David Parsons Dance Company, Nov. 11, Annenberg Center

Exuberant, fast-paced, witty, David Parsons' choreography filled up Annenberg's stage, galvanizing Dance Celebration's audience last weekend. Parsons' work is so watchable, his musical choices so beguiling and the total package so entertaining sometimes people forget he's a major—and very musically responsive—modern choreographer.

Parsons brought two local premieres—DMB (for Dave Matthews Band) and Shining Star (using Earth, Wind and Fire)—both honoring Randy Swartz's season theme of dancing to "contemporary and pop music." But in a nice twist, Parsons actually opened with Wolfgang, sending his 10 superb dancers hurling through space to Mozart's delicious cadences.

For DMB, Dave Matthews' soft voice and complicated quick-change musical shifts provided Parsons' movement inspiration. Superficially the piece was larky and social dance in feeling, with T-shirt-and-jeans-clad dancer-dynamos racing through complicated, dangerous partnering. Jeremy Smith rippled through a bare-chested solo star turn. The dance actually was as textured and layered (with modern, ballet, funk, hip-hop) as Matthews' music.

Slow Dance was actually pretty fast-paced. It began and ended with the men slowly manipulating the ladies like putty sculptural figures posed on their knees. But in between, Parsons' rapid-fire, intersecting lines of movement kept his 10 dancers spinning around to Kenji Bunch music.

Giving the dancers a breather (plus tweaking audience expectations), Hand Dance spotlighted just dancers' hands at the back of the stage performing synchronized motions (swimming, striking out, waving.) This piece is in the dance tradition of isolating body parts using lighting experiments --it goes back to experimenter Alwin Nikolais, and more recently, Pilobolus.

No matter how many times you've seen Parsons' magical solo Caught, where a dancer performing with strobe-light effects seems miraculously to walk, fly and simply stand on air—and even if you know how it's done—it remains one of the most astounding solos in dance-theater. Brian McGinnis was superb, performing his boss' tour de force.

A '70s disco mood brought things to a close. Dressed in white, dancers sashayed through Shining Star, a collage of Earth, Wind and Fire songs, giving off hints of Travolta's white figure pointing upward while at the same time throwing in bits of plain old ballroom dance and even swing. Katarzyna (Kate) Skarpetowska was marvelous, as she'd been throughout the evening. It was a dancey, prancey finale with dancers advancing on the cheering audience in repeating lines as the contagious music played. Crowd-pleasing innovator? You bet.

by Janet Anderson