La Bete.

O VERTIGO JOYCE THEATER MARCH 3-8, 1998

Nowadays, postmodern choreographers regularly invite their dancers to supply movement, which they then shape to their kinetic visions. In making La Bete ("The Beast Within"), Montreal dancemaker Ginette Laurin asked her troupe of four men and six women to invent characters for themselves, for whom she devised kinetic interactions in a phantasmagoric world created with the help of her collaborators.

Scenic designer Guillaume Lord sets before a cloud-covered sky four chairs on stilts, connected by poles to four more installed upside down, twenty feet above them. Lighting designer Axel Morgen thaler models the space with cinematic precision, often shadowy, sometimes bright, trapping dancers in harsh pools or silhouetting them against the sky. Costumer Luc J. Beland's fertile imagination has produced a lavish array of elaborately tattered, quasi-Victorian outfits: jerkins, camisoles, waistcoats, multiplying the ten-member cast into a larger population. Jean Derome's richly eclectic score swaddles the dancing in acerbic melodies, African drumming, wailing voices, and everyday noises.

Twitchy, pantomimic gestures pepper full-bodied, gruff physical encounters that draw for inspiration on martial arts and acrobatics. Elegant Anne Barry, in Victorian garb, inscribes poetry on imaginary surfaces; Carole Courtois, sporting a crimped blond mane and mascara-caked lashes (hair and makeup by Angelo Barsetti), struts impishly alongside in knee-high lace-up boots; in two-tone trousers, David Rose's legs run frantically, getting him nowhere; in a dainty dress, sturdily built Kenneth Gould minces as a "woman trapped in a man's body."

Sylvain Lafortune's solo translates his character's oafishness into poignant movement. He galumphs around with aimless urgency in a workaday suit and heavy shoes, trying to soar, but his flex-footed leaps clunk hopelessly back to earth.

I am at first a fascinated witness to Laurin's macabre dreamscape, but after an hour's worth of Visually entertaining spectacle, I still have no hint of the emotional motivations of these dark denizens of their own imaginations. I wonder if the spoken text--in French--toward the end might give me clues, if only I could understand it. But ultimately, the curtain falls on an intriguing mystery that remains unsolvable.