Plays have scripts and operas have scores, but dance pieces sometimes live only in the bodies of the dancers who perform them. That idea takes flesh this week when the Danny Grossman Dance Company presents "Rooms", the 1955 masterpiece by revered U.S, choreographer Anna Sokolow.

Intimate knowledge of how to perform the groundbreaking piece - the first modern dance ever nationally televised in the United States - has been passed to Grossman's company by Lorry May, an archivist and "authorized reconstructionist"
of the Sokolow repertory.

"Anna was very influenced by Stanislavsky, the Actors Studio," May says. "That's where "Rooms" began, with actors and dialogue." Sokolow's politics, a product of her Russian-Jewish background, are evident in this stripped-down meditation on social isolation, which began as narrative.

"

"I just finished a project in Philadelphia where we reconstructed two dances," May says. The original dancers, stimulated by photographs and each other's recollections, drew the piece out of their body memory, allowing a video to be made. But May refuses to use videos as teaching tools when passing on Sokolow's work.

"It's really bad to have that (external) image, because they have to do the work from the inside out," says May, who doesn't even use a mirror during rehearsals. "If you can see, you don't feel. And I don't know why that's true with the human body, but I certainly have felt that in my life."

American-born Grossman, who first saw "Rooms" in mid-'60s NewYork, included two of his own pieces in a program, which runs from Jan. 28 to Feb. 1 at the Premiere Dance Theatre (416-973-4000).

"What a wonderful time to show the Canadian modern dance artists what influenced them," Grossman says of "Rooms". "And many of them don't know it influenced them, because they haven't seen it. But it did."