Europeans Play With Bolero, Bach And Ballet.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL VARIOUS VENUES EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND AUGUST 12-SEPTEMBER 1, 2001

Bookended by White Oak Dance Project's well-received "PASTforward" and three decidedly mixed bills from New York City Ballet, the Edinburgh International Festival slipped some mostly satisfying European dance in between the American blockbusters.

Amanda Miller is an American living in Germany, and Emio Greco is an Italian residing in the Netherlands. Seeing their dances in tandem was a resonant experience, as much for their rich contrasts as for some surprisingly complementary links. Both choreographers employ movement and the tools of the theatre to take us on radically different journeys toward similar destinations. Greco and his creative partner, Dutch director Pieter C. Scholten, are trying to "speak" about the indivisible connection between brain and body, while Miller's mathematical approach to motion is a means to emotion.

Miller's The Art of Fugue, for her group Ballet Freiburg Pretty Ugly, is an artful response to Bach's music. The dancing, while beautifully disciplined, seemed as easy and free-flowing as a warm wind. Whether sprinting on or gliding offstage--or perched on benches to the side, like a particularly lithe sports team--Miller's nine-member company created a sense of community into which we were invited. It also included the five musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, positioned downstage, and audience members in three-tiered bleacher seating at the back.

Miller's world suggested playing field, playground, and rehearsal studio all in one. The atmosphere was relaxed and deceptively informal, with low-key lighting and dancers wearing socklets and casually sporty costumes of muted blue. Miller's ballet background was discernible in the dancers' effortless facility and clean, classical line. The footwork was cat's-paw soft, and the gentle distortions of her choreography rendered with lush assurance. The music, in an expressive orchestration for harpsichord and strings, was a filigreed structure upon which Miller's wonderfully individual dancers climbed and played.

Greco, a performer of almost Mephistophelan intensity, possesses one of the most exciting and eccentric dance vocabularies of anyone working--or maybe it possesses him. Double Points: 1 and 2 began with a solo in which he used his mercurial body to stare down, as it were, a recording of Bolero. It was a precise, Ravel-driven riot of semaphore and collapsing convulsions, trembling agitation and desperate, comically exaggerated undulations. Shaking and wriggling inside a silk shift that wrinkled like a second skin as he sweated, Greco was like a human lightning rod. He moved in a state of glorious neurosis up and down a runway or some rarely traveled highway.

The second part was likewise set in a stage space that felt sealed off yet boundless, and where the air crackled with expectation. Greco's mix of live-wire impulse and nervous, urgent calculation took on a more refined tone when Bertha Bermudez Pascual, long-limbed and identically garbed, joined him. The two engaged in a physical dialogue composed of sharp silences, peculiar murmurings and sustained, stabbing utterances. It's as if we were observing a couple of odd, ornithological creatures in their unnatural habitat. (Wim Selles's aural collage featured frog sounds along with scratches, scrapes, and too many big bangs.) Their strange ducking-and-diving kind of love duet was often played out in unison. But whether they were birds, replicants, or each other's missing half, their pairing carried a dramatic charge.

If "PASTforward" demonstrated to festival audiences that anyone can dance, Metapolis--project 972 showed us that everything can dance, too. The piece--a high-concept collaboration between Flemish choreographer Frederic Flamand, of the company Charleroi Danses/Plan K, and London-based architect Zaha Hadid--is a dizzying vision of what lies beyond urban sprawl and information overload. Lasting seventy minutes, it was a fluid, multilayered, kinetic conversation between real and virtual dancers, sound, light, and scenography.

The ever-shifting centerpiece of Hadid's designs was an elegant trio of silver bridges. Costuming also played a vital role, whether it was a single-armed, one-legged suit or a skirt of cushions. Film footage (urban landscapes, milling pedestrians, fairground rides) was first projected onto the bridges, clothing, and swatches of freewheeling fabric, and then blown up onto a huge screen backdrop.

Flamand is genuinely concerned about the rhythms and quality of contemporary life. His fourteen dancers rushed and swooped along to an eclectic soundtrack that combined hums, throbs, and whistles with saucy shards of retro-techno Berlioz. But where was the humanity in all this? Absorbed and overwhelmed by a stream of busy, bewildering imagery. Maybe that was the point. The result was a work of intellectual sophistication containing much to look at and think about, if not a lot to cherish.