Lyon Biennale de la Danse.

"Mama Africa," the name of the Sixth Biennale de la Danse in Lyons, suggests a dance program harvested from that vast continent. In fact, this event brought together several black or multi-ethnic companies from far-flung places where African and non-African traditions have met, and the rich outcome of this cultural fusion was the festival's most evident theme. Its style was set by the image of Josephine Baker--celebrated with a soiree--who, among many conquests, brought the Charleston to Paris.

The thematic programming of the Lyons Dance Biennial has always set it apart from other international dance festivals. With "Mama Africa" the festival departed from its own precedents by giving us a theme that was not under the banner of nationalism (previous festivals have been devoted to dance in Spain, in the U.S., in France, and in Germany). Only two of the twenty dance companies at the Biennial were African. The rest came from the Americas--North and South--and from the Caribbean and France.

The Biennial could not possibly survey all of the dance forms within the scope of "Mama Africa," but it tried hard. Like previous festivals, this one was on a scale inconceivable in the U.S.: From September 13 to 29, fifteen theaters were placed at the service of dance. And while live dance reigned on the stages, a film series toasted a host of social and popular dances, and, of course, La Josephine. A Bal Be-bop held on the quay of the Saone river gave both the Lyonnais and those in town for the Biennial a chance to swing for themselves. Like many of these events, it was an endearing interplay of cultures: The all-white members of the Happy Stompers Big Band played standards that cut across both time and the Atlantic, but between songs the bandleader's energetic Un, deux, trois, quatre! abruptly brought us right back to France.

For people having too much fun dancing to think about the tissage ("weaving") and metissage ("cross-breeding") of African and European rhythms there on the quay, a luxurious bilingual publication, La Revue Noire, did a lot of thinking for them, and it was available for purchase at all performances. Without this metissage, these essays reminded us, there would be no jazz, no tap, no cakewalk, no samba, no capoeira. It's tempting to follow the lineages traced in these pages out even further: to the music of Stravinsky and the dances of Balanchine, both of which would be unrecognizable without jazz, a vital modernizing force.

There was a Brazilian sway of the hips in the contemporary dancing of Grupo Corpo. Rodrigo Pederneiras, the troupe's choreographer, has discovered a minimalist but sensual vocabulary that he crafts into dances with a rare musicality and a pervasive wit. His voluptuous, pared-down movements made me think of the line drawings of Picasso.

From the program notes I expected Pederneiras's 21 (1992) to look like a Cunningham dance: The late John Cage would certainly have approved of the conceptual underpinnings of the commissioned score by Grupo Uakti, music based on mathematical permutations generated by the number 21. He would also have liked its instrumentation: water, metal, wood, and glass. But 21's rhythmic score was worlds away from Cage's disordered sounds. The only thing, in fact, that 21 shares with Cunningham's work is the confidence of choreography that knows exactly what it's doing: Pederneiras knows just how far he can rein in his vocabulary--much of 21 is like a theme-and-variations on walking. His choreography also knows that it can take its time, although always in close communion with his scores.

Nazareth (1993) gets its title from the name of turn-of-the-century Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth. For it, the contemporary composer Jose Miguel Wisnik updates Nazareth's tangos and waltzes with a twin vision to Pederneiras's choreographic one. The costumes by Freusa Zechmeister included stiff, transparent miniskirts that flipped up and rocked wonderfully on the figure-eight movements of the women's hips. Built around a spirited, sauteing movement style, this piece had a lusher joyousness than the witty minimalism of 21, but both shared the same freshness, the same strikingly original and assured vision.

While one can trace the different traditions in the work of Grupo Corpo, their intermingling never felt self-conscious. This was true of all the best work at the Biennial. It was true, for example, in the music of the African Jazz Pioneers, a big band from South Africa, and it was true of Dance Theatre of Harlem's performances of The River by Alvin Ailey, the only ballet ever commissioned from Duke Ellington. In the less successful pieces, the meeting of dance traditions seemed forced or unconvincing: French choreographer Fred Bendongue combined traditional African dance, tap, and break dance in an aimless brew; Germaine Acogny (of both France and Senegal) premiered an evening-length work in which African elements seemed little more than an excuse for pretension.

In the work by contemporary African-American choreographers, dancing made from the meeting of cultures was a fait accompli. Ron Brown and Bill T. Jones had other concerns on their minds, and their multimedia dances were inspired by looking out, not looking in.

Brown's Dirt Road is an urban collage whose disco and techno sounds could have been imported to Lyons straight from a Manhattan club. But while the score conveys the thrill of being fabulous in a very cool town, the text ruminates on death, on waiting, on hope. We hear a woman say, "Now is the time to be an undertaker in the ghetto. Now is not the time to be a mother in the ghetto." Brown says, "The truth is, death brought us closer."

What's striking about the dancing is that Brown, who in a press conference had said that he uses spoken words to make his dances "more accessible," chooses for his vocabulary an emotionally quiet movement language, the understated vocabulary of postmodernism. His swingy movement phrases tell us more about the lines they draw in the air than they do about the five dancers performing them. I didn't have to look far for dancing that spoke louder, more clearly than his: I had seen it just that afternoon at a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where, in such pieces as Cry (1971) and Revelations (1960), outstretched arms and outspread fingers spoke loudly, and so did the movements of the torso--shoulders spoke of determination or despair, contractions often spoke of pain. Steps and music also interact closely in Ailey's work--sometimes he even visualizes the lyrics.

But this is 1995, and the contemporary dance vocabulary that Brown uses wasn't invented to serve a dance-theater, but to explore formal questions-especially shape and momentum. It is 1995, and our culture has never been more ironic, more cynical. In this environment it's difficult to make a sincere, committed statement traditionally, so Brown resorts to multimedia fragmentation, to hip and funny interludes that lighten the grimness.

Bill T. Jones also choreographs in the reserved language of contemporary dance, but he is a choreographer who is not afraid of big, operatic-sized emotions. He uses multimedia to heat up the emotional pitch of these steps. Everything about Still/Here, a premiere coproduced by the Biennial and several American presenters including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is large: The scale of the staging, which lasts more than two hours; the scale of the project, which draws on material from a year and a half of the "survival workshops" that Jones conducted with terminally ill people; and the scale of Jones's goal, which is to make a dance that tells us what it's like to live knowing you're dying.

The emotional trajectory of Still/Here has much in common with Revelations as the caved-in, burdened, and broken people of "Still" give way to the affirming survivors of "Here." What's different is that Jones is not content to be merely lyrically expressive. His expressionism is also highly graphic, hitting us right in the gut instead of waiting for eyes and ears to catch on--large-screen video projections in Still/Here show us people pale and wasted by AIDS or cancer; at one point fast cuts of stylized body parts dance in unison on the screens.

Still/Here is a deft and beautiful dance, with choreography that skillfully integrates sculpture, architecture, momentum, and thoughtfulness. But it is a dance that loses, not acquires, emotional force from the video projections and taped dialogues that bear down heavy-handedly on the subtle, nuanced steps. In Kenneth Frazelle's score for "Still" violins sigh, dirgelike and lachrymose. Piercing through the melancholy of the instrumentation is the inimitable voice of folk singer Odetta, who half recites, half sings, the words of people who are dying. They are much more affecting in her song: words are abstracted, confessions become an elegiac poetry. Thanks to Odetta's unusual, almost genderless timbre, it's a poetry that haunts.

In the midst of this haunted landscape, the dancers by turns falter and affirm, collapse and offer support. Their emotions pass disorderedly through horror, despair, helplessness, denial, and determination. In "Here," set to an unfalteringly upbeat score by Vernon Reid, the mood is one of unshadowed confidence and optimism, and the choreography mirrors this with steps held securely in balances and hands clasped in solidarity.

Still/Here was one of the high points of the Biennial, but it was a dance to admire more than a dance to love. In addition to Grupo Corpo, a company that performed a program to love was the Ohio-based Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC). The program started with a classic protest dance from 1959, Donald McKayle's Rainbow Round My Shoulder, a work that depicts the wanton murder of a man on a chain gang. The power of the narrative turns on the other men's sorrow and yet lack of surprise at the killing. In the contrast between the dancers' restrained, austere drama and their bold, massive shaping of the men's burdened steps, we feel the full incendiary power of watching a community resign itself to injustice.

The dramatic challenge in Doug Varone's Home (1988) is to reproduce the impasse of a marriage in which husband and wife no longer even remember why they can't get along. In the space between the two chairs that each sits on, we feel keenly the degree to which they have walled themselves off from one another. Shonna Hickman-Matlock and Calvin Norris Young offered a shimmering performance of this truthful, simple work, so that as she tentatively, reluctantly, moves her hand up along her shoulder so that he can take it in his, we recognize both the enormity and the fragility of this final gesture.

Ulysses Dove's Vespers, created for the company in 1986, also glowed in the chiseled clarity of the company's interpretive restraint. Dove's dance for six women is a surging choir to Mikel Rouse's driving, percussive score. The positions are statuesque, and they are pitted dangerously against gravity through a series of quick directional changes. Wearing black dresses and their hair in high buns, these women made me think of the amazonian chorus in Martha Graham's Chronicle--only with those hurtling off-balances they looked as though they'd acquired motorcycles. Leading them all and setting the dancing's large scale was Sheri Williams, a dynamo of impassive strength and muscle-bound attack.

These performances marked DCDC's first engagement in Europe. Lyons, the faraway city to which they had traveled, is very French, a city of Beaujolais and great cuisine. Even so, it was Marvin Gaye I heard on the radio there, not Edith Piaf. And this, in addition to the dancing, was what "Mama Africa" was all about: Over and over the Biennial reminded us that this century's urban pulse is inextricably linked to an African pulse