E-Mail This Article to a Friend Divas ‘3 Women Solo’ at Concord Academy BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Dance for the older dancer isn’t a new idea anymore. Several groups have taken on the commendable mission of presenting men and women who’d be considered past their prime just when the rest of us are cruising up to it. These performances often have a perverse effect. The choreography means to demonstrate that the dancers can still do something — they move within a carefully circumscribed range, or they play themselves, reminiscing in a world of memory peopled by nubile youngsters. This draws our attention to what has been and so in a way defeats the purpose. Concord Academy’s "3 Women Solo" program a week ago Thursday gave me no such regrets.

It has to be an extraordinary occasion when you get three unparalleled stars together in the same room, and Sara Rudner, Martine van Hamel, and Carmen de Lavallade just don’t have anybody in the same league with them. What was more thrilling about this Summer Stages performance was that each woman’s solo was totally in command and in the moment. I felt I was looking at three wonderful dancers, not just settling for choice remnants of their former selves.

Rudner, known for years as an incomparable Twyla Tharp dancer and a co-conspirator in developing Tharp’s style, has had an independent career as an improviser. That isn’t so rare; dancers are good at exploring their own physicality. Rudner is one of a very few who can exercise body, mind, musicality, and spirit all at once, on the spot.

You can’t translate On My Mind: a luxury to imagine into words, though at the end of it, Rudner related a dire reflection on September 11 by writer George Emilio Sanchez. I didn’t think her dance was particularly pessimistic except for some tense moments at the end. Her knee locked as if her body were warning that it might eventually give out on her. It hasn’t yet.

Dressed in a black jersey, sneakers, and white pants with a red ruffle on the cuffs, she began by getting to know the space, testing its potential, trying a move or two. The moves opened up into extended phrases and variations, a stream of dance thought. Some of it was quite specific: the arm wrap that ended Tharp’s famous Fugue phrase, a charming gesture I associate with Concord Academy co-director of dance Richard Colton. Some of it described things that were happening only in Rudner’s mind.

The distinction of Rudner’s dancing is undiminished — the sense of an available body in loving connection to the ground, the articulate evocation of energies, intentions, and feelings, generously spread out for the taking.

Van Hamel specialized in classical roles and some of the modern rep as a principal at American Ballet Theatre. Since hanging up her toe shoes, she’s added singing and a gift for comedy to her dance assets. Far, Near, Never was made for her by downtown choreographer Wendy Perron, another grown-up who’s still in the game as a writer and an editor.

Perron’s dance was quirky and postmodern. For van Hamel, she’s made an amusing collage that gives the ballerina a chance to flaunt extravagant arms and legs, a melodramatic torso, and a convincing tantrum or two. Jesse Levy accompanies her, playing Bach on the cello and doubling as a stagehand. While he’s moving the scenery around, she sings wordless portions of Spanish folk songs by Manuel de Falla. Maybe there’s more to this relationship, but it would be unlikely for persons of such different stations in life. Without the imperial hauteur she assumed in the classics, van Hamel looked more relaxed than I’ve ever seen her as this goofy grande dame.

De Lavallade was one of the first modern dance stars who didn’t choreograph themselves. She was unforgettable in early Ailey and a bunch of freelance roles, but she’s been working as an actress/teacher at the Yale Repertory Theatre for decades. In her monologue Willy’s Ladies Sing the Blues, she’s a classy dame who’s had it with men.

Dressed in red silk, prompted by Geoffrey Holder’s unmistakable basso profundo singing "Blues in the Night," she tanks up on martinis and tells us men can’t be trusted. As proof, she quotes the lines of Lady Macbeth and a few other luckless Shakespearean heroines. We may have seen her flouncing, strutting attitudes in vintage Alvin Ailey, but never has the Bard been delivered with such scorching relevance.

With Gus Solomons Jr., de Lavallade did a modern dance epic of tortured love, It All, choreographed by Dwight Rhoden. I couldn’t decide whether it was a spoof or a throwback.