BY THE SEA BY THE SEA, BY THE BEAUTIFUL SEA.

Navigating the complex cultures of the Mediterranean, the Lyons Dance Biennial sailed through stormy waters to emerge on a tranquil sea--an ancient yet living link among diverse dance worlds.

Already one of the largest dance festivals in Europe, the Lyons Dance Biennial is steadily expanding its thematic approach to programming. Starting with surveys of individual countries--Germany (1986), France (1988), the U.S. (1990), Spain (1992), and Brazil (1994)--and proceeding to continents for the African festival of 1996, artistic director Guy Darmet extended "Mediterranea," this season's focus on the Mediterranean, to embrace the dozens of cultures that flourish around this inland sea. The next, millennial biennial will stretch even farther afield. In the year 2000, Lyons will explore the lands of the Silk Road from Europe to Asia.

The three-week festival, September 10-29, 1998, survived a local funding scandale--put bluntly, the right-wing regional council refused to subsidize a multicultural event that welcomed dark-skinned peoples to France--to open with strong support from the national and municipal governments. Among the many works premiered at the biennial, the most important was Belgian choreographer Frederic Flamand's dual ballet EJM 1 -- EJM 2, which featured the combined forces of his own Charleroi/Danses -- Plan K and the Lyons National Opera Ballet. Created in collaboration with American architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, this fascinating, if occasionally bewildering, evening-length work was inspired by nineteenth-century technical visionaries Eadweard James Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, exact contemporaries who independently investigated movement and film.

Flamand was never a dancer, and his flaccid choreography shows it. The chief visual, even kinetic, interest in EJM 1 -- EJM 2 is in Diller and Scofidio's enthralling manipulation of still and moving pictures. Some of these, such as the Polaroids taken of the performers of EJM 1, are created live each night. Others, like the gigantic computer-generated figure which dominates EJM 2, are prerecorded. In both cases, the special effects intentionally beg the question that has dogged photography since its invention: does the camera lie?

You bet it does. EJM 1, for Charleroi/Danses, begins with an astonishing mix of live and filmed dancers, the two indistinguishable until the choreographer deliberately clues you in. The Is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex? confusion is echoed in the bending of gender roles that follows. A man dances (very well) on pointe; a woman dances without a shirt. Perhaps in a bid for equality, dancers of both sexes pull electric irons across the floor by gripping the power cords with their teeth. Although somewhat related to Muybridge's investigation of everyday movement, it's not clear how such social pronouncements as "a man must never ask for directions" and "a woman must always answer a question with a question" relate to the photographer's experiments.

Flamand set EJM 2 on Lyons National Opera Ballet, which hadn't participated in the biennial in eight years. It continues that company's acquisition of works that investigate new media. (Bill T. Jones created 24 images/seconde, about the Lumiere brothers, for the troupe in 1995.) Inspired by Marey's work, an immense "virtual dancer" projected on the backdrop inexorably dominates a passive herd of live performers who scurry about below. Tireless and incapable of error, the virtual dancer gradually refines the movements of his flock until the only gesture they're left capable of is pushing "enter" on a keyboard. The future is not Utopia but Paradise Lost.

Though undeniably dazzling, the image technology on display in EJM 1 -- EJM 2 probably represents a less fundamental impact on our daily lives than do inexpensive Internet applications such as C U-See Me, which allows millions of ordinary people to transmit pictures of themselves worldwide in seconds.

The artfully conceived Romeo and Juliet by Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato--about as different from EJM 1--EJM 2 as a ballet could be--was the other major highlight of this multifaceted festival. Set on the beautifully schooled dancers of his Madrid-based Compania Nacional de Danza, this is the first evening-length narrative ballet Duato has attempted. He's better known for compact, plotless works such as Remanso, choreographed during the same period for American Ballet Theatre. (The two share a similar movement motif of a disembodied arm reaching around an entry to introduce a pas de deux.) Like Flamand's work, Romeo and Juliet was presented at the ultramodern yet curiously dated (shiny black walls, floors, ceilings) Opera National de Lyon.

Using a heavily edited version of Prokofiev's famous score, Duato doesn't quite tell the story we're used to. The dispute between the Montagues and the Capulets is reduced to that old favorite of European intellectuals, class warfare. And Juliet (Mar Baudesson) seems perfectly happy with her betrothal to Pads even after Romeo (Kim McCarthy) comes along, which makes you wonder why she goes off with the po-faced boy. (Is she as desperate for attention as Monica Lewinsky, who dominated the news at this time?) Still, given Duato's gift for choreographing sinewy, dramatically convincing character movement and the excellent interpretations of pivotal roles like Lord Capulet (by Thomas Klein), this Romeo and Juliet points to an interesting new avenue of creation for a major dance-maker. [For more on the ballet, see page 129.]

Michel Kelemenis took the festival's Mediterranean theme to heart for Le Paradoxe de la Femme-Poisson ("The Paradox of the Mermaid"). For this commissioned premiere, the thirty-eight-year-old choreographer devised his own libretto about the mystical past of the ancient port city of Marseilles, where his Compagnie Kelemenis is based. A spare, elegant stabile (by Benoit Petit), with a tiny boat perched on the end of one spindly arm, dominates the stage space at Transbordeur, a former factory. Dressed in wispy blue chiffon by Japanese couturier Kenzo Takada, the seven-member company spins out a delicate fantasy of "two reflections, three sirens, and four sailors." After an interlude with a postcard-bright scene of a modern sailor (Kelemenis) relaxing to the sound of crashing waves, the hazy past gives way to a harsh present. Here, everyone is an individual but no one is part of a community. At the conclusion, two women are left staring blankly at a fading neon skyline.

Paradoxe is completely beguiling. But, like much French contemporary dance, it doesn't begin to encompass onstage the level of detail provided in the copious program notes. A lot of the choreography suggests that Merce Cunningham's tours of France have not been undertaken in vain. So why the laborious libretto? After nearly ten years as director of his own troupe, can't Kelemenis make a dance that's simply about dancing?

Dance communities beyond Europe were well represented in Lyons. From Israel, Batsheva Dance Company presented director Ohad Naharin's impressively sprawling Anaphase, seen last year in the U.S., while independent choreographer Inbal Pinto showed the three-part Wrapped, an outgrowth of the work she choreographed for the American Dance Festival last summer [see Reviews/ National, November 1998, page 90].

And talk about multicultural: Murs-Murs de la Mediterranee ("Walls-Murmurs of the Mediterranean"), by Ballet Jazz Arts Productions, demonstrated how dances born in inner-city America--hip-hop, electric boogie--have come to represent the aspirations of Algerian immigrants in France. It's hard to sympathize, however, with a work about ghetto life whose apparently irony-free message is that Algerian men beating Algerian women is bad, but Algerian men beating Frenchmen is okay--they're rich honkies, you see.

A significant part of the biennial consisted of traditional dance. La Tannoura, an ensemble of whirling dervishes from Egypt, proved to be a mesmerizing small group of musicians and dancers. Troupes from Tunisia, Lebanon, and Turkey also participated.

On a much grander scale, the Greek company Lykion Ton Hellinidon filled the cavernous Auditorium de Lyon with genuinely entertaining songs and dances based on inherited marriage ceremonies. Most of the dance steps are believably small-scale, not enlarged for the proscenium stage. And, unlike some large purveyors of quote-unquote traditional dance, the Lykion dancers look vital and spontaneous. Watching them, it's easy to pick out favorites, the individuals who continually play with the music, giving a fresh spin to the cherished passages they've performed hundreds of times. Lykion Ton Hellinidon encapsulates, in one very specific example, the vibrancy of Mediterranean cultures that provided the basis for the eighth Lyons Biennial.

Gary Parks, an associate editor at Dance Magazine, writes frequently about dance in Europe.