Dance: Scenes from Heaven and Hell

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The god turns wrathful in Last Look, a frightening vision of urban apocalypse set to Donald York's florid score. Between the opening and closing image--a heap of inert bodies--the dance is a frenzy of ugly action: twitches, tics, slaps, lunges. (The motions are in fact almost all variations of a single writhing phrase for the arms and torso, whirled into myriad variations.) The setting for all this grimness is a black stage flared at random by Jennifer Tipton's pitiless lighting. The nine dancers--the men in green jump suits, the women in flotsam pieces of evening wear--move among Designer Alex Katz's triangular pillars of Mylar, creating the effect of mirrors. At one point the dancers play a sadistic game of catch, hurling Reagan Wood as the ball. Parsons and Susan McGuire try to make love but cannot seem to get the necessary moves straight. Then Parsons, in a lacerating solo, apparently tries to rip himself free of his body.

It is all a vintage expressionist nightmare. Watching it is like seeing the entire wrathful output of a garrulous postmodernist like West Germany's Pina Bausch condensed into 21 minutes. The climax is a properly grotesque epiphany: the dancers catch a glimpse of their own faces in the mirrors and the sight is literally killing. Only a few spasms more and a faltering twitch of will, and these final players of the civilization game expire.

Last Look is so engrossing that when the lights go up for curtain calls, one wonders for an instant where these nine smiling young humanoids came from. They are sweaty and winded, for the dance is punishing to perform. If there is a standout among them, it is David Parsons, 25, who is also the most lyrical of the enchanted swains in Roses.

This is one of several triumphant seasons for Taylor, but it might be called Parsons' spring. After six years with the company, he is ranging widely through the repertory and dancing marvelously. That is not all. Having tested his skills for three years at the downtown Dance Theater Workshop, Parsons has choreographed two short ballets for the Feld Ballet, which is also performing in New York now. (Another is in the repertory of the Batsheva Dance Company, a modern troupe in Israel.) Caught is a technical feat using strobe lights. But Envelope is more substantial and could be Parsons' calling card. It is in part a sassy send-up of faddish "message" ballets and of bravura dramatic lighting effects--like, say, Tip- ton's. But it also bears a respectful resemblance to Three Epitaphs (1956), another funny, irreverent young man's fantasy--Paul Taylor's. -- By Martha Duffy