Back to the Avant-Garde.

THERE IS a terrifying moment in any journalists life when he or she realizes that he or she is markedly older than his or her readers. It is a moment that came to me some now-ill-defined years ago, but I instantly rose above it. Consider the alternative. At least, consider it from my point of view! In any case, when I thought about my irreversible plight it seemed that it was a situation fraught with two specific dangers. The first was of seeming an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy to one's increasingly young and vibrant readership. The second, and surely more dangerous, was to be so determined not to seem an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy that one ran after every half-novelty in a futile attempt to demonstrate that one was with-it--which, as the discerning would soon discern, was a sure way of demonstrating that one was without-it.

However, while I have had no difficulty in deciding not to fake my reactions, and dress up my mutton thoughts as lamblike perceptions, it is fair to note that the older we get--or, let's be gentle about it, let's say the more experienced we get--to some extent, the extent of which we ourselves may be unconscious, our ideas and opinions probably get more rigid. This normally doesn't matter too much, but it might matter rather more in considering the new, the outrageous, the unexpected, the--in a word, or is it two words?--avant-garde.

So when one points out that this or the other aspect of the avant-garde looks dejavu, in fairness one should caution one's readers that the comment should be taken with a more than usually generous pinch of salt. Not, of course, that it will stop me from saying it. Now recently in New York over the course of a week or so we had a couple of varied, but I suppose representative, examples of the European dance avant-garde, the Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu on its U.S. debut at the Joyce Theater, and the return of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal to the Brooklyn. Academy of Music. And, yes, deja-vu!

The Montalvo-Hervieu troupe gave its most famous piece, Paradis, and for the first five minutes it, seemed to me Paradise indeed. I loved it. Witty, inventive, brilliant, this Dadaist mix of dance, video, and cheek smashes at the mind and I found myself cheerfully wishing it to go on forever. And then it did. Always be careful of what you wish for. Well, let's be fair. It didn't actually go on forever--not really. I think it was only seventy intermissionless, unremitting minutes, but rarely can that law of diminishing returns have seemed so diminishing or the returns themselves so diminished. There was certainly a joyous, if mindless, charm to the whole evening, yet it seemed almost as repetitive as it was clever.

The choreography was by the company's director, 45-year-old Jose Montalvo, with the assistance of the company's associate choreographer, Dominique Hervieu, and, more interestingly, Montalvo was also responsible for the video design. The use of the video proved extraordinary. What was so ultra-sophisticated about the images was that against the back curtain/screens they had been made almost indistinguishable from the real people. After a time you realize that the real guys cast very slight shadows, while their absolutely realistic video counterparts--capable, of course, of absolutely unrealistic things--do not. The movement was often imaginative, but all too soon the whole show settled into a pattern--almost like wallpaper.

Also, the essential point of Montalvo's Dadaist humor--unexpected juxtaposition and inconsequentiality--is a point that has been made repeatedly for some eighty years. It's nothing new, and it's certainly not original. Which brings me to Pina Bausch. Now, this 59-year-old cult priestess of European modern dance is a loosely tied bundle of contradictions, always has been and--for she is unlikely to reject success at this stage of her life--always will be. Her work appears to combine quite effortlessly a childlike innocence with a worldly cynicism. Her choreographic skills are breathtakingly minimal, her sense of theater virtually restricted to vestigial Dada, yet there is an engaging lack of pretension about her.

And there is also a deep and, I suspect, honest desire to amuse the bourgeois soul (remember, she is from Germany, where amusement is sometimes at a premium), even if she has to do it with gentle shocks and humorlessly momentous incongruity. If she is a fake--and just looking at her work one might make that perhaps over-facile presumption--then she is a fake who doesn't know it. Why should she, when most of the dance world assures her that she is a twenty-four-carat genius? Why should emperors and empresses, even if they feel a little chilly round the rear end, know that they are naked?

For many years Bausch--who has had some American training, and once even danced with the ballet of the Metropolitan Opera under the direction of Antony Tudor--and her famed Tanztheater Wuppertal have been popular regulars at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her latest work to reach the United States had its New York premiere as part of BAM's 1999 Next Wave Festival. This intermissionless one-hundred-and-five-minute work for twelve dancers and using an eclectic score ranging from pop to Mahler is called Danzon, which is Cuban-Spanish for "Dance." This is ironic because there is hardly any dance in the whole piece, although the Bausch regulars--such as Jan Minarek, crawling through the evening clad in nothing but a giant-size baby diaper and a scowl, and Dominique Mercy waggling giant rabbit's ears and, in the finale, blank faced, methodically dropping dirt on the stage--are as clever as ever.

Sometimes, and here is another contradiction, Bausch does, largely through her design team of Peter Pabst and Marion Cito, produce stage pictures of compelling picture-postcard attractiveness. And making her first stage appearance in New York in many years, Bausch herself does a vague, wispy little solo against a fantastically beautiful video of exotic fish in giant images, with goldfish seemingly the size of Moby Dick. She was inevitably upstaged by the dancing fish, but looked typically dignified about it. Strange.

But you know, the really strange thing about contemporary avant-garde art is that most of it could have been created at any time since the twenties. Yet actually in the twenties, avant-garde artists were doing things that had really never been done before. Bizarre.

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.