December 3, 1995

REVELATIONS" WAS BORN ON A CHILL Sunday afternoon in January 1960 at the 92d Street Y. Created by a handsome, charming young Broadway show dancer named Alvin Ailey, the piece was a success from the start, not only with that first, stunned audience but also with dancegoers around the world, from Australia to Europe to China and back. Today, "Revelations" is perhaps the best known and most loved of all American modern-dance classics. Thirty-five years after its creation, "Revelations" will be celebrated by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater with a special performance on Wednesday, the opening night of the company's monthlong season. For this occasion the music, haunting Negro spirituals, will be performed live by singers and instrumentalists, a departure from the company's years of using taped accompaniment. It will be a fitting tribute, for spirituals were the heart and inspiration of the dance: in "Revelations," Ailey looked back to the churches of his West Texas childhood and to the songs' messages of faith.

Giuliani Defends Child Policy

ALTHOUGH Long Island employers have added thousands of jobs this year, the local economy is changing, economists say, and layoffs that have disrupted many lives may become permanent. The economy is recovering slowly from the recession that began in the late 1980's, in which the unemployment rate rose to 7.4 percent in 1992 from 3.2 percent in 1988, a rate equal to the national average. By 1994, the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.6 percent. But some fields that economic experts had expected to grow, including hospitals and banking, did not expand.

NISSAN'S introductory literature says that the buyers of its 1996 Pathfinder, like the buyers of other sport-utility vehicles, will be interested in skiing, tennis, travel and gourmet foods. It also expects them to be readers, and if that is true, the customers are going to be bemused by a dashboard that plays fast and loose with the English language. For instance, there isn't room for a lot of description on the speed-control button, so the elves in engineering simply hyphenated the control like this:

ABOUT the only sound inside Intel's new factory here is a robotic whir, high overhead, made by the tiny white cars of a miniature monorail. They ferry a precious cargo of eight-inch silicon wafers. Each is covered with a grid of nearly 300 thumbnail-sized semiconductor chips, and each chip is microscopically packed with millions of electronic gateways, or transistors. Producing a state-of-the-art microprocessor is the Everest of modern manufacturing, and the Intel Corporation's new plant stands at the summit. The futuristic factory, opened in September, makes the most sophisticated microprocessors that run today's personal computers: the Pentium chip, packed with 3.3 million transistors, and Intel's next-generation Pentium Pro, with 5.5 million transistors.