Doug Elkins troupe at Annenberg

The last time choreographer Doug Elkins appeared in Philadelphia five years ago, he brought his hit "Fraulein Maria," a delightful frolic. The two frothy pieces he offers for the Dance Celebration Series, presented by Dance Affiliates and the Annenberg Center, are not as fully fleshed, but have an audience-pleasing frivolity and terrific performers.

From his new pick-up company, Doug Elkins Choreography Etc., come "Mo(or)town/Redux" and "Hapless Bizarre," which opened Thursday.

In "Hapless Bizarre" (a title I'm unable to decipher), actor/clown/dancer Mark Gindick pulls off old vaudeville hat tricks. He's a spunky little guy compared with some of the taller dancers in the troupe. And he takes a lot of good-natured teasing and pushing around before they strip him of his white shirt and button him into a patterned shirt that makes him one of them.

Deborah Lohse towers over him in this happy dance to Latin beats, with a narrator who asks such questions as "Did you ever want to make a good impression?" It's all about dating and lighthearted flirting through a dance language of bodies sliding down legs and intricate entanglements, interspersed with cha-chas and salsas. A duet by Donnell Oakley and John Sorensen-Jolink, with backward skips and lifts, is softly sophisticated.

Gindick has a hat when he comes in, but he has a girl - Cori Marquis - when he goes out.

"Mo(or)town/Redux" was created in 1990 as "Mo(or)town," and not having seen it, I can't say how it has been reduxed.

Elkins dubs it a "deconstruction of Shakespeare's Othello. But it is perhaps too deconstructed, and not all that Motown. Kyle Marshall is Othello, and Oakley, Desdemona; Alexander Dones' outstanding blend of hip-hop and Motown-era dances portrays an uptight Iago.

The Othello theme doesn't come through fully until Marquis, as Emilia, picks up Desdemona's dropped handkerchief and hands it to Iago as a prop in his treacherous deception. Marshall's slick moves to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and Oakley's pleadings of the truth while he's roughing her up to "Try a Little Tenderness" foreshadow the impending tragedy. This is a comedy that can't ask for a happy ending.

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