Dance Salad.

Houston, Texas

Various venues

April 17-19, 2003

The dressing on this year's Dance Salad, the annual Texas festival which this year featured fourteen dances (nine of them North American premieres) over three nights, was Hans van Manen's Live, performed by members of the Dutch National Ballet. Van Manen himself came to set the 1979 work, which moves from the stage through the audience, into the foyer and, eventually, outside and down the street. This seminal video/dance work is still fresh. Videographer Henk van Dijk's closeups of Igone de Jongh's amazingly flexible feet, delicate hands, and expressive face drew viewers' attention from the live performance to the video backdrop. Footage of Jongh and her partner, Nicolas Rapaic, engaged in a sensual pas in the hallway was paired with clips of a sexually aggressive rehearsal, but eventually de Jongh exited alone. If there were such a thing as Ballet TV instead of MTV, this would be it.

Sweden's Goteborg Ballet offered the "Blue Ballerina" section from Ballet Pathetique, never before seen in the U.S. This moving, Magritteinspired piece featured bowler-hatted Houston Ballet Academy students swaying with giant yellow balloons while barefoot ballerina Uta Guttler performed a breathtakingly beautiful yet mournful dance across a stage strewn with carnations. She and her blue Romantic tutu appeared to have seen better days, and her heavily powdered hair spun bluish clouds when she shook her head violently. It was a dance of forgotten ballerinas.

Mats Ek's Pointless Pastures offered a lighter but still brilliant moment. Cullberg Ballet's Raft Sadie, in an Eeyore-inspired ensemble and floppyeared hat, moved with impish delight with the somber and equally strangely hatted Vanessa de Ligniere in an unwitting love duet over a used handkerchief.

If Pointless Pastures was brilliant choreography, then Kenneth Kvarnstrom's Carmen?! was brilliant comedy. FOUR MEN FROM THE ROYAL SWEDISH BALLET/STOCKHOLM 59[degrees]NORTH, IN A FRENZY OF MOCK FLAMENCO, DEPICTED THE ENTIRE BIZET OPERA CARMEN. Bulls and bullfighters and a few random red props appeared and disappeared until the agonizingly funny blood-in-the-sand ending. Absolutely one of the most energetic and hilarious pieces choreographed for men.

Netherlands Dance Theater members Paul Lightfoot and his wife, Sol Leon, offered a different version of love in Sigue, set to Chopin. Using fall-and-release techniques, his manly dancing, and her austere piety, they evoked a troubled relationship. They ended entangled, in a long silence, as artificial snow fell from the catwalks to blanket their embrace--a beautiful moment.

Many dances were about relationships: Selections from Trey McIntyre's Memphis, "I'll Take You There" and "Blue Moon," performed by Ballet Memphis dancers, were fast, fun, and flirty, while Krzysztof Pastor's suite from Kurt Weill carried more weight in its three duets. Here, Dutch National Ballet dancers partnered seamlessly; Raphail Coumes-Marquet and Rubinald Rofino Pronk, who had an amazingly flexible upper torso, danced a moving male pas de deux. The company also performed selections from van Manen's Bach Pieces, one of the few classical dances on the festival program, and David Dawson's The Grey Area, a surreal dance of men and women caught between night and day, life and death. The taped Niels Langz electronic Bach score was almost too strident, but it was a last chance to see the elegant Sofiane Sylvie after her recent guest stay with New York City Ballet.

Also disturbing, though passionately executed, was dancer/choreographer Virpi Pahkinen's work for Royal Swedish Ballet/Stockholm 59[degrees] North, Bardo. Her black gown and shaved head with a single braid evoked The Tibetan Book of the Dead, on which this rather frightening but mesmerizing piece was based.

The athletic women's trio from Brazil's Quasar Companhia de Danca was more upbeat. In Mulheres/Women, three women in chiffon nighties merged, collided, and reconciled through choreographer Henrique Rodovalho's aggressive modern vocabulary.

Five women from Buglisi/Foreman Dance, swathed in satin bustles, sat, stood, and whirled around boxes in Jacqulyn Buglisi's exquisite Requiem, a Texas premiere. The dance was almost all upper body and brought thoughts of statues in supplicant, and occasionally rebellious, motion. Buglisi's fellow New Yorker Robert Battle sent his amusing and vocalizing Takademe solo for Battleworks dancer Kanji Segawa.

National Ballet of China's Jian Zhang and Jie Sun, a beautiful longlimbed dancer, performed the suite from Fountain of Tears, a ballet created for their company by outgoing Houston Ballet Artistic Director Ben Stevenson. Stripped of plot and Stevenson's usual eye-candy sets, the overly dramatic pas de deux seemed old school when juxtaposed with Ek, van Manen, et al.

The quality of the work, compressed into some ten hours, rivaled that of other weeklong festivals. Producer Nancy Henderek's eye for some of the best international dance is unparalleled; but the festival was not sold out.