Dance faculty member Kristi Burns' "Threads" follows, providing stark contrast. Set to a Samuel Barber's haunting "Adagio for Strings," Burns infuses the legato and melancholic music with tension and explosive energy. Following the path of a rope stretched diagonally across the stage, six dancers alternately collapse, recover, support one another and expand their group's horizon outward and upward. Burn's ability to insert short outbursts of kinetic energy into the long musical phrases of Barber creates an ongoing sense of drama.

Thanks to the existence of a Labanotation score (a form of writing down dances using a series of symbols to represent movements, directions and duration), guest faculty member Odette Blum was able to stage the excellent "Breakers," choreographed by Victoria Uris in 1985. Uris, a former Paul Taylor dancer, shows the influence of that great artist in her ecstatic flow of movement using little material but manipulating it in all possible ways. Set to the first movement of Franz Schubert's "Symphony no. 4 in C Minor," "Breakers" shows a musicality and clarity of structure so often lacking in today's choreography. Since we live in a chaotic world, it is refreshing to recall the orderliness of former times. Although it's only 20 years old, Uris' choreography seems to hark back to a much earlier era. Kudos to the dancers who managed to attack the movement with speed, accuracy and grace.

Michael Pili Pang's hula choreography set to the uplifting music of Haydn's "The Creation," first seen on a Honolulu

Symphony program some months ago, has been expanded for this occasion. Elegant in their 19th-century attire, the dancers glide about the stage, executing the formal hula of the monarchy period. As the music soars, however, one longs for the dancers to follow suit.

Soaring is exactly how the program ends with "One Flight Up," a collaborative work choreographed by dance faculty members Betsy Fisher, Gregg Lizenbery, Peggy Gaither Adams and Kristi Burns, along with lighting designer, Daniel J. Anteau, a former ice climber who knows his ropes. The piece features a chorus of onstage dancers along with five other "flyers" who dance in the air. Impressive both for its intricate and beautiful aerial choreography and for the fact that it is so stylistically unified, this closing work completes the program on an up note (no pun intended).