In Transit 2004.

HOUSE OF WORLD CULTURES BERLIN, GERMANY JUNE 2-13, 2004 Reviewed by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

In Transit 2004 stunned the eye and touched the soul. The "brainbodychild" of curators Koffi Koko (of Benin and Paris) and Johannes Odenthal, this third annual festival had an overarching theme: "The Third Body," described as "the body between worlds, the body in cross border transitions."

The opening-night ceremony show cased Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka, intoning from a balcony his epic poem "Samarkand," which played on the concept of the world as a marketplace and set the tone for the intercultural excursions to come.

The dance concerts reflected contrasts between tradition and modernity. Akira Kasai's solo, Bibo no Aozora (Handsome Blue Sky), is butoh like it's never been seen before. Sustained and lyrical, grotesque and ironic, and always with a tinge of humor just below the sculpted surface, this work displayed not the starkness of Sankai Juku but hearkened back to Kazuo Ohno and earlier schools that regarded German expressionist dance as one of its mother lodes. Kasai at times seemed to "channel" Mary Wigman, his delicately curving arras and hands dancing like hers in her Shifting Landscapes. Yet he is totally modern. He deftly transferred energy from one body part to another and finessed the interplay between taut and legato.

Nagtaba (Fusion), a collaboration between Beatrice Kombe's four-woman ensemble, Tehe Tehe (from Ivory Coast), and Souleymane Badolo's three-man group, Kongo Ba Teria (from Burkina Faso), bridged nationality, gender, and genre boundaries. Kombe and Badolo's efforts at contact slipped into conflict or competition but ended with resolution. Traditional dance motifs--fast rhythms that seemed like involuntary breakthroughs from a mythical past--punctured beautiful moments of silence and slow motion.

Abubakar Usman and Okon Akam, from Nigeria, performed Oju (The Eye), a tightrope-tense duet that spoke worlds about tradition and its discontents. Usman was "modern" man--dressed in a black suit, seated on a chair at a table, holding a bouquet of roses, and dancing in a modern ballet-jazz style. Akam was Elegba, the Yoruba trickster deity, wearing a low-slung, traditional skirt-pant, carrying a ritual whisk, and dancing barefoot and low to the ground. With balletic case and consummate skill, they represented primal opposites battling for survival. Akam's beautiful, bared back is as expressive as his face. In this cosmic contest for ascendancy, partnering became an exquisite balance of opposites--Usman stocky and strong, Akam elongated and snaky.

Jue (Aware), a duet by Gaoyan Jinzi (of the Beijing Modern Dance Company) and her mother, Luo Lili, stood out as the keynote dance concert. In this work, the two women danced the agon between old and new on the most intimate, familial level. Rather than breaking the umbilical cord, again and again Jinzi made her way back to Lili, who remained constant in her aloof, smiling perfection. Lili is the traditional Chinese female dancer--coquettish, beautiful, on a pedestal. Her daughter winced, crouched, and crawled, fetuslike, at her feet. Her movement--sometimes staccato, sometimes serpentine and acrobatic--was always raw, bared, and modern, in a European sense, churning an energy that showed her fury and sadness. At one point she mirrored her mother's movement, begging the question of fitting into Mama's mold. Impossible! The six sections in this sixty-minute work are choreographic gems performed with fervor and perfection underscored by the real-life relationship.

For twelve days the hulking, strangely beautiful House of World Cultures buzzed with performances, discussions, improvisations, and choreography labs--all part of the journey of these bodies "in transit."

FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.in-transit.de

WANT MORE REVIEWS?

Go to www.dancemagazine.com and find The Montpellier Festival and Batsheva Dance Company.