DANCE REVIEW : David Parsons Company at Royce Hall

David Parsons is a very clever choreographer, but that’s as far as it goes. When he’s packing three or four deft miniatures into an hour--each piece marked by a sharply defined premise and distinctive movement values--Parsons and his six-member modern-dance company can keep you deliriously happy.

Unfortunately, he can also leave you utterly numb when he attempts something longer and more complex.

His program Friday in Royce Hall, UCLA, began in triumph with “The Envelope” (music by Rossini), an inspired 1984 parody of the plot devices and other expressive cliches of dance-drama. Next came “Sleep Study” (1987), which transformed nighttime tossing and turning into witty, formal group maneuvers set to an endearing tune by Flim and the BBs.

To music by Robert Fripp, the solo “Caught” grew from restless prowling and anguished reaching out to an amazing vision of escape: On a pitch-dark stage, the dancer repeatedly jumped, illuminated only at the crest of his jumps by a strobe. The intensity of the strobe-flashes helped trigger the perceptual trick called persistence of vision, making him appear to float in the air for minutes at a time. A phenomenal illusion.

Parsons created “Caught” for himself seven years ago, when he was a leading dancer with the Paul Taylor company. But he’s injured this season, so it was danced on Friday by Gary Chryst, the accomplished former Joffrey dancer who has found a major career as a guest artist in ballet, modern dance and on Broadway. As always, he danced powerfully.

Alas, Chryst wasn’t the only replacement. An injury to company member Barry Wizoreck led to the substitution of newcomer Roger Montoya in “The Envelope,” “Sleep Study” and “Elysian Fields,” along with the deletion of “Brothers” from the program and the decision to present “Scrutiny” with one dancer less than usual. This company clearly wasn’t being seen (or reviewed) under normal circumstances.

Even so, “Scrutiny” (to a score by Michael Raye) and “Elysian Fields” (to Grieg) both had major built-in defects. In each, Parsons devised incredibly lush group movement with no relationship to his dramatic purpose--a purpose baldly explicated in another vocabulary.

In “Scrutiny” (1987), crude mime established the theme of obsessive attention and paranoia. In “Elysian Fields” (1988), swordsmanship became the central movement idiom, with a demonic fencing-master (Chryst) dominating a cornball ritual of brutalization.

Neither piece developed its non-choreographic motion into a fully assimilated dance metaphor. Instead, Parsons alternated mime and fencing and dance--like recitative and aria. Or like the melodramatic narrative ploys and brainless divertissements satirized in “The Envelope.”

With Parsons way overextended in these pieces, their interest Friday largely depended on the hyper-energetic attack of his dancers and the sumptuous lighting environments designed by Howell Binkley.