American Dance Festival.

Page Auditorium and Reynolds Industries Theatre Duke University Durham, N. C. June 5-July 19, 2003

The American Dance Festival's seventieth season turned out to be one of the best in its twenty-six years in Durham, and a fitting tribute to late Co-Director Stephanie Reinhart's legacy. This season focused primarily on foreign dancemakers, who presented U.S. premieres, world premieres, and an ADF debut.

French choreographer Maguy Marin proclaimed dance as a force to change the world when she accepted the Samuel H. Scripps/ADF Award for lifetime contributions to modern dance. "The stage is not a place of entertainment. It is the world," Marin said.

She illustrates this credo in her company's performance of Les Applaudissements ne se mangent pas (One Can't Eat Applause). It does not entertain. Its aggression does produce an edgy disquiet as dancers sling, chase, grab, drag, chest-butt, and eye each other like bugs about to be crushed. Repetition becomes tedious, but without it, would the one moment of compassion, as two men hug each other for a long time, have as much impact?

France's Dominique Boivin, Japan's Akiko Kitamura, and Russia's Tatiana Baganova presented world premieres in a shared program. Boivin's poetic Post-C.A.R.D.S. uses dancers' memories, spoken word, video images, telling gestures, and even traffic signs. One dancer jogs on a treadmill during the entire thirsty minutes. It includes an amazing lift in which a male dancer places his hand on a female dancer's shoulder and somehow levers himself above her head.

Kitamura's Enact Oneself aptly conveys the emotions of relationships mostly in the physical manipulation of partners and, in one case, a suggestion of physical abuse.

Baganova's Lazy Susan could be called Bounce for her ingenious use of trampoline and dancers-turned-pogo sticks, thanks to their partners. Women in satin dresses display a plucky determination as well as lush beauty, as men sweep them off their feet. The banal conversation at the end detracts from this otherwise engaging work.

When it comes to raising bizarre to the level of spectacle, Japan's Dairakudakan delivers. With white-painted bodies, wide-open months, and red-rimmed eyes, the troupe jerked, shook, and contorted its way through Artistic Director Akaji Maro's U.S. premiere, Ryuba, and troupe member Takuya Muramatsu's world premiere, Takara Jima (Treasure Island). In each, there is a mythic sense of change after struggle. MURAMATSU DISPLAYED A MASTERY OF BUTOH AS WELL AS PERSONAL VISION IN TAKARA JIMA, in which he gave a tour-de-force performance as a peg-legged sailor, particularly his cataclysmic twitching near the end. The cumulative effect proves cathartic.

The Nrityagram Dance Ensemble's exquisite Sri--In Search of the Goddess, an ADF premiere by Surupa Sen, radiates a female energy drawn from Odissi, India's oldest classical dance, and the individual empowerment of modern dance. Sen, the company's artistic director, combines classical and modern sensibilities in "Sri Savitri" inspired by a mythological heroine. Her use of the body contact of modern dance adds emotional depth and individuality to the ritual Odissi style. Some of the modern moves seem more like exercises in freedom, but most--such as when a dancer cradles another--appear integral to her vision of the goddess within.

La Maison's performance of French choreographer Nasser Martin-Gousset's Bleeding Stone puts the viewer in a living room with adolescents who suffer from ennui, self-absorption, and a preoccupation with sex and rock 'n' roll. Projected scenes, viewed through a window, add a cinematic touch but the "plot" would not hold viewers. The funniest moment occurs when a woman pronounces that it's the last time she's going to clean up after the others, then proceeds, with sexual gusto, to mop the floor.

Lin Hwai-min incorporates meditative and martial arts movements in Cursive as Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan embodies the energy and look of calligraphy. In the final image, a female dancer resembles broad and thin brushstrokes as she bends one leg out to the side and extends the other. The set consists entirely of calligraphy, including a tactile sense Of ink permeating paper as brushstrokes magically flow across a panel. The most mind-expanding moment occurs when the lights come back up to reveal a stage completely covered with calligraphy. As dancers move through these projected images, they resemble ancestral ghosts, perhaps of calligraphers--a strangely beautiful effect.