Adventurous Women Choreographers

Maguy Marin, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Nina Wiener Set the International Dance World on End.

Over the past five years, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has become the Lincoln Center of modern dance. The dance series of the three-month Next Wave Festival presents the works of choreographers on the forefront of contemporary dance. Past seasons have included Nina Weiner, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, and others.

In 1981 the dance series of the Next Wave Festival offered a core of experimental established choreographers familiar to new York audiences: Trish Brown, Laura Dean, and Lucinda Childs. Since then the Next Wave Festival has continued to program New York choreographers with large followings, but has also brought in lesser-known foreign artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Carolyn Carlson.

Spectacular Success

There have been spectacular successes at the Next Wave Festival, most recently last season's Rosas Danst Rosas by De Keersmaeker. De Keersmaeker returned this year with Elena's Aria, a ninety-minute work for five women. This stark, minimal piece was by far the most inaccessible of the dance offerings. The choreographer conceded nothing to the audience did not pander, did not try to entertain. What we saw on stage is purposeful, diligent exploration of space and time, not diversion.

Chairs from kitchenettes of times past line the back of the bare stage; others are scattered along the sides. Like an empty dance hall, the setting suggests nostalgia, history, past loves. Seated at the far side of the stage by the proscenium, a woman reads in halting English from Tolstoy, "I cannot overlook a certain sorrow that has lurked in my heart." Although passages from Brecht, Dostoyevski, and Castro are read over the course of the production, this is the line that remains in the mind, setting the theme of the work.

The movements De Keersmaeker uses in Elena's Aria are few. Women move from chair to chair, twirling as they rise to sit in the next chair. They walk the circumference of a chalk circle in high heels, with tight, bound steps. Seated, the women cross their legs at the ankles and nervously gather up their skirts, exposing taut, sinewy legs. The dancers move about with the rushes and hesitations of conversation. There are also long moments when very little happens or the dancers are motionless, leaving us to absorb the emotional desolation of the work.

During the dance, a film is projected on the back wall of the set. Depicting buildings being dynamited by a wrecking company, each falling in slow motion, the film is fascinating in its beautiful portrayal of destruction. Perhaps serving as a metaphor for the stunning demolition of the soul that seems to be occurring among the women, the wreckage is disturbing and awesome.

In contrast to the chill distance of Elena's Aria, the works of Maguy Marin were immediate crowd-pleasers, accessible and familiar. Compagnie Maguy Marin performed two works, Babel Babel and Eden, on alternating evenings at BAM. Based loosely on biblical themes, both pieces are a kind of quillwork of currently popular modern dance styles.

Eden is a collection of non sequiturs: people in flesh-colored bodysuits, Adam and Eve, knights in armor, a Hollywood starlet and leading man, dancing pelicans, King Kong. Marin uses these themes like paints in a palette, contrasting, combining, introducing, and reintroducing the disparate elements.

Male Predators

In this post-Eden world, however, all is not always so peaceful. Women are often brutalized or coerced by male predators, or simply used and ignored. In an athletic, sinuous duet, a woman winds around the body of her male partner with the fluidity and ease of a stripe on a barbershop pole. Yet, after the passionate duet, the man walks off, obvious to the woman, who hangs onto his ankles and drags behind him like an afterthought.

The work is filled with many ingredients, and it often suggests the work of Pina Bausch, Butoh, and Bejart. Yet for all of the activity on the stage, the dance does not come together as a whole. Marin chooses a theme that is strongly narrative, then takes a surreal approach. The significance of all the various characters in unclear; at one point an egg-shaped creature slowly wanders onto stage amid primitive looking dancers, twiddles his thumbs for awhile, then walks away.

Babel Babel is more linear in development, and more easily grasped. For this work, the Opera House stage is covered with rolling hills of sod. Nude dancers cross the mounds, rolling down the slopes, dancing a simple celebratory dance. Pastoral and innocent, the idyllic first section is followed by the advent of civilization. With hammers and saws, performers dressed in explorers' clothes raise shanties. At first the little group is gentle and joyous, but it is soon corrupted by various vices. Suddenly, the stage explodes into a strange blend of a punk, fifties beach party, complete with a band and bathing suits. Marin sings a collection of pop songs, including "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," in blond beehive hairdo and red party dress. The cartoonlike events on the stage become more and more decadent--grotesque women wear babies (dolls) strung around their waists like skirts, husbands and wives slug it out to "Tequila," and Marin takes off the red dress to reveal a slinky blackstudded outfit and sings torch songs to the men in the audience.

Corruption Consumes

Eventually the corruption consumes itself, and the villagers lie unconscious on the ground. All of the sets disappear, leaving only the original hills of grass. Moving slowly, the villagers free themselves of their clothes and return to a more primal state. They dance differently now, reflecting lessons learned, emotional debts paid. They have been reborn. Marin's concepts, costumes, sets, and music often overpower the dance. After one leaves the theater, the beehive hairdos, the pelicans, stay in the mind, but the dance evaporates.

In the dances of Nina Wiener, the voluptuous choreography is always the focus. Fierce Attachments, the first of the two works presented at the Opera House, is aptly described by its composer, Lucia Hwong, as "a landscape of the unconscious where female sensuality becomes a driving force."

The curtain rises to reveal a glamorous woman (actress Isabel Garcia Lorca) lounging on a platform bed lit with small white bulbs. She stretches luxuriously, a languorous, sensual, slightly erotic action that is reflected and developed thought the dance.

Fierce Attachments, choreographed to the contemporary Asian music of Hwong, is visually dazzling, with brightly colored backdrops sliced by dramatic silhouettes of panels dropped from above. It is an intoxicating stage design, but the viewer is most captivated by the choreography. The phrases of long, silken movement unwind in ribbons of dance. Wiener's work, while feminine, is not fragile, but of robust, tensile strength.

Combining Old and New

Karole Armitage, formerly of the Geneva Ballet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, created modern works during the early part of her choreographic career, then began to set works in Pointe shoes. She now has a full-fledged ballet company, the Armitage Ballet. Combining conventional ballet steps and phrases with a modern approach to structure and space, Armitage has created a style uniquely her own. Her dances are of spiky, splintery texture, with hops often off-kilter and legs extended to the sky. Wrists are bent, legs and arms are often broken at eccentric angles. There is a sophisticated coyness to her dances, at once knowing and gawky.

The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler, the second Armitage-David Salle production, is danced to an eclectic combination of music and voice. It ranges from the nightclub comedian Lord Buckley to the music of Webern and Stravinsky. In this work, Armitage's bold, skewed choreography is especially reminiscent of Balanchine. Salle's often whimsical stage designs and costumes include such devices as tutus lit from the inside.

The Armitage-Salle collaboration is an example of the particular strength of the Next Wave Festival: bringing together major talents on a grand scale, encouraging collaborations, providing the unlimited freedom of a large stage. The Tarnished Angels and Elizabethan Phrasing recall the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev: strident modernism, collaborative effort, and bright, fanciful costuming. This is the creative, vivid cultural atmosphere that the Next Wave strives to sustain.