Panoramic Parsons

SPOTLIGHT

heights held no terrors for me," the photographer Margaret Bourke-White said about crawling onto the Chrysler Building gargoyles, 800 feet above Lexington Avenue, to take pictures of "the changing moods of the city." That was in the early 1930s, when the Chrysler Building was new and Bourke-White had a chic studio on the 61st floor, with the gargoyles as part of the decor. Sixty years later, the intrepid Annie Leibovitz, a fervent Bourke-White admirer, draped the equally intrepid dancerchoreographer David Parsons over a gargoyle just as a New York sunset hit. The pose evokes images of Vaslav Nijinsky and Ted Shawn draped onanistically over scarves or rocks. Like those earlier dancer-choreographer hunks, Parsons is a muscular, powerful dancer not content to be somebody else's choreographic vessel. He was a star in Paul Taylor's company, but quit in 1987 to devote himself to his own group, the Parsons Dance Company, now a successful touring organization that will perform at the Joyce Theater in New York in early May. Its repertory includes Parson's signature solo, Caught, which is lit by strobe flashes that create the spectacular illusion of a dancer making tremendous, soaring leaps and never coming down. Heights hold no terrors for him.

S. DELANO