Lyon Opera Ballet.

LYON OPERA BALLET BAM HOWARD GILMAN OPERA HOUSE BROOKLYN, NEW YORK APRIL 20, 22-24, 2004

Wondrous dancing specimens--bungee cord-swinging ballerinas, loping flipper-footed men, inflatable marshmallow--like beings, and stranger creatures-abound in Philippe Decoufle's Tricodex. Staged for the Lyon Opera Ballet, this new work is the third in Decoufle's trilogy inspired by Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, a visually playful encyclopedia of an imaginary realm. An intermission-less hour and thirty minutes, Tricodex reads like an encyclopedia, with each section detailing the curious habits of some fantastic genus or species.

Early on, we're introduced to a ballerina whose arms have been extended with long tentacles. As she bourrees on pointe, her jointless yet oddly articulate upper limbs delicately caress the air, forming looping undulations and crisscrossing patterns. Soon we discover variants of tentacle-people: a body with two tentacles emerging from one arm, a woman spinning across the stage with a whole skirtful of tentacles, two men with extra-large tentacles sprouting from their heads alternately bowing and leaning backward to make huge, sweeping waves that fill the theater's height.

Each new costume device--there are more than 150 costumes for the twenty-five or so performers, and several ingenious mechanical apparatuses to boot--brings a sense of delight and fascination. But there's some good barebones dancing too. One woman in a simple unitard performs a limber, sinewy solo--slinking on all fours, she retracts and dangles her foot like a cat shaking water from a paw. Later, near nudity creates a different sort of spectacle. A horde of body-slapping cavemen suddenly shed their scraggly duds, transforming themselves into a chorus line of bikini-clad Adonises. In Chippendale-esque fashion, the men take turns primping and preening on pedestals, popping their biceps and rippling their abs. The effect of such transformations is to make the odd seem natural and the natural seem vaguely preposterous. To further this effect, Decoufle employs a small-scale proscenium arch that is maneuvered to flame certain episodes in the dance, as if putting them on a stage within a stage.

In one of the work's most visually striking episodes, two ballerinas suspended by bungee cords are propelled by their ground-based partners into wild flying arcs. The extraordinary lighting by Patrice Besobes makes the airborne dancers' blue tutus glow like clouds in the night. Combining aerial elements of circus with ballet motifs and a modern-dance sensibility gleaned from Nikolais and others, Decoufle with Tricodex creates a hybrid dance-spectacle that is witty inventive, and visually sublime.

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