Two years ago, Garth Fagan won a Tony award for his choreography for blockbuster Broadway musical The Lion King. Fagan is not one to rest on his laurels, however; in fact he was relieved to get back to working with his company. "I'm extremely proud of The Lion King," said Fagan, "but what I really love is concert dance, where I have a clear canvas and can show off my beautiful dancers unencumbered."

This year, his company celebrates 30 years in dance and has just completed a successful run at the Joyce Theater in New York City. For its program at the Fine Arts Center the company will perform several works, including a new piece called Trips and Trysts, a recent collaboration with Fagan's friend, colleague and jazz great Wynton Marsalis. In Trips and Trysts, Fagan pursues romance on the rails, while Marsalis creates a party atmosphere with chugging rhythms, slurred trombone slides and tooting horns.

Fagan's choreographic style is one of extremes and a willingness to push movement into space through distortions and dynamics. He doesn't buy into the pas de deux mystique -- the credo that you put a woman down only to pick her up again; he uses lifts sparingly and interestingly. When the dancers embrace, Fagan reconfigures them, revealing its essence. The afterimages left by a Fagan evening are of dancers suddenly speeding up beyond expectation and leaps that carve an asymmetric body shape in the air. It's earthy, vital, with a capacity for wildness, yet anchored in technical finesse, intensity and elegance.

Also included in the evening's program are the virtuosic Prelude with music by Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) and Max Roach and the revival of Easter Freeway Processional. In "Easter Freeway," the choreographer applies his expert musicality to a score by Philip Glass, hearing not only the rhythms but the instrumental timbres, and the unraveling of the music's subtleties. The evening will close with the popular "Woza" where this superb group of dancers weave their bodies into fabulous shapes and move, really move, from the agony of slave ships to a joyous, all-out celebration. As always, the Garth Fagan Company offers an evening of sheer poetry.

The Garth Fagan Company will perform on Thursday, February 15 at 7:30pm in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall. For tickets call 545-2511 or 1-800-999-UMAS.