FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE NOUVELLE DANSE (F.I.N.D.).

FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE NOUVELLE DANSE (F.I.N.D.) VARIOUS THEATERS MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA SEPTEMBER 28-OCTOBER 9, 1999

In venues across Montreal, supplemented by three days of symposiums, and featuring a smoothly organized, five-hour marathon of works by independent choreographers, the ninth biennial Festival International de Nouvelle Danse afforded quick acquaintance with current Canadian, and some promising contemporary African dance.

The theme was "Africa--in and out," the cue to present young companies from the African continent as well as several hybrid collaborations between European choreographers and African dancers.

Originating from Burkina Faso, and named after founding members Seydou Boro and Salia Sanon, Compagnie Salia ni Seydou won the people's choice award. In the male trio Figninto ("blind" in the Bambara language) they tackled themes of metaphysical sightlessness, powerlessness, and mortality through forceful images and a symbolic physical language that, in Sanon's words, "speaks of bodies that are inhabited by hearts."

Two troupes came from the Ivory Coast. The all-female Tchetche is only two years old. In Dimi, a forty-minute rites-of-passage drama, founding choreographer Beatrice Kombe and three other close-cropped, sturdy-thighed women danced with expressionist dynamism. Kombe's gift for showing heavy-duty vulnerability is heartening. Compagnie Sylvain Zabli flirted with narrative dance in the earnest Heritage, but the performance was really an excuse for eight tireless youths to show how well-drilled they are with a string of street and traditional dances.

Several white European women shared the results of their ventures into African territory. In Pour Antigone, from 1991, Mathilde Monnier forged tenuous conceptual and corporeal links between Greek tragedy and African dance. Thundering bursts of live percussion were balanced against contrasting bouts of movement from a cast of eleven men and women. Uma Historia da Duvida (A Story of Doubt) drew on Lisbon-based Clara Andermatt's visits to the islands of Cape Verde. In this piece of overextended primal playfulness, fifteen bare-chested men romped through a noisy, meandering, masculine ritual on and around a huge, wheeled structure, like the bridge of a ship. Susanne Linke's Le Coq est Mort grew out of workshops that the veteran German dance artist had conducted in Senegal. Devised with Israeli choreographer Avi Kaiser, her scenario was clear: breaking out of rigid, conformist diplomacy, eight business-suited men indulged their war-mongering impulses before reverting back to nature. The piece mourned a guileless innocence Linke fears modern society has lost.

Other artists straddled borders. Zab Maboungou, of Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata, is a Franco-Congolese pioneer of African dance in Canada. Forget the stereotypical image of a happy, smiling African dancer. Accompanied by trance-inducing drumming, her fifty-minute solo Incantation was sober, skillful, and deliberately self-absorbed.

FIND's European centerpiece was the skittering, kinetic ecstasies and polished, percolating traffic games of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Drumming. On a smaller scale, Dutch dancer Mirjam Bos shared a program with English-born, Winnipeg-based Ruth Cansfield. Bos, a straggly blonde in shag coat, black bra and tiny skirt, began her solo X with a series of facial manipulations and gross-out sound effects (grunts, throat clearings, wheezes and burps) that gradually morphed into assaultive jerks, staggers, and spasms. Bos's risky, confident embodiment of neurotic, ugly beauty was a triumph of self-indulgence, while Cansfield's two solos and a trio demonstrated her talent for sharply-sketched dramatic abstraction.

The rest of the Festival's Canadian contingent made a strong showing. Document 1 was the first in Lynda Gaudreau's Encyclopedia series for her Compagnie De Brune. Six dancers, including a Cunninghamesque older male, rendered fresh and full of feeling what might have been dry and cerebral. With involved serenity they worked through seventy minutes of choreography for feet, hands, arms, hips and head, augmented by film, drawings, post-modem hopscotch, and wind-up toys.

The air was thick with sweaty attitude in another sextet. Incarnation, by Helene Blackburn for her company Cas Public, was a juicy series of male-female encounters marked by catwalk stalks, marionettish manipulations, and fast, erotic tussles. The dancing was so good and actorly, and the dance itself so seductively, neoclassically kinky that you could almost overlook how few steps there were and the work's overall sameness.

French native Dominique Porte has been a Montreal resident for ten years. In 7 gouettes et des poussieres, a solo built cleverly round an imaginative scramble of words and phrases projected behind her, she gave precise physical indication of the mind's wobbling indecisions. But in Cortex, a FIND commission, she and two others dribbled into woefully arcane, intellectually slack terrain. The piece was too arbitrary, too devoid of anything to do with living, to make Porte's facility for movement matter.

The sixteen dancers in Jean-Pierre Perreault's L'Exil--L'Oubli were dressed in dark, old-fashioned clothes. Like stylized versions of real people they clutched their heads, huddled, reached, or rushed into a near-embrace and froze. There was urgency and tension in the group's rhythms, wrapped in a poignant poetry echoed by Bertrand Chenier's reverberant score. This overlong, but beautiful, epic chamber piece was one of FIND 99's most formally and emotionally satisfying dances.