Lubovitch troupe does his prize dance

In May, Lar Lubovitch was awarded the prize for best choreography at the 20th annual Benois de la Danse, one of the most prestigious honors in the dance world. Lubovitch was the first American choreographer ever to win the prize, presented at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

So it was extra-special that Lar Lubovitch Dance Company performed the piece that earned him that honor, Crisis Variations, when the popular Dance Celebration series opened its 30th season Thursday night at the Annenberg Center.

Crisis Variations - set to a suite for five instruments based on Liszt's Transcendental Etudes for piano - is a brilliant deconstruction of what could be chaotic action. Dancers fall, throw their bodies with abandon, are dragged, and hang off each other. But each movement is done with energy and great intention. At times, the action is danced in amazingly controlled slow motion, so we can see how it evolves, and then brought back up to normal speed.

The piece opens with several crisis scenes, which change each time the lights go up. It's a trick that's been done many times before, often to comedic effect, but here it felt like a series of paintings that offer a world of information in a few quick glimpses.

The program opened with North Star, which Lubovitch created in 1978 to music by Philip Glass. This soothing work has the dancers, all in blue, moving as one in oceanlike movements: ebbing, flowing, swirling, swooping, making small waves with their hands, or doing a flutter kick while lifted across a sea of other dancers.

Little Rhapsodies, to Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13, a work for three men, takes similar steps and presents them in different styles. There's the emotive balletic dancer, the showy, jazzier dancer, and the one who performs a pared-down variation. In sections danced together, the men take on one another's styles.

The Legend of Ten also mixes genres, with a duo - Elisa Clark and Clifton Brown - performing a contemporary pas de deux among an ensemble dancing lively steps borrowed from character and folk dance. Set to music by Brahms, The Legend of Ten also has the dancers in a corps de balletlike role, mimicking the duet's arm movements from the corner of the stage and dancing formations around them.

It's a beautiful, memorable way to mark a moment in Philadelphia's dance history.

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