Lyon Opera Ballet.

Lyon Opera Ballet Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA October 27, 2006

Every visit with the ballet company from France's second city brings its share of revelations. Again, this time, the Lyonnais did not disappoint when they imported dances, both borrowed and commissioned, by three prominent European women modernists who interpreted familiar classical music through radically contrasting sensibilities. They scored triumphs in every case.

Sharing the program were the world premiere of Sasha Waltz's Fantasie and the company premiere of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's 1992 Die Grosse Fuge, an astute coupling. Inspired by Beethoven's eponymous string quartet movement, De Keersmaeker both mirrors and illuminates the music's web of counterpoint and dense textures. The Belgian choreographer thrusts her eight black-clad dancers into a measured movement maelstrom, introducing and then developing thematic elements. The gestures of the reclining woman at the start yield to 20 minutes of squiggling, spiraling, kneeling, rolling, and recovering bodies, often congealing in unison. Even partial disrobings take place at choice moments in the score.

If De Keersmaeker remains a cool analyst, Waltz seethes with the dangerous Romantic passion at the heart of Schubert's Fantasie in F Minor for Piano, Four Hands. The German choreographer extracts the turbulence below the surface in the shocking opening episode, where one of Schubert's most lyrical effusions creeps in on a brutal assault inflicted by one man on another. The eight dancers, arms often floating, wander through a purgatory in which relationships find little fulfillment in truncated lifts and desultory groupings. When a dancer falls and is caught by another man, the momentary connection seems like an emotional epiphany. According to the program notes, Waltz encouraged improvisation from these classically trained dancers, and their rapport sustains an uncommon level of intensity.

The evening ended with a revival of Maguy Marin's 1989 Groosland. The French choreographer's iconic fat suits, in which 20 dancers waddle and cavort-and do it with great technical skill--to two Bach Brandenburg Concertos, aren't nearly as witty as this piece's sophisticated satirical jab at choreographers who deploy bouncy baroque music like sonic wallpaper, to conceal the cracks in their craftsmanship. See www.opera-lyon.com.