GENDER DIVIDE MOVES WEST IN `TEA'.

GENDER DIVIDE MOVES WEST IN `TEA' MODERN DANCE TURKEY BLOOMSBURY THEATRE LONDON, ENGLAND JANUARY 13-14, 2000

Modern Dance Turkey is the Islamic World's sole state-funded contemporary dance company. Forget the unintended pun in this Ankara-based troupe's name. On the evidence of this triple bill, Modern Dance Turkey is worth keeping tabs on.

Artistic director Beyhan Murphy trained at the London School of Contemporary Dance. She subsequently worked in Britain for seventeen years as a freelance dancer and choreographer. Since founding this company in 1992, Murphy has consistently capitalized on her U.K. contacts. Top British choreographers like Richard Alston and Ashley Page are among those invited to make new work on her eager young dancers.

Ironically, the least successful part of the Company's Bloomsbury program was Mark Baldwin's Three Short Pieces. Created in 1995, this arch souffle of athletic and balletic social dance reveals Baldwin's creeping penchant for cuteness. His undeniable facility for knitting together pleasing movement patterns is sometimes sorely undercut by a smug, winking jocularity. Still, this ensemble piece--strategically chosen for MDT's British bow--showed off the dancers' mettle.

Baldwin's style felt imposed upon them. No surprise that Murphy's own The Tea House did not. It's hardly discrediting the choreographer to call her work an entertainment. This knowing send-up of Turkish society's gender divide is one of the funniest dances to hit a London stage in recent memory. It begins with mundane calm. A half-dozen men play dice games while a woman upstage pours and serves their tea. As they stir, she retreats to a harem-like realm where she and five other females in ballooning trousers play giggling games of their own behind exquisitely carved wooden screens. These are continually rearranged to suggest a woman's lot in life, a mix of private pleasures and literally pushing, slamming, yoke-like burdens. Are they caged in, or are the males locked out?

The self-absorbed men take center stage via a series of furtive crouches, runs, hops, and boxing feints. These proud macho poseurs stare out, tap their chests, competitively spin chairs and, hunched over like gorillas, don foolish false moustaches. This cues an increasingly comic fantasy in which the women exchange traditional garb for red heels, blonde wigs, and black swimsuits. But their Barbie-like transformation is short-lived. The tables turn as wigs and `staches are swapped in a power play that fades back, inconclusively, into the suspect reality of a dance party.

Murphy leaves us wanting more which, thankfully, there is; The Tea House is an extended excerpt from a longer, one-act piece of dance-theatre. It would be good to see it in its entirety.

The evening opened with moonlighting MDT dancer Barge Ozturk's shadowy, glancing Oxygen. Set to an alternately throbbing, "tick-y" and "wah-wah" soundscore by Bowery Electric, Rachels, and Emrah Olcay, this quartet of dancers betrays a gift for subtle, abstract emotionalism that should be encouraged. Murphy, it would seem, is just the person to do this for her company.