Jennifer Dunning, Ideas And Reflections On Time And Memory, The New York Times, August 4, 1990

''Hey, guys, we made it through Megadance,'' an audience member said as she filed out of Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday night after the concluding program in the Serious Fun festival. It was a long night, with eight commissioned dances that together ran for about two and a half hours. The accent was on light entertainment, though, with one charming piece taking the evening's honors.

''Hey, guys, we made it through Megadance,'' an audience member said as she filed out of Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday night after the concluding program in the Serious Fun festival. It was a long night, with eight commissioned dances that together ran for about two and a half hours. The accent was on light entertainment, though, with one charming piece taking the evening's honors.

That dance was Liz Lerman's ''Perfect Ten,'' a work about being asked to make a 10-minute dance for the festival. Typically, Ms. Lerman put together a taped script of her own and her performers' reminiscences and comments, here about the nature of time and memory. She added a little music, in this case a John Philip Sousa march, and stirred in odd little gestures and natural movement as compellingly simple and rough-edged as a folk carving.

''The Perfect Ten,'' performed by members of Ms. Lerman's Dance Exchange company, manages, also typically, to make no distinction between performers in their 20's and those in their 60's at the same time as it draws on their varying life experiences. ''In 10 minutes, you can get born, die and get married,'' one of the older performers says dryly. ''You can't get divorced, though.'' For one of the younger performers, 10 was ''a one and a nothing'' in his childhood. When his grandfather died, he recalled, his grandmother suddenly became ''someone next to nothing.''

Late in the piece, Ms. Lerman talks of ''the perfect 10 minutes,'' reading children's books in bed with her husband and her 2-year-old daughter, whose ideas about time provide one of the more amusing sequences in this funny and poignant work. The cast for ''The Perfect Ten'' also included Amie Dowling, Tom Dwyer, Judith Jourdin, Tom Truss and Boris Willis.

The program opened with Donald Byrd's ''What Makes Samantha . . .,'' a punchy, provocative dance set to a pulsating score by Peter Gordon and dedicated to Laura Beaumont, an administrator at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Three male dancers shift ranks continuously, one of them breaking loose for bursts of bravura dancing. For the most part, however, the men exist as partners for a ballerina, in a dance that comments slyly on the manners and gender differentiation of classical ballet. Jeremy Lemme was the pyrotechnist and Wendi Lees Beckwitt the ballerina in a likable cast completed by Andre George and Robert Logan-Mayo. Gabriel Berry designed the teasingly stylish costumes.

Liz Prince's costume for ''Time to Go,'' choreographed and performed by Margarita Guergue, was also stylish. Hahn Rowe's rich and driving score was filled with light and dark and textural changes. But there was a vacuum at the heart of the solo. Miss Guergue seemed to have a somber theme in mind in this dance of slow disrobing. But what came through was the fact that she is an agile mover with a limited vocabulary of slithers, loops, walks, stares and dry, uncommunicative little gestures.

Jim Self's ''Getting Married'' followed. Depicting a wedding ceremony for Mr. Self and Julio Torres, the piece had the kind of scrappy giddiness of much downtown club theater of the last decade. Geoff Howell's costumes and set were shrewdly ingenuous, as was the cast of nine men and women, who played such characters as a singing Pope, sunshine and a cupid. The genuine and touching sweetness of Mr. Self and Mr. Torres clearly suggested that one of the few truly irreconcilable differences among us may be that participation in bedrock social institutions like marriage is not open to everyone.

Peter Pucci's ''Heir of Civility,'' danced to George Gershwin's intriguing ''Lullaby for Strings,'' was a tango of sorts for two men in business suits. Their cool, unvarying gentlemanliness is broken, almost unnoticeably at first, by small slaps and punches that build to all-out battle. A clever if extended joke, it was wittily performed by Mr. Pucci and Jim Blanc.

In 'Down in the Mouth,' John Kelly proved once more that he is a master of atmosphere. But this new work - which features a mildly mad scientist, a hyperactive boy with yellow-painted hair, a staring man in cotton briefs with red-painted hair, a refugee from ''Marat/Sade'' and two women, called Sympathy and Tea, who gossip together in English and in French over tea - looks overpopulated and off its mark. Huck Snyder designed the vivid scenery for ''Down in the Mouth,'' which was performed to music by Arvo Part and a Donizetti aria that finally draws the characters together.

Brenda Daniels's ''Glare'' was a sleek ritual for herself and three other strong, bold female dancers, set to music by Marc Farre, a composer with a gift for enhancing or building the atmosphere of a dance. Looking at first like a mysterious, slightly punky cycladic figure, Ms. Daniels became the high priestess stretching, crumpling and suddenly, a little shockingly, crawling through a glare of light designed by Nicole Werner. The cast also included Kristina Harvey, Calla Jo and Paula Swiatowski.

In Stephan Koplowitz's interminable ''Target Heart Rate,'' which ended the program, a man pedals away on an exercise bicycle as six hard-dancing figures churn behind him and finally soothe him. Set to music by Andrew Warshaw and some amusing taped grunts, murmurs and laughs, the dance was unclear in its theme, and the dancers had less interesting things to do than Mr. Koplowitz, a trenchant if understated mime on his bicycle.