DANCES WITH FRANCE.

DANCES WITH FRANCE FRANCE MOVES VARIOUS VENUES NEW YORK, NEW YORK APRIL 23-MAY 6

In this ambitious and brilliantly organized project, ten French modern dance companies offered their wares to New York City. Under the artistic direction of Yorgos Loukos, they kept Gotham audiences running and riding from the stately Brooklyn Academy of Music to downtown's Kitchen and Danspace; the warmly dignified New Victory to the friendly Joyce and the cozy Florence Gould Hall.

There was also a generous assortment of lectures, films, and panels, but believing that dance reveals as much as one could ever want to know about a country, I stuck to the main events.

Actually, there was not very much "pure" dance, nor were there many signs of newly minted dance language. In turning their backs on France's beloved danse classique, the young choreographers did not pare down their language as the early American modern dance choreographers had done. Instead, they embellished it with gymnastics, acrobatics, break dancing, ethnic strains, and video--lots of video, some of it hilariously inventive.

What a joy to hear laughter curling through the house, or to hear the crackle of spontaneous applause that accompanied the antics of Philippe Decoufle's Compagnie DCA in Shazam! What does DCA stand for? Briefly, for diversity, drawing, designing; a collection of companions; an assortment of people.

They began with a tatterdemalion parade of musicians and baton twirlers down the aisle and onto the stage. And how inviting that stage was with its space deployed like an arena.

Decoufle had obviously chosen his performers not for balletic conformity, but for their individuality: Magali Caillet, a chubby young woman, could spring from level to level on little cat feet; a man named Salengro was bony-kneed, flat-footed, pitcher-eared, and adorably funny.

The company consisted of only nine dancers, but they were multiplied by mirrors and by the incredible speed with which they maneuvered. At one point three of them fled up the aisle and into the lobby. An onstage video picked them up dancing out there.

The funniest use of video was a series of images of dancers forming impossible pyramids whose human summits curved downward like drooping posies.

Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu's Le Jardin io io ito ito also made one realize how rare dance humor is. Here, too, the performers were chosen for their madcap skills by directors Jose Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu. Dancers, acrobats, contortionists, they were all these and more as they pirouetted on their heads, flew into each others' upraised hands, shook their derrieres, and skittered through tiny steps as rapid as the filigree of accompanying baroque music.

How brilliantly they interplayed with fleet screen images of ostriches with human heads, flamingos with human legs, a video tiger with a man's head chasing a live woman across the stage. A man did somersaults while sitting in a chair; a woman filled her mouth with water and gargled a song; Court-Circuit (Short-Circuit) looked solemnly at the audience and said, "As for me, I am dancing inside."

Le Jardin might be thought of as a circus patchwork. But in circus, the acts of skill are more important than the people executing them. Here, one found a delicate balance of skill and humanity.

The most serious trend in contemporary French dance is the surreal blend of acting and dance, set in a constantly altering landscape. Josef Nadj, Maguy Marin, and Angelin Preljocaj have added individual nuances to this style.

Franz Kafka loomed over Nadj's Les Veilleurs (The Watchers). Its action centered on a middle-aged man sitting alone onstage in underwear and socks as the audience assembled. Three men rushed in and used surgical instruments to apply his clothing. Their action was deft and compulsive, as were all of the subsequent events.

Were they sane or in a world of their own? A man turned a woman whose heel was in a goblet; a woman slapped and climbed on three men; a man gobbled pasta. A set of ancillary events took place on a stage suspended within the stage. As the action became more violent, Kafka's words explained the growing tension: "How could crazy people be tired?"

In Pour ansi dire (So to Speak), Maguy Matin and designer Christian Toullec created brilliant havoc with space and time. By way of emphasis, a cuckoo clock on one wall made its own steady commentary. Like Nadj, Matin does not use her dancers as lyric artists. Instead, they are restless beings who are in some way trapped.

This work placed three people (Laurent Frick, Laura Frigato, and Alessandro Sabatini) in an interior whose walls and windows kept changing their relationships. As individuals, the dancers had little identity. They were engulfed by their environment and by the symbolism of props like the tambourine, trumpet, Pinocchio, and bottle of grappa that accompanied their final ritual of swigging and stomping.

The most successful of the three was Angelin Preljocaj. In his Paysage apres la bataille (Landscape After the Battle), the conflicts concerned emotion against intellect, men against women, animals against humans.

As though on a medieval jousting ground, the participants kept emerging from brightly curtained stalls. After a melange of shouting and posing, four apes loped on. They ripped off their pelts to reveal nude men. Another group of men began tossing chairs to one another; the chairs flew and were caught with hair-raising precision. This tribute to human skill gave way to a pile of dancers resembling discarded corpses or perhaps grub worms newly unearthed. Finally, in a no-man's-land of sexual ambiguity, effeminate men sent shopping carts to reeling; women in mannish suits wove among them. Ultimately, their world was filled with gray-draped figures walking in silence.

Three of the ten companies concentrated on the exploration of dance values as contrasted with theatrical concepts. They were Compagnie AZANIE (Africa), Association Edna, and MeMe BaNjO. Of the three, AZANIE came closest to a developed kinetic language.

Their D'une Rive a l'autre (From One Shore to the Other) blended African and South American styles performed by male dancers (Harry Albert, Fred Bendongue, Alberto Hechevarria, and Rui Moreira), all of them beautifully matched and possessed of endless stamina.

Their choreographers, Bendongue and Moreira, plus their composer, Areski Hamitouche, could not have been more sensitively connected, and the presentation was further enriched by singer Landy Andriamboavonjy. The tone of the dance was by turns rapt, jubilant, and possessed. Its prime fault was length.

Lionel Hoche's Mirabilis/Volubilis also suffered from excessive length. Danced by four men from his Meme BaNjO Company, it consisted of essentially balletic patterns spun out to Bach organ music. The decor was cleanly geometric: a descending cube for the first section and a stylized tree branch for the second. While the participants performed harmoniously, there was something pretentious about their essentially unison patterns and self-conscious port de bras. It was as though the dance had not yet fully emerged from a too-cool chrysalis.

Choreographer Boris Charmatz's Herses (une lente introduction), danced by members of his Association Edna, consisted essentially of two couples executing contact improvisation in the nude. Charmatz joined them near the end.

Two soloists, Blanca Li and Dominique Boivin, rounded out the Gallic fortnight. Li, recently appointed artistic director of Berlin's Comic Opera, with her bright little ferret face and sinewy physique, has an incredible avidity for movement, any kind. And she executes all of it--ballet, flamenco, hip-hop, samba, rope climbing--with skill and wit.

For Zap! Zap! Zap! she devised a television talk-show format that moved like a tornado. Li was the talker, constantly appearing on a TV screen; Li was all of the guest artists. With its dazzling costumes by Claudie Kermarrec and a bright, adaptable set by Bernard Michel, the performance was more a clever revue act than part of a new trend in French dance.

Dominique Boivin's La Danse, une histoire a ma facon (My Kind of Dance History) was a limp attempt at satire. On an indifferently decorated stage, he reeled off a lecture-demo. We were treated to the likes of Pavlova, St. Denis, Shawn, Nikolais, and Graham. But Boivin (who heads a company called Beau Geste) did not move precisely enough to lend tang to his take-offs. He also injected a sour note, as though he resented the very people he chose to mimic.

France is the size of Texas. Unlike Texas or any other American state, it has a federal government that assumes responsibility for the arts. While the participants of France Moves did not all represent meaningful aesthetic trends, the venture was tastefully promoted and presented. Unlike our National Endowment for the Arts, the French Ministry of Culture can be counted on to march down the aisle, baton in hand.

See review of France Moves films online at www.dancemagazine.com (Moving Images)