‘ALIVE’ AND WELL ON PBS

Is Bill Irwin a clown? A visual acrobat? A silent comic born 60 years too late? Call him what you want but the celebrated New Vaudevillian is at the top of his form tonight as “Alive From Off Center” kicks off its third season on PBS with Irwin’s wildly inventive video spoof “As Seen on TV.”

Network variety shows may be dead, but with its award-winning “Alive” series, PBS has improved on the old formula. If “Alive” were a ride at Disneyland, you’d have to call it “TV Tomorrowland.” (“Alive From Off Center” airs at 10:30 p.m. on KCET Channel 28.)

For the next 10 weeks, “Alive” will offer a delightfully diverse array of performers and video artists, including the Quay Brothers, a pair of bizarre puppet animators; black comic-monologist Eric Bogosian; adventuresome composer/choreographer Meredith Monk and video wizard Zbigniew Rybczynski.

It’s the kind of video romper room that should have Max Headroom as a host--and PBS has come up with the next best thing, performance artist Laurie Anderson (who has her own electronic clone helping her cue up each new episode).

What makes “Alive” such a tantalizing feast is that it offers us a snazzy sneak preview of the entertainment stars of the future. With his rapier wit, Bogosian could be a late-night comic sensation, while Rybczynski--already a top music-video director--is surely only a few years away from a shot at a feature film.

As for Irwin, let’s put him at the head of the class--in fact, put him in a class by himself. Partly a video satire, partly a homage to the gravity-defying stunts of silent film greats, “As Seen on TV” takes us for a giddy, spellbinding spin through the magic world of television.

Wearing a top hat, baggy trousers and glasses that slide down his nose (every object Irwin touches seems to have a mind of its own), Irwin has come to audition for a role as a dancer in a TV variety hour. Intimidated by a noisy crowd of rivals, he retires to an empty rehearsal room, where he quickly becomes enchanted with a video camera, eyeing his movements in the monitor and getting tangled in a spider’s web of wires and cables.

The real fun begins after Irwin trips, falls out a window and then, when he climbs back in, finds that he has somehow vanished from real life and tumbled into a garish TV twilight zone.

Wandering into each new scene like an uninvited party guest, our bewildered hero bounces from old Barbara Stanwyck movies to bad soap operas to hushed ballet performances. Blessed with the loose-limbed agility of Buster Keaton and the chameleon-like charm of Harold Lloyd, Irwin emerges as a video innocent abroad, hilariously eager to make himself at home in each new TV landscape. If he suddenly finds himself with a ballerina in his arms, he gamely attempts a pirouette. Caught amid a phalanx of red-wigged chorus girls frugging to an old soul hit, Irwin quietly slips into step until he’s leading them all around the stage.

Irwin clearly views TV as a seductive trap. But he has such a fondness for its garish images and excesses that he never lets his nightmarish vision veer off into preachy satire. His silent-comic pose is also a boon, since it forces him to use his visual imagination. Directed by Charles Atlas, the show is full of cheeky images--Irwin’s dance rivals include a violinist accompanied by a high-decibel police radio, and a pair of punkettes tap-dancing to Led Zeppelin. But the star is Irwin, who is as elegant as he is inventive, two qualities in short supply on stage or screen these days.

On July 20, “Alive From Off Center” will also showcase the absolutely bizarre imagination of the Quay Brothers, a pair of young American film makers who use puppet animation to dramatize “The Street of Crocodiles,” an unsettling series of tales written by Polish satirist Bruno Schulz. Set in a sepia-tinged underground world where screws twirl out of their grooves, wiggle to their feet and scurry off into the shadows, the Quays create a moody, surreal dreamscape worthy of Kafka and Kubrick.

“Alive” also has its share of failures. Choreographer Molissa Fenley has a solid critical reputation, but her Aug. 3 episode goes down in flames as she leads a trio of dancers through a series of pieces set among rock formations in the Painted Desert. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the choice of apparel (shades and hiking boots), but the whole performance is a snooze, displaying about as much energy as a musical directed by Robert Bresson.

A much more promising episode, due July 27, is “Steps,” a video fantasy by video whiz Rybczynski. You’ve seen what Brian De Palma did with Eisenstein’s classic “Odessa Steps” sequence in “The Untouchables.” However, Rybczynski--a far more impish spirit than De Palma--is aiming for a daffier version of video mayhem. By combining old film images with new video processing, he’s slyly deposited a busload of American tourists at the steps just as the Cossacks are about to open fire.