Get physical: movement theater like Jump broadens the audience for dance.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When The New York Times reviewed Be, a high-energy melding of dance, drums, and acrobatics presented off-Broadway this spring by the Israeli performance group Mayumana, the headline read, "Who Needs a Narrative? Just Look Good and Bang on Stuff."

Reductive though it is, that headline could serve as a label for a whole school of musical theater that seems to be cropping up more and more regularly in places where narrative once held sway. A dancer looking for a job in these oddball productions is often better off with a resume that includes gymnastics, circus skills, and martial arts rather than one that stresses singing and acting. What's the point of being a "triple threat" in a show that relies mostly on recorded music or percussion and has little or no text? (And don't forget to mention your skating prowess.)

It's almost a throwback to the earliest days of musicals, to the Ziegfeld Follies. Even though nowadays it takes more to get hired than a good pair of legs and a pretty face, for the audience, the result is the same: easy-to-swallow entertainment served up in stylish, discrete chunks.

Then during the summer, New Yorkers were flocking to the South Street Seaport to see La Vie and Absinthe, a pair of Cirque du Soleil-like shows that shoehorn spectacular aerial tricks and nifty juggling acts into a themed evening. As it happens, Be did not catch on the way De La Guarda did some years ago--it ran a mere four months, compared with De La Guarda's five years. But, like De La Guarda, it has been tremendously successful at home and on tour. And no one needs to be reminded that the noisy Stomp and the messy Blue Man Group, two older examples of this trend, seem likely to run forever in the Village.

On the one hand, such displays represent a kind of Vegas-ization of theater--more or less content-free, accessible to all, and challenging to none but the prudish. On the other hand, they draw audiences--young ones, in particular--to a kind of entertainment in which sound and movement trump all else. That's not a complete definition of dance, by any means, but it's certainly a reasonable starting-point for arriving at one. So I'm not prepared to bemoan the popularity of a kind of theater that, while it seems to be a diminution of the form defined by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Kander and Ebb, is also an extension of the work of Petipa and Balanchine and Graham and Morris. And anything that stretches the possibilities for performers and audiences has to be welcomed.

Consider the newest entry in this increasingly eclectic genre, Jump. Opening this month at the Union Square Theater, it is a complete category-buster, a comic melange of music (by Dong-June Lee and others) and martial arts (choreographed by Gye-Hwan Park). It was created in Seoul by a Korean theater troupe, the Yegam Theatre Company, and, according to the publicity material, is still selling out there four years later. It's had successful tours in Hong Kong, Spain, Britain, Israel, Japan, and Malaysia, among others. And the plan, obviously, is to settle in at the Union Square and draw the same hip, young, often international crowd that went to Be and the theater's previous tenant, Slava's Snowshow, a confetti-strewn, European-flavored mime-fest by the Russian clown Slava Polunin. (The Union Square, once the seat of New York's rough-and-ready Tammany Democratic machine, now seems to be the New York headquarters for another kind of roughhousing.)

Jump has a wisp of a plot: the home of an extended family of martial arts experts is invaded by two bungling burglars. With its realistic living-room set and its differentiated characters, it looks like something close to the traditional musical. But the music ranges from hip hop to tangos, depending on which generation is front and center. The dialogue is completely incidental. And the whole setup is little more than an excuse for a series of ornate, often comic demonstrations of high-speed tumbling, twirling, kicking, and flipping.

Still, it seems as remote from Be and La Vie as it does from Grease and Xanadu. But as fate would have it, a sort of second cousin was also in town this summer. The Lincoln Center Festival presented the Heisei Nakamura-Za company in Hokaibo, a Kabuki comedy--there aren't too many of those--directed by its leading player, Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII. It was a spectacular evening of music and dance studded with highly evocative acting and expert physical comedy. Looked at through the prism of Kabuki and other Asian theater forms, Jump begins to make sense. It's not a Vegas-style entertainment, and it's not a Broadway-style musical. It's a work that takes its form from the traditions of Asian theater.

For us in the West, dance is, generally speaking, a discrete part of musical theater. You can usually tell where choreography begins and where it ends, and this holds true even for the vaunted danced-through musicals of Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett. Like the difference between a speech and a song, the split between a show's workaday movement and its dance numbers is readily apparent. But in Asian theater, and Kabuki in particular, dance inflects the movement from beginning to end. Dialogue is so stylized and musical accompaniment so pervasive that it seems sung-through. Asian theater is the place to look for the ultimate fusion of music, dance, and text. Wouldn't it be nice if Jump opened a little space in our theater for shows that know how to look good, know how to bang on stuff, and also tell us a story?

Sylviane Gold has written on theater for Newsday and The New York Times.