Back with the avant-garde. (Attitudes).

ONE OF THE PUZZLES OF WORLD DANCE IS WHY THE NEW YORK-BORN WILLIAM FORSYTHE IS REVERED ALL OVER EUROPE FROM MOODY PARIS TO MODISH LONDON AS PROBABLY THE WORLD'S LEADING CLASSIC CHOREOGRAPHER, yet is little more than a cult figure in the United States. He is far from unknown, having choreographed well-received works for the Joffrey Ballet (where his own dancing career started), New York City Ballet, and the San Francisco Ballet, as well as having works seen here with the Paris Opera Ballet. But his real lame in Europe tests with his own German company, the Ballett Frankfurt, which he started in 1984 as a remodeling of the Frankfurt Ballet and which visited the United States only four times during that entire period.

When I first began pondering on the whole Forsythe phenomenon and the 52-year-old's unusual expatriate career my instinct was to link him with another famous Yankee dance export, the 60-year-old John Neumeier, director of the Hamburg Ballet. Both have worked a lot in America, yet both of their reputations are higher in Europe than here. And both, interestingly enough, started their choreographic careers while dancing with the Stuttgart Ballet, Neumeier under the late John Cranko and Forsythe under Cranko's successor, Marcia Haydee.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more it appeared fallacious--for fundamentally Neumeier, although in my mind a remarkable talent, is a traditionalist, whereas Forsythe, seems to be more by nature a pusher of envelopes. He is intrinsically avant garde, a terre I would somehow hesitate to pin to the equally but differently progressive Neumeier. In a way, it comes down to the audience each attracts--and Forsythe, certainly in New York at least, seems to attract the audience that Pina Bausch once made her own here, or at least only shared with such theatrical players as Robert Wilson and Robert LePage.

In this respect it was more than a coincidence but a particular triumph for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival 2001 to persuade back for the first time since 1998 the Ballett Frankfurt--bringing with it a program of three short works, dating from 1989 to 2001, rather than the full-evening pieces Forsythe had previously featured--but also in the very same season to offer Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. Here was a rare and irresistible opportunity to compare and contrast Europe's two reigning avant-garde heroes.

Unfortunately, Frankfurt opened with a happily brief dud: a silly and pompous duet, Woolf Phrase, for two dancers and two attendant microphones. Apparently the dancers were spouting a phrase or phrases from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway while writhing decoratively. Forsythe should probably be afraid of Virginia Woolf and all her literary ilk. But it was short enough, and the two other works proved stunners.

That slinky writhing, which looked so inconsequential in the opening duet, is very much part of Forsythe's dazzlingly iconoclastic take on the classic dance vocabulary. While putting his women in ballet slippers rather than pointe shoes, Forsythe maintains ballet's classic shape yet also twists and remodels it in a quite startling way that holds its own logic and challenging beauty. The hands are often unclassically open, the body is given a special curvy articulation, and his theatrical use of space--he uses every odd, sometimes unlit, corner of the stage--is extraordinary. At rimes the effect was as if you had only been used to nineteenth-century landscapes and were suddenly presented with a Jackson Pollock. And dancers in both of these works, the savage ensemble piece Enemy in the Figure and the elegiac Quintett, which Forsythe created as a love letter to his dying wife, were perfect in their athleticism, style, and dedication.

By contrast, it seems to me that Pina Bausch, still the darling of the European dance avant-garde and equally beloved by many sections of the intelligentsia on this side of the Atlantic, is quite extraordinary in parlaying a surprisingly small talent into a sensationally large reputation. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch brought to Brooklyn's Next Wave Festival the New York premiere of one of her more recent full-evening pieces, Masurca Fogo (Fiery Mazurka). It is simply old hat, although, with its frothy Teutonic humor, doubtless a riot of modernism in Wuppertal.

Bausch's collage style of dance (where everything, choreography and drama, is strictly linear with an underlying theme), has never much varied from its Dadaist, highbrow, vaudeville principles of cheap shock and easy mockery. What would have been original in the '20s is now surprising only to people with little sense of history--or the easily surprised. In Masurca Fogo, a long, long piece created for Expo '98 in Lisbon, she makes considerable use of Portuguese and Brazilian music, and, as usual, she makes exceptionally brilliant and theatrical use of lighting and video clips.

The theme this time is apparently sex and the dance. Bausch has little particularly new to say about sex--although the idea that a woman could achieve orgasm by being whirled in the air in a chair was indeed new to me. As for dance, choreography was never Bausch's strong suit, and although it includes hints of break dancing, and even a water slide (presumably cribbed from Pitobolus's Day Two), it is still the banal, bland, and repetitive pseudo-expressionism as before. Luckily, the dancer/performers were often young, sometimes very attractive, and generally enthusiastic.

What is strange is that in Europe and sometimes in America little distinction is made between Forsythe and Bausch; both are bunched together as trailblazers. But the dance methodology of Bausch represents a path that was already well trodden by the end of the '30s, while Forsythe, although widely variable in the quality of his work, is truly an original. It is a perfect object lesson in the difference between avant-garde and deja vu! It even lets us brush up our French!

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