American Dance Festival.

REVIEWED BY CATHRYN HARDING

In its nineteen years at Duke University, the American Dance Festival has hosted everything in modern dance from the sublime to the ridiculous. This summer was no exception. Fortunately, among the bevy of premieres on ADF's smaller stage there was more to praise than there was to bemoan.

In Afternoon of the Fauns, one of three premieres on his program, Mark Dendy unleashed a gleeful, galloping tribute to Nijinsky. Locating the ballet star's madness in his homosexuality, Dendy made a frankly erotic duet for himself and Lawrence Keigwin. Wearing designer Elizabeth Prince's furry knickers, the energetic fauns ran and ran and ran--great, wide-tripped runs in one spot--until their physical joy took on a sexual complexion. Saucy and playful, spidery and grinning with naughty delight, Dendy and Keigwin celebrated the kind of freedom that could not be imagined in Nijinsky's own time.

Aria, a new solo for Li Chico-Ping, was a study in steadfast devotion. The dancer embarked on a spiritual journey that took her across the stage and eventually through a grand set of white curtains. Her unwavering physical strength a metaphor for her sureness of purpose, Li executed a series of twists, head-stands, and impossibly low penchee arabesques. It was an apt rendering of the contortions that can test even the most muscular faith.

Spirituality returned as a theme in Pitual, a showcase for three dozen ADF students. With the entire theater as his temple, Dendy created a slow-moving frieze of white-clad novitiates that wound its way through the lobby and aisles and eventually onto the stage. It clearly was a work born out of love and respect for the theater.

Lenka Flory, a young Czech choreographer making her American debut, ited spiritual themes as well in . . .and where is Maria? a fullevening piece from 1995 accompanied by a dozen versions of NAve Maria." Setting Catholic iconography--a statue of the Madonna, votive candles--againts the prosaic rolls and seated scoots of her five dancers, Flory was aiming, I think, to show the simultaneous existence of the ordinary and the divine. But her efforts were better realized a month later when she joined the International Choreographers Concert. There she premiered Live and Let live. That dance for nine was delicately spiced with happy awkwardness and finished with the remarkably gentle image of darkness falling on a stage full of flowers that, throughout the work, had been slowly descending from the rahers.

Susana Tambutti premiered Muerte Prevista en el Guion (Round Up the Usual Suspects) on the same program. Beginning with The Dying Swan and ending with the ritual sacrifice of Le Sacre du Printemps, the Argentine choreographer created an inventive and witly tableau of famous female deaths in ballet. With an unfailing command of stagecraft, Tambutti exacted every possible metaphor from four movable ballet barres and some lengths of fabric. (The deathbed of the La Traviata section was particularly inspired.) While the dancing from her four performers was exciting, requiring almost gymnastic precision across those barres and a confident grasp of many movement motifs the piece would have benefited from a more lucid connective thread. I could have wished that so many commendable elements had left me with more than, "so what?"

The third ADF commissioned premiere in that concert was from Spain's Maria Rovira. Tierra de Nadie featured a cast of eleven students inhabiting what looked like a bus shelter to who-knowswhere. With a title translated as "No Man's Land," Rovira's piece alluded to many choreographers' styles. There was o nod to Robbins's West Side Story and Fosse's patented ensemble riffs. There were flamenco, machismo, and martial arts. To my eye, Rovira neatly charted that transitional stage when a student, having worked through other people's material, begins to become her own dancer.

Over the years ADF has done wonderful things by introducing the dance of other countries. Sadly, this year's Portuguese program did not match earlier efforts. Joao Fiadeiro offered the 1995 solo Self(ish-Portrait, whose fitting title I can only amplify by noting that midway through the long, noisy piece Fiadeiro simulated masturbation and fellatio with a hand-held microphone. Three works by Vera Mantero, including the recklessly sloppy Untitled (Nothing to Sell), commissioned for ADF students, shared the themes of existential dread and obsession. Repetitive without illuminating any ideas, Mantero's work induced within me a sympathetically obsessive state. "Please, God," I muttered to myself again and again, "Let this be over soon."