Not many choreographers trade their freedom for school, but then, the vivacious Pam Tanowitz is no typical choreographer.  As soon as she reached a point in her career where she felt her dances were becoming repetitive, she enrolled in the dance program at Sarah Lawrence College.  "I had three jobs--the whole New York thing," she says.  "You schlep around in subways to go to those jobs, and then you have two hours to make work.  I didn't have time to think."

Tanowitz could make the same dance over and over again, and it would be more interesting that the work of most choreographers.  Her style, which pits quirky, gestural movement and humor against formal structure, is appealing, accessible and invigorating to watch. This weekend at Musical Theatre Works, Tanowitz's Open 24 Hours Dance Company (named after the hustle of New York) presents REady-made, set to music of Bartok; Sifted, which incorporates toilet plungers; Too Rich for My Blood, a film noir rendition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; and Duck the Oyster, a square dance for three dancers.

Tanowitz, 27, has produced the majority of her concerts herself since moving to New York in 1991.  Her first performance in the city was at CBGB's Gallery.  "I raise money myself and do it on a shoestring," she says.  "One thing I've learned in New York is you can't wait around for people to produce you--you have to be hell-bent on doing it yourself."

As a dancer, Tanowitz began training relatively late, at 15, with jazz and modern technique.  "I always wish that my mom had started me as a three-year-old with ballet," she says, "because I'm a little bit of a closet ballerina."  She began choreographing in 1990 during her junior year at Ohio State University, where she found that teachers were more impressed with her choreographic efforts than with her dancing.

"There was on teacher who wouldn't look at me in technique class, but in choreography class, loved me," she recalls.  "I had this idea that modern dance was boring and generic and I didn't want to create anything that I had ever seen before in my life, which was ridiculous.  I was so adament.  You know what you're like when you're 20," she adds.

While her past work has based itself on strapping a stream of witty and provocative gestures onto formal movement, Tanowitz hopes to add a "layer of style" to Ready-made, the third version of a piece she's been working on over the past year.  In preparation, she watched videotapes of George Balanchine's shifted directions.  Ready-made is the first dance she's created with the music as inspiration.

"The Bartok is really attractive to me--the quick twitterings and plucking so the violin remind me of my movement," she says. "Basically, the piece is kind of like a laundry list of known movements, like the arabesque, which I've tried to put a twist on."

Although the movement is more structured than in previous pieces, Tanowitz, as always, tinkers with classical vocabulary.  "At times the dancers do a plain arabesque, and other times they do an arabesque while holding their crotch. They grasp their head," she says, pushing her own.  "Not making the gestures look as though it's tacked on is my main concern.  I want it to be integrated all the time."

Tanowitz's main mentor at Sarah Lawrence is Viola Farber, the former Merce Cunningham dancer who heads the dance department. "She will walk into a composition class and say, 'Make something.  Right now.' It's terrible, but that doesn't matter because it makes you think on your feet.  It makes you think, Okay let me look at my environment: What can I do? Make a sculpture with chairs! Whatever.  But it keeps you on the edge and not comfortable in your ways."

She regards graduate school, of which a year remains, as a gift to herself. "I'm going to have to pay for it the rest of my life, but it's where I get to think about dance, talk about dance, all day, every day for two years. It's affected more than the way I look at dance; being in this environment has changed the way I look at life.  That's integral to making dances.  I would never look at a tree before I went to school--I would walk around the city with my head down.  You can't have tunnel vision--you need to have something to make art about and dances about.  If you walk around with blinders on, every dance will end up looking the same."