Danny Buraczeski calls his company “Jazzdance,” the verbal conflation evidently intended to distinguish it from the generic “jazz dance,” a catchall used to refer loosely to show dancing. As anyone who has seen A Chorus Line knows, Broadway gypsies today are expected to know ballet and tap as well as traditional jazz. Buraczeski, himself a former show dancer, has transposed this hybrid form from its commercial context to the concert-dance stage and used it to choreograph composed jazz music for himself and his eight-member troupe.

On the evidence of his last New York program (January 19-24 at the Joyce Theatre), Buraczeski takes a balletic approach to jazz, eschewing tap and indulging only rarely in shoulder and pelvic isolations. His bulky physique is also a limiting factor of his movement vocabulary. Many of his dancers, too, have less than ideal bodies, and the general level of training is low. Moreover, though they have the advantage of youth, they lack the theatrical presence of the more seasoned Buraczeski: as the protagonist in Night Vision, his entrances produced a heightened effect that was palpable.

Set to tango music by the popular Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, Night Visionis a quasi-narrative work. A program note consists of a quote attributed to an Argentine general—“In any war there are people who disappear”—and the action showed the eventual triumph of the people, represented by three couples, over political oppression, in the form of a menacing Buraczeski in a generic khaki uniform. How