Misty Copeland, Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, all of them deserving. Congratulations, boy and girls.

Alastair Macaulay (The Times) calls it a “numbingly tedious and relentlessly earnest show…. Not one moment here is fresh.” And more of the same.

Tobi Tobias (Bloomberg) acclaims Varone’s “[m]asterly ability to blend dance, music, video and set design with an idea about the human predicament: the daunting challenge of not merely speaking, but of making oneself understood.”

I admire these writers and am usually in agreement with both of them. But not this time out. Although Dense Terrain seems to me a flawed work, I was utterly gripped by it, as I always am by what Mr. Varone does. This is his first season at B.A.M. (and the 20th anniversary of his company), and he’s made a highly ambitious piece, employing all the impedimenta—film projections, sliding panels, voice-overs—that have become a boring symptom of so much modern dance. And yet, like all his work, it’s alive, exciting, moving. To hell with the oversize actor who’s intoning and shrilling and scribbling an invented language up on the big screen and, later, on the stage itself. It’s the dance invention that counts, and the dancers’ deep connection with each other.

Varone dancers are kinetically thrilling. They go all the way, both when they’re in vivid, rushing motion and when they’re in deep stillness. In full flow, they crash across the stage, brushing against each other as they pass, jumping up to carom off each other, every moment unexpected and—yes—fresh. As a group, they’re like molecules, breaking up and reforming, yet never randomly—I always sense intelligent design.

But other choreographers create kinetic excitement. What makes Varone so special is the marriage between pure dance thrill and profound human interaction. In two climactic duets, we recognize life as we know it, or sense it. The first is between two men—angry, clashing, frustrated at their inability to connect in any way other than a violent and barren kiss. The second is between a man and a woman—the blond, beautiful Natalie Desch and the affecting Daniel Charon—who lie together on the floor, barely in motion, cupping each other’s heads, wrapping a leg over a body, lifting a hand to a face, bound up in their mutual tenderness: a beautiful and moving passage of achieved intimacy as a corrective to the anxieties and frustrations of all that’s come before.

How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there’s no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we’re looking for different things in dance. That’s why some of us prefer Paul Taylor to Merce Cunningham, say: It’s not a rejection of, or blindness to, one man’s genius in favor of the other’s; it’s a matter of temperament. From the first moment, some years ago, when I first encountered Doug Varone, I knew he was for me.

IT’S THE SAME WITH INDIVIDUAL DANCERS. In the run of Bayadères with which A.B.T. has opened its spring season, we’ve seen a bewildering array of performances, particularly in the central role of Nikiya, the temple dancer who is loved and betrayed by Solor. If you’re seeing only the famous “Kingdom of the Shades” scene—the way we first encountered Bayadère in the West—Nikiya is an emblem of pure Kirov classicism. But if you’re watching the entire ballet, she’s also an exotic, a victim, an object of passion and despair. Her role is a prime example of the dual demands on a ballerina that spark so many 19th-century works: Swan Lake’s Odette/Odile; Giselle’s peasant girl and Wili. Mastering all aspects of Nikiya is a formidable challenge. Pavlova was a famous Nikiya; Fonteyn another; the Kirov’s Altynai Asylmuratova yet another.

The three ballerinas I saw last week were radically different—and to radically different effect. I have a Veronika Part problem: Her somewhat bovine beauty, her deliberate and affected mannerisms, her unmusicality get in the way of my appreciating her dance glamour. But at least I can understand why others worship her. Paloma Herrera is a pleasing and honest lyrical dancer, but she has neither the sensuality of the temple dancer nor the absolute authority of technique which the “Shades” act calls for.

And then there is Diana Vishneva. She has everything—or almost everything. (I’m not sure I sense deep feeling.) But the beauty of her plastique—that supple back and exquisite arabesque; the easy command; the stage smarts…. She’s a supreme example of Kirov training combined with a powerful dance intelligence. Who else is equally impressive as Odette and as the lead girl in Balanchine’s Rubies—two roles that are almost a contradiction in terms? Her association with A.B.T. is an unalloyed blessing.

The outstanding Solor I saw was David Hallberg—magnificent in his size, pliancy, ardor. He excites without effort and dominates the stage without hogging it. And what an actor! Alas, he wasn’t paired with Vishneva, whom he would set off more effectively than Ethan Stiefel does, whereas Stiefel would look more comfortable with the shorter Herrera. Stiefel, hardly an actor at all—and sometimes one wishes he wouldn’t try—is looking good after his recent knee problems, but he’s no Indian warrior: He’s a dazzling all-American boy trapped in a 19th-century melodrama (and not one, like Le Corsaire, that he can have fun with).

Another dancer about whom viewers disagree is that other American whiz-bang, Gillian Murphy. She was trained by Melissa Hayden, which means she’s a Balanchine dancer—strong, quick, musical. I liked her very much as Gamzatti (the Amneris character)—her acting is improving and she was well up to the technical challenges of the betrothal-scene pas de deux. Various highly knowledgeable British and Russian observers find the tightness in Murphy’s upper body—the lack of épaulement—impossible to get past, despite their acknowledgement of her dance powers. For me, her thrusting brilliance is primary. But then my eye was formed by Balanchine, who famously sniffed, “The English dance from the waist up.”

There were other gratifying performances sprinkled through these Bayadères. No one could fault Herman Cornejo’s brilliant Bronze Idol: He’s a paragon of dynamic excitement fused with non-showoff ease. (Baryshnikov is the greatest example of a dancer with this combination of qualities, but then Baryshnikov was a paragon of everything.) Both Stella Abrera and Michele Wiles were convincing Gamzattis. Perhaps Craig Salstein, recently promoted to soloist, was over the top as the Head Fakir, but you can’t do too much in this role, you can only do too little; he galvanized the opening temple scene. And, finally, a tip of the hat to Sarawanee Tanatanit, whose Aya, Gamzatti’s servant, carries servility to new heights—or depths. Oh, the mysterious East ….

The music for Castles is Prokofiev's throbbing Waltz Suite, Op. 110, music that back in 1973 Jerome Robbins used, to lesser effect, for a ballet called An Evening's Waltzes , which didn't stay long in City Ballet's repertory. At the time, the score came in for a share of the blame-critics found its discordant romanticism off-putting, and as I vaguely remember the piece, Robbins worked against the nature of the music rather than with it. But Prokofiev's conflicting impulses are perfectly suited to Varone's, whose work is consistently, almost obsessively, devoted to reconciling aggression and tenderness. Varone doesn't resist the percussive, overheated climaxes of the music; he rushes at them with a kind of manic joy-this is waltz music danced the way a whirlwind would dance it.

At the start, eight thin shafts of light from above pinpoint the eight dancers. They're wearing costumes by Liz Prince that at first seem awkward-tunics casually falling over pants or skirts or leg-warmers; a kind of Greek or classical palette-variations on Attic red and pale gray or cream. The costumes move, though, and that's what matters in this piece. Projected on the back wall are luminous blurred images of gates or other ornamentations, but they're more suggestive than literal. It's the dancing that counts.

Almost at once, the full company explodes into a Varone specialty: They fling themselves at each other and around each other and past each other. Everything is sudden, galvanic, dangerous. But as two dancers seem to be on a collision course, one may reach out a hand and gently divert the other's trajectory. Small gestures have big impact as they personalize the group's clangorous dynamic.

You begin to sense that the color coding of the costumes has a point: Are there two rival camps here, one dominated by red, the other by gray? The first duet is between two men-John Beasant III and Daniel Charon. It's a love duet-maybe. It's also two guys confronting each other. It's emotional but not sexual. Not surprisingly, the music reminds you of Prokofiev's famous Romeo and Juliet score-are these two men Mercutio and Tybalt? Romeo and Benvolio? Are they being playful rather than intimate? Are they angry, or loving, or angry because loving? Varone isn't going to tell us.

Later there's another duet, this one for a girl and a boy-the striking blond Natalie Desch and the dark, sensuous Kayvon Pourazar. She's almost all in red, he's almost all in gray. She plunges into a deep supported arabesque-the most balletic moment in the piece-but mostly they're on the floor, lying side by side or on each other or inching themselves forward. Much of the music comes from Prokofiev's Cinderella score, but the references seem to be to Capulets and Montagues, not to ugly stepsisters. (And if these two are indeed Romeo and Juliet, what a relief to have them down on the ground after all those swooning lifts in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet -they're enough to make you air-sick.)

The electric Adriane Fang hurls herself on, dominating the stage with her rattlesnake-quick movements and gestures. Then the whole company is back, surging, clashing, plummeting to the ground. Many choreographers do these things, of course. What makes Varone different is that everything seems felt, emotionally true, earned. You might think that too much is going on, or that he repeats himself, but never that he's fakey or empty or showy.

Castles appeared on both the programs Varone brought to the Joyce. Also on both was a 1993 piece for four couples, Rise , that works perfectly well but is nowhere near at the level of the later work. He also showed Of the Earth Far Below , which premiered at Symphony Space last year and which, given its Steve Reich score, is appropriately more propulsive and less nuanced than Castles . Also at the Joyce was The Bottomland , or at least the first half of it-the entire two-part work was shown at the tiny Ohio Theater about a year ago.

This remarkable work, you may remember, is set in Kentucky's Appalachia, with giant films of the dancers outside the Mammoth Caves serving as backdrop and echo of what's happening on the stage. The music is a group of moving country songs, sung by Patty Loveless. The costumes, again by Liz Prince, could have come straight from Sears Roebuck catalogs. This is a piece about a community and a way of life, but it's also a series of individual, personal crises. Daniel Charon is the fiery preacher ("Daniel Prayed"); Natalie Desch and Larry Hahn are a couple unable to fall completely apart ("Someone I Used to Know"); John Beasant III and Faye Driscoll are an inarticulate couple in torment as they try to express their feelings for each other ("Raging Fire"); a grieving Nina Watt is comforted by the neighbor women ("Sorrowful Angels"). The grimness of the life these people lead is underlined by the final song-"You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive"; their humanity is revealed through their emotional intensity and their stubborn resistance to the hand life has dealt them.

The extraordinary Larry Hahn retired recently from the company after 15 years. Luckily, he's back as a guest artist, since his massive presence and implacable integrity seem central to The Bottomland . Nina Watt-for 30 years a crucial figure in the José Limon company, from which Doug Varone himself emerged-is also a guest, and she, too, would be irreplaceable in The Bottomland . Several years ago, Varone made a brief duet for Watt and himself which they performed again this season- Short Story , to Rachmaninoff's famous Prelude in C-sharp Minor. This sad vision of two people trapped by love crystallizes Varone's talent for us: his startling use of lightning gesture to punctuate stretches of stillness, his deep sensitivity to the anguish of human relationships. He bares himself to us, as do his dances and dancers, not in emotional exhibitionism but in honesty and generosity.

What a distance from the work of Bill T. Jones! The program I saw at B.A.M. of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company opened with a new work called Chaconne , to Bach. Exhibitionism? Narcissism? Take your pick. Imagine a solo by a dancer whose strength is seriously diminished and yet who postured and gestured with obvious self-satisfaction through what seemed an eternity. Oh, yes-there was also an almost total absence of steps. Some years ago, Arlene Croce created a scandal by refusing to attend a Jones special about the terminally ill, which she labeled "victim art." Watching Chaconne , I could only think, "Lucky Arlene."

Jones' Reading, Mercy and The Artificial Nigger was a masterpiece by comparison, one's attention held at first by Flannery O'Connor's superb story (tactfully pruned, and read with affecting simplicity by Susan Sarandon and Jones himself). But the dance accompaniment provided some interest, too. Pairing various combinations-men, women; black, white; short, tall-to portray the story's grandfather and little boy, Jones deliteralized the narrative, and managed to suggest the emotional content of the disturbing yet transfiguring tale. When the story was over, the dancers stayed on, to further distill the experience into "pure" dance, reflecting motifs that had figured in the narrative part of the work. Jones's vocabulary proved less effective on its own, without the mediation of Flannery O'Connor's words-he just doesn't have enough dance stuff to keep you going for long-but at least it's watchable. After Chaconne , I was grateful for that modest blessing.

The meritriciousness of most of what Bill T. Jones has to offer-and of so much else that makes up the New, Newer and Newest Waves at B.A.M.-points up the virtues of an artist like Doug Varone: honesty and passion, the missing links in so much of dance today.

Hubbard Street, now 25 years old, was the creation of Lou Conte, who led the company until he retired three years ago. His chosen successor was Jim Vincent, whose background includes many years dancing for Jirí Kylián's Nederlands Dans Theater and a shorter stretch with Nacho Duato's Compañía Nacional de Danza. No wonder that Hubbard Street, which at one time was heavily invested in the work of Twyla Tharp, is leaning further and further into the world of Kylián, Duato and the Israeli Ohad Naharin, all of whom were represented in the season recently ended. Next up, I fear: Mats Ek, Lar Lubovitch, William Forsythe and Hans van Manen, for all whom Vincent has danced.

The trend towards Eurodance began under Conte with the idea, I imagine, of counterbalancing the showbizziness and Tharpishness of the company, last seen here nine years ago. It was not a good idea; ironically, the most successful of this season's works were two distinctly Tharpian pieces by Harrison McEldowney. One was Let's Call the Whole Thing Off , a duet in which first a guy jabbers away in guilt and embarrassment (he's turned up late, as usual, for a date) while his girlfriend dances her frustration, followed by the girl giving him an equal dose of lip while he squirms and writhes in a spastic solo. Needless to say, a third episode makes it clear that nothing's been called off. McEldowney's other piece, also to standard songs, has four couples satirizing another slice of contemporary life- Group Therapy -as they struggle to explain themselves to each other by acting out their various neurotic compulsions. One couple is in a fury. One guy is phobic about being touched. One girl is narcoleptic. Another girl can't break her cigarette habit (to "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me"). This is the stuff of Jules Feiffer or Ed Koren cartoons, and McEldowney shares not only their point of view but their wit, a quality fatally lacking in the rest of the Hubbard Street repertory. You could say, in fact, that wit is the ultimate antidote to Euroangst, like water to the Wicked Witch.

More sprightly than witty but still amusing was Daniel Ezralow's Lady Lost Found , set to a suite of folky songs arranged by Percy Grainger-"What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?," "Danny Boy," etc. A fellow in a mini-kilt breezily kicks up his heels while mingling with a corps of four, of whom the standout was the buoyant and expressive Charlaine Katsuyoshi. A painless event. Ezralow's other offering was Super Straight is coming down , and it was a very different kettle of fish, although again it featured three men and two women (to a minimalist commissioned score by Thom Willems, currently William Forsythe's composer of choice). It opens with the dancers standing upstage in isolated cellophane bags, out of which they emerge in order to leap and spasm, spasm and leap. This work is almost 15 years old, so we can't blame it on Jim Vincent, and certainly not on these dedicated dancers.

The inevitable Kylián piece, No More Play , is also 15 years old, and it's by far the most authoritative of the European or neo-European contributions. The music is Webern-Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5-and there are simple, effective costumes by Kylián himself. The vocabulary involves the usual splayings and flailings, but at least they're well-organized: You may not like Kylian's choreography (I don't), but he's a choreographer. Which I'm not sure you can say about Trey McIntyre, who unveiled a new piece, Full Grown Man , to recordings by Beck. Like Beck's songs, it kept telling us that it was about something. But what? Beck's music isn't very danceogenic, and focusing on his words is a mistake. The whole thing seemed not only drearily derivative but longer than Parsifal .

As for Jim Vincent's own counter/part , the music was a patchwork of Bach, and the piece was Everybody's Baroque Ballet. (Paul Taylor's wonderful Esplanade has a lot to answer for.) The costumes were ludicrous, particularly the boys' little jerkins and skirtlets worn over tights. Jamy Meek, down to his own wee red skirtlet dangling from tiny panties, darted among the crowd. We had already glimpsed his bare chest twice before on this program, in two guitary duets, one (schmaltzy) by Duato, one (tormented) by Naharin. As it happens, Meek doesn't have much chest to bare-he's the thinnest dancer this side of Mark Morris' John Heginbotham. counter/part was all generic filler, no crust, although it does, according to the credits, feature "Décor Construction," "Sound Design for counters" and "Text and Voice." It just had no point. Vincent's offering was dedicated to the company's board of directors, and I hope they enjoyed it. That the author of so uninspired a work is the new head of Hubbard Street is not a happy portent.

If Hubbard Street is an aesthetic mishmash, Doug Varone & Dancers is all of a piece-it's a small company whose ideas and style spring from one forceful and convincing mind-set. The dancers are highly charged and strikingly individual (Hubbard Street's tend to homogenize). The work, whether it's telling a story-as in last year's moving The Bottomland -or in more abstract pieces, seems to focus on people connecting or failing to connect. The dancers approach each other and grapple or shy away. And although Varone can produce a storm of kinetic excitement, there's also a considerable amount of simple gesture. That's one of the reasons Varone is often called minimalist, but if that's what he is, he's proof that minimalist needn't imply empty.

The program at Symphony Space consisted of three pieces, all to music by Steve Reich. Proverb was more an exploration of certain gestures-one arm swinging out, swimming motions-than an attempt at following a throughline from A to Z. It was restrained, intelligent, cool-perhaps a little too cerebral. Of the Earth Far Below , to Reich's "Triple Quartet," was a high-voltage explosion of energy, its eight dancers churning, colliding, rolling on the floor, clambering over each other. Although these dancers are so distinctive, they complement each other rather than distract from each other. Suddenly an Eddie Taketa, an Adriane Fang, compels your eye, then is absorbed back into the intensity of the company as a whole. It's quite a ride.

Even so, the most telling piece on the program was the duet Distance that Varone created for himself and Larry Hahn, who is leaving the company after 15 years. Hahn is a boulder of a man, less a dancer than a large, solid presence; Varone is small, delicate; neither is young. They do almost no "dancing" in this piece-it's a slow, sad parade of hesitancy, expressed in the most tentative gestures. Varone is trying to reach out to Hahn, who stands there obdurate and inarticulate. A hand on the shoulder, a hand to the breast, the brushing of arm against arm rather than hands grasping, a stuttering embrace-this is the coin of emotion here. These are not men resisting physical contact, but men resisting the expression of feeling. By the end, Varone has receded upstage, while Hahn goes on standing there, possibly moved but unable to respond.

Distance can be taken as a farewell tribute and gift to Hahn. But although its gestures are highly particular to the two men who perform it, there is no reason why it couldn't be performed by two other men, or by two women, or by a woman and a man. I'm sure Doug Varone knows that "distance" is not unique to any gender or any situation.

The company understandably makes consistent efforts to keep alive the rest of Ailey's large output (he died in 1989), but however striking some of his theatrical effects are, his post- Revelations work-and that means almost everything after 1960-is low in imagination, constricted in vocabulary, sloppily constructed and overreliant on extra-dance considerations. That's the curse of Revelations : The company couldn't exist without it, yet it makes everything else they do look feeble in comparison.

This year saw Ailey's The River back in the repertory, a piece with an unusual history: It was first made for American Ballet Theater in 1970, with the dancers on point. Its Duke Ellington score helped make it something of a trendy success back then, but when it's been danced by Ailey's own company, its weaknesses have been all too apparent-it doesn't hang together, it just lurches from one episodic fragment to the next. This year, a disparate group of ballet dancers was imported to honor the work's original ballet impulse. They came from Pennsylvania Ballet, Colorado Ballet, La Scala, Ballet Florida, Prague Ballet, and they should all have stayed home. These were for the most part provincial dancers, who further diluted The River , which is already diluted Ailey. Only the "Falls" section came alive, in which four of the company's own men demonstrated just what makes the company really tick: thrilling man-power.

There were a number of other revivals and new works-there always are, in the management's decades-long search for a new Revelations . (The closest thing they've got is Ronald K. Brown's Grace , which this year was looking more and more slam-bang and less and less full of grace.) A new piece by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Prayers from the Edge , was particularly depressing. It's a seven-part work in which two tribes or clans-one dressed in red, one in gold (as opposed to the two groups in Grace , who are dressed in red and white )-are bitter enemies, except for a boy in red and a girl in gold who fall for each other. And just like Romeo and Juliet, they end up dead, though not before we've weathered a number of violent encounters between the tribes. Most of the dancers' time is spent in athletic charging about the jungle with arms widespread, but for a change of pace there's a drearily insipid, conventional balletic duet-lots of swirling around-and a final calm-after-the-storm Prayer for Peace. This overextended piece is set to Twin Peaks– ish music by Peter Gabriel.

Back in the rep was Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Shelter , now with an all-male cast. (Made on Zollar's Urban Bush Women back in 1988, it had an all-female cast.) It's mostly about homelessness and outcastness, and it's got both music by Junior (Gabu) Wedderburn and recited texts, one of them titled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place at the Intersection of Reduced Resources and Reverberating Rage." There's a lot of crawling around, and a dynamic performance by one of the youngest men in the company, Abdur-Rahim Jackson. Ailey's battalions of terrific male dancers just keep on coming.

A revival from 1979 of Elisa Monte's Treading was a relatively welcome contrast to all the macho posturing. As a leading Graham dancer, Monte naturally employed Graham elements in this piece, danced the night I saw it by Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell and the omnipresent and valuable crew-cut Clifton Brown. There are also touches of Jerome Robbins' The Cage : She hangs from him, crawls through his legs-it's a mating marathon. But in its sculptural, sensual way, it's a serious effort, with some kind of shape to it.

Another revival, the late Billy Wilson's The Winter in Lisbon , didn't have much choreographic interest-lots of huge lifts and playing with hats, with a final section, "Manteca," that was more party than dance-but Fisher-Harrell and Brown did their effective thing again, and Matthew Rushing gave us a typically brilliant mid-air split. About Francesca Harper's Apex , let it be noted that it is "dedicated to those who stand up for human dignity and freedom," that it's about deportation, asylum denied and male rape, and that words like "Credible" and "Fear" and "Tortured" are projected onto the backdrop. More and more words are sneaking into the Ailey repertory. Does the company think that subjects like torture and poverty are too important to be left to mere dance?

Black Milk , by Ohad Naharin, head of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, was given its company premiere. Another piece that began life danced by women, it's now a work for five men and a bucket, into which they dip their hands in order to smear their faces with white paint or clay before they challenge each other to see who's the most macho of them all. Black Milk is a good opportunity to watch Ailey at what it does best: showing off Rushing, Brown and their male colleagues. Not that the women are less accomplished; they just have less to do. With Renee Robinson phasing out, the central female roles are being taken on with great conviction by Fisher-Harrell, Linda-Celeste Sims and Bahiyah Sayyed-Gaines (whole lotta hyphens going on). And of course there's the wonderful Dwana Adiaha Smallwood, all explosive strut and thrust. She's still waiting for someone to make a star vehicle for her. Come on, Ailey: Focus!

Meanwhile, as Ailey was packing them in at the City Center (for five weeks), down in Soho, at the tiny Ohio Theater, Doug Varone brought us the most interesting and moving work of this endless fall season. It's called The Bottomland , and it's set in a backwoods Kentucky community. The first part, "Songs That Tell a Story," is set to country music sung by the talented Patty Loveless; the second part, "As Told at Night, When the Air is a Different Color," is to an original score by Gaétan Leboeuf.

In Part I, the dancers perform against a video background that shows them in and around the imposing landscape of Kentucky's Mammoth Caves. The movement onstage echoes rather than mirrors what's happening on screen; we're observing this community both up close and far away. At times, the video distracts from the dancing, yet it also deepens it by emphasizing that we are watching "real people" we recognize in a "real place" we can identify. The costumes look appropriately real, too, particularly the cheap, washed-out dresses-the kind that farm women used to order from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. The movement seems to well up out of the characters' emotions: A strong characteristic of Varone's vocabulary is the way stillness is suddenly shattered by outbursts of flailing energy. There's weight to the movement-arms sink heavily downwards, people collapse against each other or to the ground. This first part of The Bottomland is about the intense feelings of people in an isolated community: They hold each other in silence, they erupt into passion or anger, they console each other. By the end, when one of the women tears off her dress and disappears upstage to the sound of a slammed door, we have entered wholly into the claustrophobic emotional world these people inhabit.

Part II is also powerful, but it's less original than Part I because it's more conventionally plotty. There's an older abused wife (danced by that veteran star of the José Limón company, Nina Watt), jealous of her husband's attentions to a conflicted younger rival. There's a young Asian couple who are ostracized and roughed up by the rest of the community. There's a hellfire preacher, both inciting violence and healing it. But though the "stories" may be conventional, in their telling everything flows together and comes together, the continuity mysteriously enhanced by the way a dozen or so lifelike dollhouses are slid around the dark playing area by the dancers, constantly reshaping the space, creating new arenas in which to reveal their intensifying emotion. Varone's language is to a large extent one of gesture and facial expression-there are even sobs-yet nothing seems hokey. As with all successful dance works, you know from the first moment that something original and strong is happening. The relief!

Note: Doug Varone is the choreographer for the Met's new production of Les Troyens , opening next month.