Edinbergh International Festival, various sites, Edinburgh, August 10-30, 1997.

AUGUST 10-30, 1997 REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER BOWEN

Mark Morris. Merce Cunningham. Miami City Ballet. Lucinda Childs. Bill T. Jones.... With the notable--an happily frequent--exception of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, Edinburgh Festival dance events in recent years have had a distinctly transatlantic accent. No surprise, then, that for this year's bash (the official fiftieth birthday, as opposed to last year's fiftieth Festival) director Brian McMaster fielded some of the big guns of U.S. dance in his program. A few of the shots, though, fell rather short of their intended target.

Take Twyla Tharp and the triptych of works she calls, in all humility, Tharp! In this roller coaster ride through her jazz-inflected oeuvre, Tharp sets her remarkable dancers up against each other in mock combat for Heroes (performed to the eponymous Philip Glass symphonic score), toys with folk motifs and Shaker hymns in Sweet Fields, and sketches a cartoonish romp to fifties bachelor-pad music in 66. It is a slick, skillfully realized program of dance, performed at a blistering pace by a supremely gifted ensemble. But there is a mechanical quality to what Tharp has created here that ultimately renders the evening--and her dancers' strenuous efforts--redundant.

Returning to Edinburgh--and Britain--for the first time in nearly two decades, San Francisco Ballet displayed many of the qualities that have marked this ensemble as one of the major forces in American ballet. There is a deliciously creamy quality to the best of the company's dancing, a sense that no matter how brisk the tempo, movements should be allowed to breathe and must never be snatched. It was just this quality that distinguished the company's performance of Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto (opening the first of two repertory programs), where the gloriously contrasting duets--or arias, as Stravinsky named them--at the center of the piece were vividly brought to life by Muriel Maffre and Katita Waldo.

Maffre (tall, sinuous, regal) and Waldo (a disarming combination of feisty and delicate) caught the wit and mystery in Balanchine's remarkable ballet; his Symphony in C, however, was less well served by an ensemble that appeared a little sluggish (jet lag, perhaps?) at the start of this grand neoclassical showcase.

Balanchine wasn't the only choreographer on display n SFB's Edinburgh programs; artistic director Helgi Tomasson gave us the breathlessly romantic vision of his Sonata--a piece of swooning Rachmaninoff and mittel-European angst of the mock-Tudor school--and Criss-Cross, his perhaps understandably complex and convoluted response to Avison's settings of Scarlatti and Schoenberg's arrangements of Handel. A happier marriage was to be found in Mark Morris's Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, a deliciously witty and ingenious response to Virgil Thomson piano studies that the ensemble (and Christopher Stowell, in particular) danced with immense style and subtlety.

For the first time in the six years it has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, Mark Morris's own company did not perform a program, but the Dance Group played a vital role (or, rather, roles) in Morris's production of Rameau's Platee for the newly homeless Royal Opera Covent Garden, making its first appearance at the festival since 1961. There seems little point in trying to dissect the plot here (Platee is a baroque opera, after all), but in Morris's vision, the action shifts from a New York bar, circa, to the swampy interior of a vast terrarium. There's plenty of opportunity, then, for pastiche a la Jerry Robbins and Hermes Pan from the bar's loucke regulars, and all manner of slithery, slimy, creepy-crawly movement motifs from the swamp things that inhabit Platee's damp domain. It's gloriously silly, hugely entertaining, and spectacularly costumed by Isaac Mizrahi.

There was also quite a lot of lurking about among the swamps in Stephen Page's Fish for Bangarra Dance Theatre. This Sydney-based aboriginal dance group has made quite an impact down under as an ensemble that melds the traditional forms and sounds of an ancient civilization with contemporary urban culture. In Fish, a piece about water in all its guises, the fusion only occasionally works, chiefly because Page's modern choreographic vocabulary never quite matches the compelling majesty of Djakapurra Munyarryun's traditional dance performance.

A similar imbalance was apparent in Regine Chopinot's Vegetal. Created in collaboration with environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy for Chopinot's Ballet Atlantique in La Rochelle, France, the dance in Vegetal is formed by the action of dancers creating the towers of stone and vast corrals of interwoven branches that so distinguish Goldsworthy's work. But here, the somewhat self-effacing nature of the minimalist dance seems entirely deliberate, as if to serve a higher purpose--the creation of a piece that is neither dance nor sculpture, but truly visual art.

There's more to Netherlands Dance Theater 3 than its constituent parts, as Jiri Kylian's Tears of Laughter proves. In this evening-length program of five short pieces created for the stars of NDT's senior wing--Martine van Hamel, Sabine Kupferberg, Gary Chryst, and eminence grise Gerard Lemaitre--the themes and motifs that have occupied Kylian these past few years seem to be presented in miniature. There are quirkily humorous ensembles, like cartoon strips; solos of potent theatricality (Chryst's feral, explosive dance is a searing wail of anguish); and fluid formations presented as ritual.

Throughout it all the dance is lush, full-bodied, and makes few concessions to the performers' "maturity"--from forty-something to sixty-something. But the collective experience and stagecraft of these great dancers propel them far the parameters of mere technique. Sure they can dance, but these are performers, still happily (like Miss Jean Brodie) in their prime. Little wonder Edinburgh took them to its collective heart.