IN THE MIDDLE of the concert I leaned over and whispered to a friend, "I still don't know what dance criticism is about." It wasn't the first time that uneasy feeling had struck. My friend offered, "Just think about what you like." "No," I protested, "first I have to know what is."

We were sitting at the edge of the floor marked off for a performance by Dance Collective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Our place was so close to the dancers that their energy caught us up confused in its swirl. "Why are these people doing such funny things?" I kept asking myself.

This past weekend I saw some of the funnythings performed again at the Mass College of Art, and, distanced by the proscenium, they seemed to make sense. Or perhaps the familiarity of the proscenium covered for my confusion.

My first notions about dance reviewing came from a lecture by Deborah Jowitt, dance critic for The Village Voice. She stressed that the critic's responsibility is not to make value judgements but rather to describe the dance event, to recreate the experience for the reader. Her view relieves the critic of the onus of setting himself up as a judge--but is it playing chicken?

Jowitt's view translates into practical terms the notions of author-critic Susan Sonntag in her essay "Against Interpretation," a manifesto of sorts for the sixties' avant-garde. Sonntag writes:

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now ... Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less, real to us.

What Jowitt and Sonntag are saying is: we can't think about larger questions, about which work is a masterpiece, which choreographer a genius, because we are so dead to reality as to be unable to see the work at all. I'd like to think one could do both: see the work as it really is and ask questions of comparative value.

According to Jowitt and Sonntag, I shouldn't write that of the six Boston choreographers collaborating as Dance Collective, Beth Soll seems to have the most sensitivity for making dances, but rather I should only describe her work: "Safari," a trio for one woman and a couple, concerns memory, history, travel. Three journeyers slowly traverse the stage, their gestures more theatrical than dance-like. What begins as logic ends as absurdity; like scouts, the trio raise their hands to their brows, then transform the gesture into an odd wiggly wave.

Soll juxtaposes incongruous images, a waltz and an hours-long fall or love-making and a corpse-like pose. She warps time and space, creates endless moments and an unidentifiable yet distinct place--I felt as if I must have seen the dance sometime before. This ability to shade time and space with felt qualities is what's meant by an intuition for choreography.

Soll's second work, "Lunch Break," also uses the principle of juxtaposition. Images jumble together at such a fast pace that the eight performers are pushed almost to the point of becoming characters--yet the tempo is so quick that they never quite have time to become anyone. On one level the work parodies dance: Soll dressed in baggy pants and a sweatshirt punches her way through arabesques and pirouettes; one group (construction workers?) breathlessly executes Graham floor exercises; another trio plods in a circle as in many a minimalist dance. Even sections not broadly satiric take on a quality of harried work. In "Lunch Break" Soll inflects time and space with the opposite qualities of those in "Safari"; here place has no history, and time no memory.

Martha Armstrong Gray, a prolific choreographer who has shown over 25 dances in Boston during the last eight years, presented three works in this latest Dance Collective assemblage. "Passing Through" is similar to Soll's work in that it pulls together disparate elements. But whereas Soll sets incongruous images against one another, Gray brings together incongruous styles--the sports parody and the surrealist fantasy. Gray does manage to unify the two, yet connections between the styles go no deeper than the surface. Gray always seems to have a well-conceived them in mind, as is evident in "Passing Through" and in "Re-entry," the tale of a stranger in a fantasy world. In neither instance, however, does she bind the theme to imaginings beyond deliberate thought.

In "Tangent Watchers," the most recent of a series of intimate dances titled "Inscapes," Gray does succeed in reaching beyond her theme. A duet for two women, the pieces begin with Gray pounding her fist into her palm, Susan Dowling catching one wrist with the other hand. Dowling delicately arrests her gestures, Gray percussively snaps hers. Both work within their own style of moving and yet transcend their individuality too, dancing in unison through the second half of the piece. In contrast, Gray starts off another dance in the series, "Looking to See," with unison movement. In this piece a second twosome doesn't have the chance the performers do in "Tangent Watchers" to interpret self through movement.

The works of Dawn Kramer and Judith Chaffee Black are well-crafted, polished statements. Both choreographers steer clear of the dangerous gap between conception and realization haunting Gray's work. Yet neither compacts the poetic suggestiveness of Soll. Kramer's "Notion" is a slick dance to a slick song, picking up its title from Billie Holiday's croon, "If I should take a notion to jump into the ocean, ain't nobody's business if I do." Kramer uses her own slinky way of moving to draw the sinuous lines of Holiday's lament. At one point she cooly trails her index finger along the floor, then follows its path with the rest of her lankiness.

A mirror to music--tracing its form with a mind to undermining its content--is what Kramer does as well in "Haiku." Sitting on stage, cellist Ron Heifetz bows the trills of a Bach suite to no more than a half-dozen dance motifs. The choreography is skeletal, easily divisible into separate parts, and echoes the simplicity of the music's deep-down design.

Black's "Owl and Flower" also sets an instrumentalist on stage. The guitarist Keeset-tanamock strums for roughly the middle third of the piece. Huddled down, Black and John Hofstetter prance in circles, teasing one another. Black cuts unexpectedly to the outside of the circle, Hofstetter surprises herwith a flip over his shoulder. Black uses the same loose athletic style Gray called on in sections of "Passing Through" and Soll in bits of "Lunch Break."

Dance critics are forever writing about dance's immediacy, how it's an experience short-lived and ephemeral. "At the still point there the dance is," penned T.S. Eliot. That "still point" haunts critics--and challenges a stubborn belief that later reflection makes the experience more real.