TV REVIEW : ‘OFF CENTER’ OFFERS THE UNEXPECTED

The aptly named “Alive From Off Center” returns for its second season on public television tonight (10 p.m., Channels 28 and 50, 11 p.m., Channel 24)--a lively collection of avant-garde video productions that may leave you excited, intrigued, angry or completely mystified, but rarely bored.

Television for the most part is so conventional in the types of programs it presents--dramas, documentaries, concerts, talk shows--that it’s easy to forget there are other forms it could take. MTV demonstrated some of the impressionistic, non-linear possibilities; “Alive From Off Center” takes that to a more esoteric level.

“We promise you the unexpected,” host Susan Stamberg says tonight, and it’s certainly true that one week’s program is not necessarily like the next.

Tonight’s, for example, opens with “Luminare,” a stimulating video by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler that combines computer graphics, modern dance, paintings and a pulsating synthesizer score. Later comes a French production, “Jump,” which features people in weird costumes and green and blue faces doing strange dances. It’s quite captivating, if abstruse.

In between are a pair of short comedy videos, by Doug Hall and Teddy Dibble, which are more bizarre than funny.

The second show, meanwhile, is completely different--a specially staged production of the 1980 musical “Sister Suzie Cinema,” by Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, who subsequently created the well-received “Gospel at Colonus.”

At little more than 20 minutes in length, “Sister Suzie Cinema” is not a story but rather an operatic paean to the movies, sung a capella in 1950s doo-wop style by a five-man group called 14 Karat Soul.

That’s a lot of a capella harmonizing for one sitting, but the production maintains interest on the strength of Sanborn’s staging, which suggests the religious nature of the film-going experience, and of Breuer’s witty, purposely gushy lyrics about our love affair with the movies (“You’re my fantasy, my romance. . . . I’ll be there when the popcorn is gone”).

Get ready to switch gears again the next week, when most of the program is given over to the masterful juggling of Michael Moschen. His deft, gravity-defying manipulation of torches, a glass ball and luminous sticks is made all the more effective with the stylized use of music, lighting and body movement. This is performance as art.

If you still need to see it in conventional terms, think of “Alive From Off Center” this way: It’s a variety show for the video-sophisticated ‘80s.