The only international production in the dance section of the continuing Tokyo Festival of Performing Arts turned out to be a heavyweight contender, a collaboration betweentwo of the German dancers and choreographers who, with Pina Bausch, have formed the representative triangle of German dance for the last two to three decades. Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffmann debuted "Ueber Kreuz" Nov. 22 at Park Tower Hall in Shinjuku.

Performances have their own way of morphing in the consciousness into a collection of images that shift and gradually sort themselves into a visual memory, strong or fast-fading, with highlights increasingly breaking free from all the padding. But such was the precision and attention to form displayed by Hoffmann and Linke that "Ueber Kreuz" remained a clear constellation of distinct and disparate movement patterns. In a dance world in which productions use movement in competition for attention with text and theatrical elements, Hoffmann and Linke showed us pure, unadulterated movement.

White paper lined the stage, with separate long rectangular screens on wheels providing a changing landscape in the center. It was an austere backdrop, with black fabric screens hiding ceiling lights hitting a white canvas floor. Hoffmann and Linke peopled this monochromatic dream world as dancers in black and shimmering gray costumes, somehow rendered two-dimensional as they cut patterns of diagonal movement dictated by the Laban notation projected on one of the mobile screens.

Rudolph von Laban was as good a place as any for the two of them to start. He established Labanotation, a way of writing and recording movement that looks a bit like cryptic architectural blueprints evolving from one vertical line, which represents the dancer's body. Perhaps best remembered for his symmetrical choreography for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Laban built up his body of work in Britain, where he lived from the later 1930s. The projected images provided clues as to the length of time Hoffmann or Linke would hold patterns or poses, as the length of the lines and symbols coming from this vertical staff or axis indicate the length of the movement itself. Their silhouettes against backlit screens were set to a piano score by Helmut Lachenmann, of severe dotted rhythms on repeated notes and a honkytonk intro that sounded a bit like Carmen's aria from Bizet.

At times, like many Folkwang-Hochschule dance demonstrations in Germany, particularly in Essen, the work where both dancers were on stage sometimes came off as yet another exercise in precise placement and time-keeping. But in the solo work, with Hoffmann moving deftly, cleanly and with total surety and Linke using a more freewheeling idiom, it was disconcerting to be swept away by this severe dance form, and to wonder, at the end of a yet another daunting piece of movement, how did had lost us in the movement and carried us to this point?

Hoffmann displayed her well-honed aesthetics of angularity, one hip jutting in profile past a splayed hand or arms swinging around in sculpted shapes. At one point, as she dropped black balls and bent over the last one as it hit the floor without bouncing, the tension from armpit to fingertip was palpable. She revisited this image as she closed out her solo, but left the ball on the floor, in a subtle, wholly intellectual appreciation of the meaning inherent in repetition. Her finest hour was a dance with a deer's antlers shaped and fitting over her shoulders in ultra-expressionist symbolism.

Linke, in a simple gray shift, danced past endurance, her fair hair swirling around her head, in fragile solo to a haunting score by Salvatore Sciarrino, arching her legs, hips, arms and torso in a restless communion with the floor as fulcrum. The sibilance of soft shoes on stretched canvas in repeated patterns of movement created its own soft shoe-shuffle score. With this level of concentration, this nonabating tension, it was scary indeed to think what these two older dancers could have pared away, the patterns they had jettisoned to arrive at something so seamless and streamlined. It ended against a projected sketch by Mary Wigman, a nod to Linke's training at the Wigman studio in Berlin in the 1970s, and Hoffmann's relocation there after her work with Bochum Theater. But it was the dancers' shared work at Essen, where they led the company until 1977, and their independent legacies as directors of Bremen Dance Theater that created the great comparisons and contrasts in "Ueber Kreuz."

This was strong stuff indeed, strong historic stuff that brought together the commonality of German dance in the 20th century, despite Linke and Hoffmann's differing traditions. But more than any consideration of German or other dance traditions, "Ueber Kreuz" was finally a challenging piece of work by two professionals still working at an "ueber" peak that would appall more compromising dancers entering the profession today.