This year's "Fall Footholds" Dance Concert at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa presents the choreographic works of current students and two alumni from the dance program. The emphasis this semester is on modern dance, showing the diversity and range of that genre.

"Sundown," a contemporary hula work choreographed by Michael Pili Pang and Noelani Goldstein Vitarelli and performed by Tamie Onchi, opens the program with a pleasing fusion of traditional hula steps and gestures with larger, more abstracted movements. Set to a lovely song by Robert Cazimero and gentle as a summer breeze, the dance starts the program off on a lyrical note.

It is followed by a complex and highly structured quintet created by Rosemary Summers. This ambitious composition, titled "Textured Harmony" and set to a highly danceable score by Eric Ewazen, begins with a frozen pose of the dancers, backs to audience, in a tug-of-warstyle line, counterbalancing one another through oppositional weights and tensions. This striking opening image, reminiscent of an ancient frieze, dissolves too casually as the dancers simply stand apart. However, it returns again in the opening moments and once more toward the end of the dance.

After the opening prologue, the dance is divided into two major sections, each clearly distinguishable by its music and use of different thematic material.

A buoyant, swingy motif that includes large arm circles and legs thrusting front to back is followed by a running theme that has the dancers covering space in a multitude of floor patterns.

The dance ends with a fleeting return to the opening tug-of-war pose, dissolving, somewhat unsatisfactorily, into a final lineup of the dancers, arms around waists, backs to audience.

Summers, like several other choreographers on the program, clearly has an excellent eye for composition and structure. These gifts are equally observed in the works of Traci Chun, Jennifer Butler Shannon and Beth McKee Elliott.

While Chun's work, danced to a pulsating score by Philip Glass, tends toward the lyrical with energetic spins, leaps, and falls alternating with contrasting slow walks accompanied by body pulses, Elliott's piece, "Women's Work," is both architectural in its use of the large group of dancers and strong and percussive in the movements, reminiscent of the aesthetic of modern dance of the '30s with its angular poses, tightly fisted hands and two-dimensional profile view of dancers.

Worthy of mention also are the works of Chansri A. Green and Kiplinn Sagmiller. Sagmiller's solo, "Deconstruction," shows her to be a dancer not only of considerable technical ability but with the mind and sophisticated creative talent to match it.