Dance Umbrella 2004.

DANCE UMBRELLA 2004 VARIOUS VENUES, LONDON, ENGLAND OCTOBER 5-NOVEMBER 27, 2004

It was a good, not great, year for Britain's biggest and best-known contemporary dance festival. This year's 26th edition reached beyond North America and Europe to cast a spotlight on fresh talent from Asia and Africa.

Young Japanese choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda, artistic director of Batik, showed off her provocative, peekaboo style. The female sextet Side B combines the look of early Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (girls in black boots and dresses) with a creepy-cruel fury. Skirts are lifted of dropped; a red curtain, partially raised, is pulled down with the teeth. Long, swinging hair renders the women, who danced like a pack of sly schoolgirl Bacchae, virtually faceless. This strange, striking slice of sorority power politics is both coy and vicious.

Kuroda danced Shoku in a red dress and frilly white underpants, the stuttering, thrashing mores spewing from her tightly sprung body. Featuring a handful of small, phallic flashlights, this tantrum-like yet ceremonial solo imparted a sense of punitive sexual frustration.

An inspired and inspiring double bill contrasted a poetic, entrancing depiction of Cape Verdean womanhood with male Nigerian spiritual and corporeal energies. Duas Sera Tres (a colloquial pun for a woman's lost virginity) is the first choreographic collaboration by Rosy Timas and Elisabete Fernandes, members of Raiz di Polon. Speaking, singing, and using branches, broom, and buckets as props, this sweetly seductive duo conjured a fragile yet comic, sensual universe.

Duas was followed by the galvanizing Ori (The Head), a ritualistic blend of contemporary and African dance by Adedayo Muslim Liadi for himself and four distinctive dancers in his Ijodee Dance Company. Watching this intense, vividly physicalized abstraction about body, mind, and personal destiny was both exhilarating and exhausting.

The festival hosted a handful of disappointing world premieres. An exception was David Gordon's slightly choreographed adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's play The Chairs. Michael Feingold tailored his translation to the talents of Gordon and longtime partner Valda Setterfield. With the wordless support of Bessie-winning dancers Karen Graham and Guillermo Resto, this lovely star couple sustained a tone of endearing absurdity.

Many of the new British works were impressionistic, multimedia collages set in hermetically sealed imaginary worlds. The Changing Room teamed choreographer Carol Brown, brainy high priestess of dance and new technology, with architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. Despite some clever Bond-girl graphics, the interactions between digital imagery and live dance (by Brown and two other slippery women) were uninviting and sterile.

Brown overestimated our engagement with technology. Similarly, Kim Brandstrup's melancholic Hans Christian Andersen: Anatomy of a Storyteller incorrectly assumed both audience familiarity with his famous fellow Dane's fables and our desire to link them to this painfully insecure man's life. Although well performed and gorgeous, this swirling labor of love for Brandstrup's Arc Dance Company was too shadowy and subtle for its own good.

English eccentric Yolande Snaith and visual artist Sharon Marston spent two years researching Jardin Blanc, an insubstantial, textureless hybrid of movement, design, and sound on the theme of gardens. Some of Marston's objects-giant fiber-optic tree, wheeled flowerbed, talking lampshade--possess an odd charm. Five talented dancers worked hard to make Snaith's project more than just an overextended exercise in whimsy. Passare, a collaboration between Canadian choreographer Ginette Laurin and astrophysicist Claude Theoret, marks the 20th anniversary of Laurin's Montreal-based company, O Vertigo. Her laboratorial ensemble work, composed of elaborate yet glancing perceptual games, utilizes video, drawings made onstage, props, and speech. Clever, but inconsistently engaging.

Viewers had to make their own thematic connections in An (el silenci), by Spain's Pep Ramis and Maria Munoz for their company, Mal Pelo. Is it a road movie, a cautionary study of mortality, of a feckless, frustrating, self-indulgent chunk of chamber-sized dance-theater? Parts of it--passages of gutsy dancing, a cinematic carpet of a running horse projected on the floor, Steve Noble's live music--sink in and stay with you. But it's one of those pieces you like better when it's over.

On the plus side was Bird Song, a work of meticulous yet intuitive craft by British choreographic mainstay Siobhan Davies with eight superlative members of her eponymous company. Investigating how sound shapes movement, and laced with felicitous discoveries and quiet marvels, the hourlong dance fanned out from an aural center point: the call of the Australian Pied Butcher. Unconventional seating--the audience sat three rows deep on all sides of a square performing space--paralleled the work's unusual structure.

Another highlight, Frenchman Philippe Decoufle's effervescent Solo, was an irresistible melange of precise physical skills and unpretentious technological tricks. Whether playing special-effects wizard or a contemporary dance clown, Decoufle was a deadpan delight.

FOR MORE INFORMATION www.danceumbrella.co.uk/2004