Bella Lewitzky’s dance company made its final Nashville appearance Friday night at Langford Auditorium. Its director/choreographer, now 81, will retire after some 50 years in the business. After the performance, Bennett Tarleton of the Tennessee Arts Commission walked onstage and presented Lewitzky with a plaque of appreciation on behalf of the TAC and Vanderbilt’s Great Performances series. The choreographer responded by graciously praising Nashville audiences for their “incredible warmth and understanding” over the years.

This diminutive artist continues to pack a punch even as she plans to hang up her black tights and leotards. After all, she’s the one who stared down Jesse Helms and forced the NEA to delete the proviso that every arts grantee must promise not to offend public sensibilities. Talk about a First Amendment issue to delight the ACLU crowd! American artists owe this feisty modern-dance pioneer a special debt for her courage in squaring off against the McCarthy wannabes.

The last piece on her program might well have been dedicated to Helms and to all those who sow discord for political purposes, whether in Serbia, Somalia, or the U.S. Congress. In “Turf,” every man is a feudal lord, his castle a wooden box on which he stands. One at a time, each of the four dancers revels in pride of ownership—almost licking every square inch of the platform with his body, toes running over its grooves, elbows slithering about its corners, neck drooping over the edges. Each explores the potential of his property, with individual personalities revealed in one dancer’s ape-like crouches, another’s spider-leg extensions, a third’s erect humanoid stance, and a fourth’s reptilian slithering. While one dances, the others hunker down, eyes darting from side to side as they appraise the enemy for even the slightest false start. The tension is palpable.

A bell rings, as in the beginning of a championship match. The lights turn brighter, and the drum rolls. The game of confrontation begins. Dancers edge warily about as one after the other makes tentative forays to snatch at the other’s space. A rapid-fire series of invasions begins as the tempo escalates, but it always ends with a quick scurry back to the safety of each man’s original box. Dancers scamper back and forth in a heartbeat. They dare each other. They run, fast as they can, like the Gingerbread Man, with a you-can’t-catch-me boast writ boldly on their bodies. They fall, they roll, they jump over each other, but they always return to home base. It is as complex a dance as the interlacing of a Highland reel, only twice as fast.

Violations lead to open warfare in this textbook treatise on the anatomy of aggression. This is not Ted Shawn and his all-male company of dancers who posture in macho caricature of muscle-bound warriors. No, dancers Walter Kennedy, Michael Mizerany, John Pennington, and Darrin Wright flowed with rapid-fire precision in their forays to and fro. They were clever in the wily ways that they defended their turf. For example, two dancers dragged their boxes together so that one could attack while the other defended.

The finale, striking in its imagery, happened lightning-fast. All four boxes ended up jumbled together. One man asserted his primacy as King of the Mountain while the others squabbled below him. A second scrambled atop the first man’s shoulders, while the third hopped on the second’s back. The audience gasped in astonishment when the fourth leapt over all to form a human pyramid with himself at the apex. He waved his arm in a gesture of triumph. The curtain went down immediately, but was this the end of the struggle? Today’s news headlines, rife with stories of ethnic cleansing and gang warfare, would suggest it was not.

Bella Lewitzky’s choreography astonishes by its diversity, for she did not repeat herself. “Impressions” was just what its title promised: six women dancers giving “impressions” of sculptures created by the great British artist Henry Moore. It was as if the sculpture garden in New York’s Museum of Modern Art had magically come alive and the pieces turned interactive.

The dance had an ethereal playfulness about it. Performers turned into pedestals, kneeling on the floor to support a giant figure sprawled atop them. Or six dancers subdivided into two-figure forms, alternately facing each other and rolling over to the opposite side, where they gazed far out into space with vacuous eyes. One of the most successful episodes was the depiction of traveling reclining figures in which dancers lay on their sides and, at their own individual pace, twirled slowly about as if being moved by some unseen force. Particularly beautiful was the mother-and-child duet that ended with one dancer clinging to the mother figure, legs wrapped about her and hands clasped at her neck, as she revolved slowly about the stage.

The dancers moved serenely in space with sculptural steadiness of purpose, their fingers closely bound together rather than individuated—as if their hands were indeed made of bronze. The dancers’ self-possession and the steady pace of the choreography reinforced the impression of a massive Moore sculpture, even though the dancers themselves were small of stature. The costumes, silky flesh-colored unitards, were bathed in a golden light à la Titian. The effect was stunning in its simplicity.

The opening piece, “Game Plan,” was a kind of kids’ party game, a bit of an ice-breaker for the sophisticated theater-goer. The rules, though complex, involved a single person “calling” the name of another, who responded by improvising certain dance steps. Next, the caller selected a section from the repertoire, which everyone recognized by its code number. Smoothly, without missing a beat, the group moved right into the excerpt, until the next dancer burst onto the stage and called for something else. It was fun to learn dancers’ names, to see them in a human context as they had to respond quickly and flexibly to each other. It was even fun to see dancers mouth off at someone who made a mistake. “Penalty! Penalty!” someone yelled in mid-stream, causing one of the other dancers to beat a hasty retreat offstage.

In other ways, the piece was disconcerting to watch. It was like trying to work a moving crossword puzzle when you don’t know the rules and are always trying, like Alice in Wonderland, to figure out what’s going on. The lack of context, when excerpts were presented, left me with a feeling of unfinished business. For example, at one point dancers presented combination number 3a or 4b or whatever it was. Two went down on the floor to serve as chairs, while a man and a woman sat on their backs. The upright pair smiled broadly (and falsely), waving like wind-up toys. Other dancers jumped with excitement and waved back. Then, without warning, the woman crawled out of the “convertible,” and the man slumped over on his back. The icon of Kennedy’s assassination is stamped indelibly in the American imagination, and this excerpt raised emotions that it was not prepared to handle in the way that the choreographer had, doubtless, originally planned. The dancers coolly moved on to yet another exercise, thus trivializing an American trauma by turning it into caricature.

The dancers were all well-trained and exceptional in their dedication to presenting Lewitzky’s choreography with great integrity. No one could be singled out as exceptional in the group, although several of the dancers were not up to the level of the others. It was the choreographer, however, who was truly the star of the show—and deservedly so.