Modern Dance

Martha Graham was a troublemaker. She depicted sex so unsparingly that her "Phaedra" was denounced in Congress as obscene. She refused to represent America at the Olympic Arts Festival in Berlin in 1936 because it meant dignifying the regime of Adolf Hitler. She gave artists of color prominence in her company during a period when they were seen as "exotics"--or not at all.

An unruly shock of snow white hair makes Alwin Nikolais look more like a medieval alchemist than a modern-day dance maker. But the man known the world over as the wizard of modern dance is strictly high-tech. "I have to be an engineer myself sometimes to create the special effects," Nikolais said in a telephone interview from his New York studio.

"The once heavily drawn lines between ballet and modern dance are fading. The rebellion against classical dance has played itself out, and things have to move on." So says Lar Lubovitch, the celebrated iconoclast whose artistic vision has catapulted the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company to the very top of the modern-dance heap. Nevertheless, when asked about balletic influences in his own cutting-edge choreographic style, Lubovitch turns defensive.

For 17 years, summer workshops given by Three's Company dancers and visiting faculty have been a tradition in San Diego. So, too, have the annual concerts that display the results. But this year's annual Faculty-Student Workshop Concert, which takes place at 8:30 p.m. tonight and tomorrow, promises more than prior years. The program at the Three's Company studio, 3255 5th Ave. will be bigger and more focused.

The Gloria Newman Dance Theater, Orange County's most distinguished home-based modern dance troupe, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, but don't expect to see any hometown cake-cutting celebrations. At least not for a while. Despite a much ballyhooed rush to assert cultural coming-of-age with the new Performing Arts Center, the county's attitude toward the highly regarded Newman troupe seems to have been one of benign neglect.

Jane Dudley, a champion of dance as social protest who worked with modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham and became a leading teacher and choreographer in the United States and Britain, has died, news reports said. She was 89. The Times of London said Dudley died Wednesday in the British capital, where she had lived since 1970. No cause of death was given. Born in New York in 1912, she began dancing at the age of 6, when her mother decided she needed to be more graceful.

For Dhana Bradford, dancing is a labor of love. And mileage. Bradford is the founder of Dim Sum, a modern dance company based in Orange County whose four members--all of whom work or attend college full time--volunteer their time. Beyond that, Bradford lives in Palm Springs and drives 240 miles round-trip for rehearsals. On Sunday mornings, no less, and sometimes twice a week. "Now that's love," she said with a wry chuckle recently.

The title of this weekend's Lo-Tec concert is "Made in New York." But a better description of the two performances scheduled for Three's Company's Hillcrest studio this weekend might be " Man -Made in New York." Men have been conspicuously absent from most of Three's Company's Lo-Tecs this summer. And even on those rare occasions when men were around, they were heavily outnumbered by women. Not so this weekend.

By chance, they collided in the lobby of a Tampa hotel while both were touring Florida three years ago. But instead of the usual, vague promises to "meet for lunch," Bella Lewitzky's and Richard Stoltzman's parting words were: "Let's do a piece together." They meant it. So tonight at Royce Hall, UCLA, California's doyenne of modern dance and her friend, the virtuoso clarinetist, unveil their joint effort: "Glass Canyons."

KATHERINE Dunham's gifts to dance history stare out from vintage black-and-white photographs on the walls of her New York apartment. Here's a teenager with the face of an angel and the fierce gaze of a sharecropper's daughter who escaped the South Carolina cotton fields and was hellbent on becoming the sultry Dunham sensation called Eartha Kitt.