DANCE REVIEW : CUNNINGHAM COMPANY AT ROYCE HALL

The greatest dance rebels and innovators often create their most perfect or influential works by reconceiving the past in their own image. Mikhail Fokine in “Les Sylphides,” Doris Humphrey in “The Shakers,” George Balanchine in “Theme and Variations,” Twyla Tharp in “Eight Jelly Rolls” each redefined stage dancing by transforming a movement legacy.

Merce Cunningham is no different. This modern-dance visionary, who turns 68 Thursday, occasionally applies his celebrated breakthroughs in choreographic spacing and sequencing, chance procedures and collaborative collage to old dance forms. When that happens, masterpieces emerge.

Three years ago, for instance, his dreamlike, opalescent “Pictures” stripped traditional ballet lyricism of its stylistic pretensions and antique formal rhetoric, achieving a distillation of classicism that was somehow nostalgic yet utterly contemporary and American.

If “Pictures” was Cunningham’s “Swan Lake,” then the more recent “Grange Eve” must be his “Napoli” or “La Fille mal Gardee.” Crowning an otherwise bracingly futuristic Cunningham program in Royce Hall, UCLA, on Friday, it enlisted nearly his entire 15-member company in a whimsical/analytical investigation of folk culture.

From slick Broadway unisons to playful county-fair sideshows, from tightly structured square-dance formations to loose, jazzy social-dance steps, Cunningham piled up the popular references.

For example, a men’s sextet with wooden canes seemed to simultaneously replay fragments of every walking-stick routine in show-biz history: all the poking, leaning, swinging, balancing possibilities of cane-dancing brilliantly evoked, celebrated and then abandoned for new priorities, new arrangements of found material.

And Cunningham also deftly sketched in a social context: Against the severely architectural group dances, he set games involving an elastic hoop worn around the waist, impromptu gymnastics, even the intrusions of a wandering drunk: outdoor activities suggesting a community at play.

Takehisa Kosugi’s score (played live) added its own surprising juxtapositions--amplified thwacking and clanking versus wistful harmonica and perky kazoo--and Cunningham himself appeared occasionally, for once no outsider but just one of the boys.

Full of love for the idioms it quoted and manipulated, “Grange Eve” ultimately proved an affirmation of heritage, a remarkably mellow tribute to the movement entertainments that delighted us long before we got hooked on highfalutin concert dance.

In the highly sophisticated, surgically precise language of a master, it expressed some very simple truths definitively--among them, that you can take a boy named Merce Cunningham out of Centralia, Wash., but you’ll never take Centralia, Wash., out of the boy.

To David Tudor’s loud, live wheezes, rumbles, boings and gurgles, Cunningham’s new “Shards” isolated the act of dancing by contrasting it--indeed, nearly overwhelming it--with tense immobility. Most of the time, more people were frozen in sculptural end-of-phrase poses than were moving, and this sense of action emerging from (and receding into) stillness gave the fast, emphatic dancing an unexpected poignancy.

Adapted from a 1986 video-dance, the new “Points in Space” boasted softly hissing accompaniment by John Cage, complex layerings of movement patterns in overlapping spatial planes and, most of all, an intriguing exploration of diagonal paths and boldly tilted or angled positions--especially in a spectacularly inventive duet for Catherine Kerr and Alan Good.

All three works featured bold painted backdrops by William Anastasi resembling enlarged charcoal and Magic Marker sketches.