Dance

If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?

Ralph Macchio, Lord of the Dance. Bet you didn't see that one coming. I always get a little disoriented when a kid from TV's misty past (Macchio was on Eight Is Enough ) pops up as an adult. Scott Baio, Rick Schroder, Butch Patrick, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Cassidy, Mindy Cohn - they all give me a slight case of the whirlies when I see the ravages of time etched on their faces. (I've built up an immunity to Neil Patrick Harris.) But who would have thought Macchio would foxtrot to the top of the leaderboard on the season debut of Dancing With the Stars ?

A dragon dances to bring good luck to the home of Bint Wu as Chinatown celebrates the completion of the Hing Wah Yuen housing development, a 51-unit townhouse development on Callowhill Street near 8th. The name of the development means "Prosperous Chinese Garden. " Built by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, the $7-million project is the culmination of more than eight years of work. The ribbon-cutting ceremony was followed by a Chinese New Year banquet at Joy Tsin Lau restaurant.

The table-setting for full-blown negotations in South Africa continued apace last week, most dramatically with President F.W. de Klerk's lifting of a state of emergency under which some 50,000 blacks have been detained without charges for up to three years. The move came as his ex-prisoner, Nelson Mandela, toured Western Europe, urging that economic sanctions remain in effect against Pretoria pending more fundamental reform. Even though emergency laws have been lifted (except in the province of Natal)

The life and legacy of the Armenian people was portrayed in dance Sunday afternoon at Archbishop Carroll High School in Radnor, as the Sayat Nova Dance Company performed in native costume. The dance company of 40 men and women is named after an 18th-century troubadour.

Ah, Valentine's Day and a chance to dance. And so they did during the Valentine's dance sponsored by the Hometown Senior Citizens Center of Media. The dance was held Saturday at the Redwood Playhouse in Upland.

At Overbrook School for the Blind, students teamed up with dancers from the Philadelphia Civic Ballet for "Dance Happens. " Forty students, ages 5 to 18, performed ballet, jazz and tap for yesterday's show, which was financed by a grant from Arco Chemical Co.

Although Dance in America has probably done more to disseminate dance across the nation than any other television program, it has sometimes been criticized for taking too conservative, or documentational, an approach - for transferring dance conceived for live theater to television lock, stock and barrel. With Paul Taylor's Speaking in Tongues, which airs tonight at 11 on Channel 12, Dance in America (part of PBS's Great Performances series) has finally made an exciting marriage between two mediums.

"Reduce, reuse and recycle" never sounded more hip and sexy. The lyrics, on a CD recorded last year by students with SEAMAAC's Hip Hop Heritage program, are part of a song, "Goin' Green," in which one student rapped in Indonesian and another sang in English about the environment. Yeah, that's right. A rap song about the environment. The hip-hop program is fun, but it's not all games. Besides break-dancing, some students learn how to write and record songs, as demonstrated by the "Hip Hop Heritage: The Album Vol. 1" CD, which includes "Goin' Green.

Support Philly's women of football tonight at TPDS as DJ WGB spins dance music for the Liberty Belles fund-raiser. Ricardo Montalban won't be in the house to make dreams come true, but never mind, because "Fantasy Island" at Shampoo on Saturday will have Sandra Collins, Louis Osbourne, StarChild, Dr. Octo-pussy, Ed Sitler, and Steve Singer. Contact Lloylita Prout at 215-854-2877 or lprout@phillynews.com.

After 44 years on - and more recently off - the stage, Dance Theatre of Harlem opened Thursday night at the Annenberg Center. It was a welcome return, and the company looked both young and sophisticated. Led by founding member and longtime principal dancer Virginia Johnson, the troupe was on hiatus for eight years after facing a debt of more than $2 million. When the curtain went down in 2004, the company had 44 dancers. Now, it's performing with just 18. This week's tour to Philadelphia brought two artists home.

Immerse yourself in different cultures on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and celebrate Philadelphia's 10 Sister Cities at the Sister Cities Park International Festival. Event festivities include dancing, music, cooking demos, and hands-on activities. There will be cultural activities and performances throughout the day. The Italian Council's Luigi Scotto will sing, the Guang Hua Chinese School troupe will dance, and Taiko drummers will enrich with a Japanese percussion show. Guests can even get a French language lesson at 3:05 p.m. Other activities include a Cameroonian fashion show and Israeli, Polish and Korean dance performances.

The opening of the Come Together Festival at Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Thursday night showed just four reasons critics consider Philadelphia the country's top dance city (outside the Big Apple). This festival of 27 established and emerging companies spotlights only a sliver of the richness of our dance culture. World-renowned Rennie Harris Puremovement set the pace with Continuum (1997), for five company members and guest dancers. Battling it out with serial solos in a circle of light, and cheered on by their mates, Dinita Askew and Katia Cruz were jewels in Harris' crown of astonishing dancers.

TAWANDA "WAWA" Jones would always joke that the drill team she founded, the Camden Sophisticated Sisters (CSS), was ready to make its Hollywood debut. On Tuesday, that aspirational joke became reality when the CSS girls taught the celebs how it was done on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars. " The eight ladies from South Jersey performed a stunning number to Beyonce 's "Get Me Bodied. " To see a video of their performance, go to ph.ly/CamdenDWTS. Jones still can't believe her troupe made it to prime time.

The Beatles' song "Come Together" was an anthem of odd juxtapositions: joo joo eyeballs, walrus gumboat. And the Suzanne Roberts Theatre beginning Thursday will be a forum for some odd dance pairings - hip-hop, gymnastics, aerial, ballet, jazz, and modern - when 27 Philadelphia dance companies perform in a nine-day festival conceived by choreographer Roni Koresh and called, appropriately, Come Together. In residence at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Koresh Dance Company - ranked by DanceUSA in the top 90 of the nation's 650 companies - is opening its spring season to 26 other troupes and, with a grant from PNC Bank, has added a second weekend.

READINGTON, N.J. - A school district in Hunterdon County canceled a middle-school dance after the embattled principal received a threatening e-mail. Authorities did not disclose specific details about the threat made against Readington Middle School principal Sharon Moffat. But they said the threat received Friday morning apparently came "from overseas" and was not considered credible. A dance scheduled for Friday night was canceled after the threat was received. District Superintendent Barbara Sargent said township police offered to have an officer at the school, but she said it seemed "more sensible" not to hold the dance.

I hear the swagging before I find it. The pulsating and the applause, the eight-counts too big even for the basement terrain of the massive, gargoyled Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus, where I have come. I'm here to find the kids who are going to put on a weekend show - the West Philly students who, thanks to a program called CityStep, have been practicing all year to amaze their family and friends with the dances they've learned from a couple dozen incredibly devoted Penn undergrads.

By Andrea Camilleri Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli Penguin, 288 pp., $15 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky Fifteen books into his Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (with several titles yet to be translated from Italian/Sicilian/Camillerian into English), Andrea Camilleri manages both to offer readers the pleasures they've come to expect, and to vary the ingredients and add enough emotional depth to keep the series from growing tired. In book 14 ( The Age of Doubt )

CONGRATULATIONS to Alison Young , who won the fifth annual Dancing with the Philadelphia Stars on Sunday night at the Crystal Tea Room. Young, the vice president of External Affairs for the National Constitution Center, danced the foxtrot with Paul Samuelnas from the Studio on Take the Lead on Pine. Young was clad in floor-length pink spandex, covered in rhinetstones. She had no dance experience before. Q102 DJ Maxwell came in second with the waltz, while Fox29's Kacie McDonnell came in third with the tango.

If there's one thing Ira Glass knows, it's that you can't put a dance performance on the radio. The public radio journalist, who hosts NPR's popular weekly newsmagazine This American Life , was hit with that truth - and the resulting conundrum - two years ago when he fell in love with a performance by New York choreographer Monica Bill Barnes' modern dance ensemble. "I was struck by how the aesthetics of her show matched the tone and feeling of the radio show I do," Glass, 54, said this week in a phone interview.