DANCE AND MUSIC REVIEWS : LEWITZKY PREMIERE

Horizontal panels of cool color across the backdrop, eight neon tubes standing upright onstage--and dancers dodging between the glowing tubes in playful encounters. This is Bella Lewitzky’s new “8 dancers/8 lights,” a dance composition so Spartan in its childlike whimsy that it virtually creates a new genre: kiddie minimalism.

Introduced Saturday in Royce Hall, UCLA, the work boasts a bouncy taped score by Donald Knaack that sounds as if it’s being played on toy instruments, plus costumes by Darlene Neel that look perfect for team play. Above all, it showcases the warmth, charm and wit of the Lewitzky dancers, who deliver some pretty obvious sight gags with a touching delicacy.

These dancers and their colleagues challenge the opposite extreme in “Nos Duraturi” (a revised version of Lewitzky’s contribution to the Olympic Arts Festival): intense depictions of violence expressed through shared (and borne) weight. Hardly child’s play.

They triumph, making the problematic work seem better with a cast of 12 than with the 22 dancers who had performed it last June. The William Hall Chorale and orchestra again provided a fine performance of Stravinsky’s mighty “Symphony of Psalms.”

Lewitzky’s “Suite Satie,” a familiar study in lyric athleticism, completed the program--danced superbly (of course) by a cast headed by Kurt Weinheimer and nicely played by the uncredited pianist, Dean Fritz.