Choreographer's style: lights, cameras, deadpan action

Buster Keaton crossed with Merce Cunningham. That's how Richard Colton describes the work of choreographer Neil Greenberg, whose New York-based company visits Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy on Thursday. ''He has this dry Buster Keaton humor that runs right into an intellectual level that comes from his dancing with Merce," Colton says.

Greenberg was a Cunningham company member from 1979 to 1986. But it's his collaborative work with his own company that led to the invitation, says Colton, who runs SSD with his wife, Amy Spencer. ''It's the kind of thing we want our students to see," Colton explains. Greenberg's dances often include texts, projections, and other media woven into the choreography. His team for ''Partial View," the new piece that Dance by Neil Greenberg is presenting in Concord, consists of the MacArthur-winning video designer John Jesurun, plus two longtime regulars, composer Zeena Parkins and lighting designer Michael Stiller.

''Partial View" is a nearly hourlong work for the four dancers in Greenberg's troupe. The piece, which premiered in New York in April, bears the signature of Greenberg's current style: Video projections and dancers interacting and colliding in a seemingly random way.

But partial view of what? The answer is the dance itself. ''There's never any way of seeing the whole thing," Greenberg says over the phone from New York. ''Each of the four dancers performs the same movements differently. It's really four versions of the same thing." Like a theme and variations? ''No," he says emphatically. ''It's all variations."

With a score that swerves from African drumming to marimba and flute music, the piece features both prerecorded projections and a live video feed, Greenberg says. ''The dancers move four video cameras around the stage, adding another layer to their choreographed movement. A fifth camera is overhead. It's a way of showing the audience fragments of the work they wouldn't see otherwise -- a close-up or a view looking down. It's a way of framing the dance."

Greenberg, 46, is seeing ''Partial View" from a different perspective himself -- the outside. ''It's only the second piece I've made that I haven't been in myself," he says wistfully. Dance makers of his generation are gradually weaning themselves from performing, at least in works with much younger dancers.

Greenberg's solution, this time around, is a 10-minute piece he made for himself, which serves as a prologue to the larger work. It's called ''Partial View Solo."

Greenberg's dance career began straightforwardly enough. He trained conventionally in ballet and various modern dance techniques including Martha Graham's and Cunningham's, but he broke away from any specific dance vocabulary when he left the latter's company. He's also worked in various alternative modes -- somatic techniques and body-mind centering.

Greenberg's choreography starts with his improvising in front of a video camera. ''I used to design movement from a mind place," he says, ''but it was much less rich than if I just improvise, taking it from a body place. There's no name for anything I do, no arabesque." If you look at images of his company dancing, words like ''flailing," ''writhing," and ''sprawling" come to mind instead.

Although he's received a Guggenheim fellowship and other awards, including the dance world's highest honor, a ''Bessie," and has created pieces for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, Greenberg has unfulfilled goals. His company performs only 15 to 25 times a year. ''My ideal would be at least double that," he says. ''A work changes, matures, and goes through phases when you can perform it 40 times."

Next year he'll revive the work that won him his Bessie, the 1994 ''Not-About-AIDS-Dance." In that piece, he sought to reveal information about the dancers, thus altering the viewer-performer relationship. During the rehearsal period, a dozen people he knew, including his brother, died of AIDS. That horror was information shared with the audience -- along with the fact that he himself is HIV-positive.

''I lived into the era when there's something that can be done about HIV," he says, referring to the medical cocktails that have kept him alive and fit. ''But I want to remind audiences of all those people who didn't."