For Dance, A Season Of The Unexpected Standouts: A Hellmut Gottschild Solo, A Narrative Tap, A Performance In The Park.

Who would have predicted that Dance Now!, a mishmash of programming that included everything but Philadelphia's best dance troupes, would have turned out to be a valid and entertaining experience?

The success of this three-month series at Movement Theater International, which ended in April, is one of several surprises that enlivened Philadelphia's dance scene this past season.

Other hightlights: Hellmut Gottschild, who retired from active duty last year when he left ZeroMoving Dance Company, the troupe he founded, jumped back into the fray with a gem of a solo called Meet Mr. R. Site-specific dances usually mean two things: bad sight lines and missed connections between the dances and the sites. But Leah Stein's Departure, which unfolded in a beautiful field in Fairmount Park on a fine spring day, let us see the performers and the environment in joyful collusion.

Tap-dancing, which in Philadelphia is the most tradition-bound of dance forms, broke new ground in a narrative tap dance called Cyndi'Ella. Another surprise is that the best new dance offered by the Pennsylvania Ballet, Diane Coburn Bruning's In the Vestry, was created for its experimental wing, the Off-Center Ballet.

Some of these surprises may be one-shot deals. Robert Burden, for example, the choreographer of Cyndi'Ella, doesn't have an on-going company at his disposal to enable continuous experimentation in ways to present tap-dancing. And, unfortunately, Diane Bruning's dance never graduated into the Pennsylvania Ballet's regular repertory, where it could reach a wider audience. But the Dance Now! series, with a permanent theater at MTI and

financial backing from the William Penn Foundation, promises to become a regular feature of local dance life. And so does a Pew Trusts-subsidized venture, the Philadelphia Dance Projects.

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The conceptual framework of Dance Now! was the more radical of the two series, because the majority of its six programs were shared by two or more companies. Traditionally, program-sharing has been nixed by dance troupes, which fear losing their identities.