THE LUCIEN SHOW

"Well, that crane is me, in a way," Lucien says. "I think man has an innate attraction to birds because they represent what we can't achieve, and that is flight."

Which reminds him of his most recent dance piece. Now that he's no longer reliving the pains of World War II and sexual rejection, he's thinking about birds more than ever--to the point of creating another simple, powerful body motion. The inspiration came to him on a recent trip to the Falkland Islands, he says, where he discovered albatrosses.

"They would lay eggs, and the males and females would take turns sitting on them," he recalls. "I saw them shuffle to the edge of the precipice and fall over and float out onto the air. The more wind there is, the better they fly, and if they sleep at all, they sleep on the wing. On our way to Antarctica I saw them off the end of boat. They were riding the wind, floating back and forth, as if they were doing a perpetual dance. I found that wonderful.