Aide-Memoire.

FEBRUARY 24-MARCH 1, 1998 REVIEWED BY NAOMI ABRAHAMI

Seven wooden panels. Stark white down lights. Six women in white, gliding forward and back. Ominous, throbbing, propulsive music. Flung limbs. Writhing. Chest-slapping. Another case of Euro-angst?

No. Aide-Memoire ("Reminder"), artistic director Rami Be'er's multilayered, seventy-five-minute, minimalistic meditation on the persistent power of memory--in his case, memory of the Holocaust. As the child of a survivor, and the head of a company founded by one, Be'er copes with the tragedy in the only way possible--through the dreamlike filter of memory. Aide-Memoire was the sole work presented by the eighteen-year-old ensemble during its New York debut, which came near the beginning of its first tour of the U.S. since 1984.

The bare stage and naked lighting (also designed by Be'er) provide the black-and-white landscape of a dream, shot through with a single streak of color--the green straps that restrain the arms of the dark-haired woman who flits in and out of this narrow psychic space. Flimsily clad dancers ascend and descend in endless, uniform succession on multilevel platforms, sometimes half-seen behind them, ghostlike and insubstantial.

Crouched against the panels, heads bowed, shoulders stooped, these phantasms become shrunken, lifeless victims. Stripped of individuality, they move through an endless series of preprogrammed patterns without expression. Even love, where it exists--and there is "a time for love," as we are told by a voice quoting the Biblical words from Ecclesiastes--is passionless, desperate, and stunted, as this post-Holocaust generation attempts to rebuild, to "gather stones together."

Finally, the dancers descend from the panels. Men break into soaring arabesques, women into high kicks. Have they become individuals, or are they a line of marching victims, waiting to be chosen for extermination? When the dancers pound out a rhythm in unison on the panels, are they pounding to escape, or have they finally become initiators, agents of their own destiny? The woman who, moments earlier, danced freely, returns with arms bound. Women recede between the panels, cross their arms quietly over their chests. "A time for peace," cries the disembodied voice. Let the ghosts rest. For now.