Kabbalah

Police and the Los Angeles County district attorney's office have joined the investigation into the possible financial exploitation of an heiress by a Hollywood business manager. Detectives from Palos Verdes Estates, where 87-year-old Susan Strong Davis lives, met with prosecutors in the district attorney's elder abuse unit Thursday to discuss potential criminal aspects in the handling of her finances. The management of her affairs by John E. Larkin, a veteran entertainment money manager, was already the subject of a probe by social workers from the county's Adult Protective Services.

Now in her late 70s, dancer-choreographer Marion Scott has a message about life: Balance is the key. The third in her series of "Spirit Dances," which were done over the past year at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, was therefore called "Yin/Yang," and featured five duets based on oppositional words--"Masculine/Feminine," "Firm/Yielding" and the like. But embodying oppositions gets tricky when the overall movement style is dreamy.

Leonora Panich is a dancing psychic who makes herself the vehicle for natural and spiritual forces. She does not try to dance a depiction of the wind, for instance, but believes that the wind itself possesses and propels her. Beginning with hands pressed against her sides, Panich channels the wind in gusts of hand-undulations over her head and sudden, convulsive whirling/shuddering motions of her body--ending with her arms held back and down, head and shoulders bent forward.

Madonna "Confessions on a Dance Floor" (Warner Bros.) * * * "RE-INVENTION" must be one of Madonna's favorite words. It was the title of her 2004 tour, and now the press release for her new album proclaims that the record "re-invents dance music for a new generation." It doesn't say what generation that is, and actually she isn't reinventing so much as revisiting. Or maybe it's retrenching.