Dance Winter, General Clearance of Evils at the Beginning of at the Hasty Pudding Club, Dec. 4.6 and 10-13

EVER SINCE I made the mistake of going to see a Hasty Pudding Show, 12 Holyoke Street has been haunted for me-infested by a ghostly chorus line of clubbiesin-drag. The pool tables, leather armchairs, and antique posters survive. but that chorus line has been exorcised forever by Lindsay Crouse and the Cambridge Dance Company. Miss Crouse's production, Winter, General Clearance of Evils at the Beginning of is as ambitious as its title, and, almost incvitably, sometimes falls short of its goals. But when it succeeds it does more than create moments of beauty and excitement; it fuses space, light, and color, music and movement, into a living whole: the all-encompassing "Energy" Blake called Eternal Delight.

"Pray For It," the first of the three dances that make up Winter, exemplifies this fusion in its purest form. Allesandro Vitelli's lighting is as vital to the sequence as Lindsay Crouse's chorcography, or the Charlie Mingus jazz piece she and Wakeen Ray-Riv dance to. As the space their bodies move in changes from blue to orange to hot pink, they become silhouettes of motion in a pulsating frame of sound and color; when the frame constricts to two thin streams of light, they move in a separate frenzy against the darkness. The integration is so smooth that "mixed-media" seems the only natural Medium, and we wonder how we ever enjoyed dance by itself.

The clements to be integrated in the second dance, "Pavilion," are much more complex. The music is partly electronic, partly live percussion. The visual design includes slides as well as light changes, and the dance is done by the whole company. Most important, a thematic element is introduced: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is the inspiration of the piece. Some technical mishaps didn't make the task of uniting these elements any easier, and at times the production seemed ragged. But overall "Pavilion" is the most exciting and original dance in Winter. and contains its most brilliant sequences.

At one point the dancers move before a slide projection of white circles on black; white ares cut across them as they dance, defining their bodies, absorbing them into pure design, and translating design into motion. In another sequence, three dancers in what look like stylized gas masks stand bound together by a length of sheet. Sounds of traffic and drilling blur into an oppressive roar as the dancers writhe against their bondage; and against the bleak gray and black patterns projected behind them and onto the moving drapery. At first we perceive the slide-patterns as abstract, then as endless wooden coffins; only near the end do we realize that the photographs are close-ups of a sky-scraper facade.

THE LAST EPISODE in "Pavilion" is perhaps best left as a surprise: it's the perfect end of a moving creation. Lindsay Crouse has said that she wanted "Pavilion" to "embody the visions Coleridge might have had before he actually wrote "Kubla Khan and was limited by words." When the lights dim, we feel that she and her company have succeeded.

Unfortunately, in the final seene, "American Meadows," Lindsay Crouse seems to have forgotten that words can be limiting. The three-part dance is accompanied by the narration of Blake's poem "Song of Liberty." By itself the poem is extremely complex; combined with the complexity of Cherries Ivies music, and of the choreography which mixes mime with dance, the poem becomes virtually incoherent to anyone who hasn't studied it extensively beforehand. More important, the intellectual effort which the poem demands detracts from our response to the dance-it leaves us fragmented. This is a sad irony, because Blacke's "Song of Liberty" is essentially a celebration of life without restrictions and compartments: a celebration of man free and whole in the "Eternal Delight" of his being. That's what "Pray For It" and "Pavilion" are finally about-and that's what might actually clear away some of the evil spirits in our lives.