American Dance Festival.

JUNE 12-JULY 26, 1997 REVIEWED BY SUSAN BROILI

The American Dance Festival's sixty-third year and twentieth season in Durham was packed with programs that offered plenty of works worth watching. The best dances can liven up even the most bone-weary dancegoer. Programs by the African American Dance Ensemble and the International Choreographers project did that for me. Chuck Davis's ensemble of strong, passionate, and acrobatic dancers has never looked or sounded better. Dressed in white, dancers moved with meditative grace to the heartbeat of drums, harmonica, and violin in Ronald K. Brown's premiere, Free, both an affirmation of hope and a recognition of the forces that can kill it. Repeated movement, such as clearing ground and casting seed, and the constant Row of dancers, often walking, gave a sense of perseverance.

The International Choreographers program featured premieres set on ADF students by David Grenke (from the U.S.), Myriam Herve-Gil (France), and Maria Rovira (Spain). Rovira's Ale (The Essential Breath) proved the most innovative work. It opened with blue light on a misty stage as a woman stood, balanced, and swung on a trapeze in various ways. Even on the ground, group movements looked airy. In another section, three women undulated their hips, moving playfully to a toy piano tango. Finally, a woman swayed, head down, her feet wrapped around trapeze ropes, then slid down the ropes into the arms of a man.

Grenke presented a life lesson in how to fall and get up again in his multimedia Humpty-Dumpty, in which a woman fell repeatedly. The soft slap of her landing was nothing compared to the splat of other dancers hitting a wall and then the floor. Herve-Gil's Julot and Nini dealt, in one brief section, with men abusing their waltz partners who played a role in their own victimization by coming back and playing up to the men. But mostly, the work celebrated the waltz. Even the audience was invited to dance. Soon the stage was filled with waltzers.

Another ballroom dance, the tango, inspired Paul Taylor's premiere, Piazzolla Caldera. It takes its cue from the fiery, bittersweet, and dark emotions of Astor Piazzolla's music, which leads Taylor into a new, more theatrical direction that looks at both the sexy surface and seamy underside of life viewed through social dance.

Pilobolus Dance Theatre also plunged into the emotional realm in its new Gnomen, a male quartet that is its most powerful, personal dance to date. Dedicated to the memory of Pilobolus dancer Jim Blanc, who died of complications arising from AIDS last year, the dance is the troupe's caring send-off to spiritual transcendence. It began with four dancers linked in one rolling hoop and ended with them sitting Zen-like, on their heels, knees on the floor. In an unforgettably poignant image, three men used their toes to lift the other man several inches from the floor and gently swung him, as though rocking a baby in heaven.

Trisha Brown went the other way--to Hades. Even so, twelve minutes there was not nearly long enough as she presented the premiere of Canto/Pianto from her re-creation of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo. I could watch her combination of liquid, effortless, no-bones movements and angular torques even as fire singed my feet. Dancers looked like flames as they rose and fell, trying to get to Eurydice, but she's rescued by Orpheus--this time.

Mark Haim showed the full version of his long-evolving work, The Goldberg Variations. He earned applause for the sheer audacity and courage in performing thirty solos to Bach's music of the same name, played live by pianist Andre Gribou. Haim avoided the soloist's pitfall of self-absorption and, with sincerity, humor, and inventive use of stagecraft, won the audience's trust in this seventy-four-minute tour de force. In one variation he undressed and threw his clothes offstage, only to have another set thrown down to him. In another, he invited audience members to literally move him, but turned the tables by telling them to freeze; then he manipulated them.

Donald Byrd's style also provided mesmerizing moments; his marriage of the mercurial quickness and grace of ballet with idiosyncratic gestures was best illustrated in the "I Got the Wilis" section of his Life Situations: Daydreams on Giselle. In it, black-wigged Wilis in frothy skirts cowered and twitched like subservient animals whenever their queen appeared.

The French ended this season with panache. Lyons National Opera Ballet demonstrated a flair for both the abstract and the dramatic in its ADF debut program of works by Herve Robbe, Susan Marshall, and Maguy Marin. It was a real treat to see vintage work by the talented Marin, and her 1979 Contrastes, set to music by Bela Bartok was a good choice for a finale. The gap between the wealthy and the working class was vividly illustrated by a line of round-shouldered, gray-suited office workers observing a butler serving a couple so blase they never noticed the almost-nude man and woman stretched out on their table. Contrastes ended as the workers trudged off, but as the very last one was about to disappear, she kicked up her heels--a fitting image to end a season of dance, as it speaks of the ability of this art to lift us above the everyday grind.