Dance Umbrella.

VARIOUS VENUES LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM SEPTEMBER 28-NOVEMBER 8, 2003

BRITAIN'S highest profile contemporary dance festival pulled out all the stops for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Hailing mainly from the United States and Europe, the nearly three dozen soloists or companies involved in this special edition of Dance Umbrella ranged from Michael Clark to Merce Cunningham. Tim emphasis throughout the six-week schedule was on several generations of established artists, all of whom have enjoyed fruitful associations with Umbrella. The roster included a starry opening night gala, a fascinating video installation from festivals past, and an omnibus program titled Silver Celebration that was stolen by David Gordon and Valda Setterfield in a wry, captivating duet from their Private Lives of Dancers. That bill also included a sneak preview of Siobhan Davies's Bird Song, an ensemble piece due to be premiered in 2004. Here the featured dancers were the wonderful long-time Davies dancers Henry Montes and Deborah Saxon.

Cunningham's promenade-style Anniversary Events were a joyous, awesome salute to both Umbrella and the half-century mark of the maestro's own company. Staged in the great, sloping-floored Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum, the forty-five-minute performances were a spectacular expansion of Cunningham's concepts of decentralized space and ever-shifting perspective. The Hall is as long as a football field and several stories high. Cunningham and a trio of musicians were stationed atop a wide, central viewing bridge, an area off-limits to the public. A runway beneath it separated two adjoining dance areas from a third. The Hall was dominated at one end by a gigantic artificial sun--the work of Icelandic/Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, a specialist in elemental sculptures and installations. The audience, free to roam in the glowing light, could view the dancing close-up, from afar, or, thanks to a reflective ceiling, from below but as if from above. There was simply no way to see everything, a philosophical stance bound to tantalize some while frustrating others. Tree to Cunningham's "events" tradition, the movement material was a collage of his repertoire that showed his current crop of fifteen dancers to be in superbly articulate shape.

Among the Umbrella commissions were Charles Linehan's Disintegration Loops, a quartet quite up to this low-key choreographer's usual high of intense yet subtly nuanced human interaction, and fellow Brit Russell Maliphant's Choice, a quintet of lapidary craftsmanship danced with molten cool and enhanced no end by the lighting genius of regular collaborator Michael Hulls.

The other chief world premiere was Stephen Petronio's The Island of Misfit Toys, a one-act adorned with monstrously large-scale doll sculptures by Cindy Sherman and a score culled mainly from Lou Reed's recent Poe-inspired recording of The Raven. The Poe connection is detectable in the work's hallucinatory and melancholic tone, tainted by a more contemporary note of repulsive infantile sexuality. Wearing summery pajamas, and made up as if they'd raided mommy's cosmetics, the dancers come across like a gang of blankly naughty overgrown children whose decadent behavior is reducing them to wobble-headed automatons. Perhaps they're Petronio's playthings. He makes a parenthetical cameo as a creepy avuncular figure. When the other eight dancers seethe near him, his pedophilic impulses get the best of him. Eventually he's flung offstage, washing up later in the lap of an oversized faceless doll. Cued to Reed's varied soundtrack, Petronio's step-laden and sinister comedy adheres to a buffeting pace. His trademark broken, barefoot classicism is much in evidence. The cast bursts into and out of the wings with jerky, angular jumps, as if someone were polling hard on their strings. Their awkward, hobbling rhythms have an atom-splitting speed, and the dance itself has a sad, sickening force.

The clever gimmicks littering Saburo Teshigawara's Luminous, for his company KARAS, were swept away for an extended finale that movingly contrasted the liquid yet cutting Japanese dancer-choreographer and the young, avid, and blind British dancer Stuart Jackson.

Other Umbrella highlights were the stunning South African soloist Vincent Mantsoe, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's brave, engaging anti-war solo Once, to the music of loan Baez, and the Czech-Italian company Deja Donne in a vital study of sexual appetite and humiliation titled In Bella Copia.

Festival disappointments included the thin mysteries of Trisha Brown's Geometry of Quiet and an uninspired rendition of Groove and Countermove, the last part of her jazz trilogy to the music of Dave Douglas. Boobies, by Israel's Inbal Pinto Dance Company, failed to go anywhere significant with its cunning combination of prehistoric surrealism and post-apocalyptic darkness.

The most controversial Umbrella performance was Ballett Frankfurt's Kammer/Kammer, a hugely intriguing blend of movement, live film, and spoken text that challenged conventional notions of what dance-as-theater can--and cannot--do.