Modern's Freshest Find. (Reviews: International).

FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE NOUVELLE DANSE VARIOUS VENUES MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 6, 2001

The body as laboratory was the focus of the tenth Festival International de Nouvelle Danse (FIND). Sprawled across a dozen Montreal venues, the event hosted fifty-three choreographers from eight countries and featured nine world premieres. The aesthetic base stretched from the old guard avant-garde (represented by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Judson Dance Theater, via White Oak's "PASTforward" anthology) to the latest by younger European and Canadian hotshots--providing a glance at global developments in postmodern dance in the last forty-plus years. The majority of work, however, was new rather than archival. Screenings, discussions, exhibitions, and even a five-hour dance marathon were also on the agenda.

France's Boris Charmatz is in his 20s, with maybe half a dozen pieces under his belt. No two are alike. Con forts fleuve, which deeply divided critical opinion, is the most demanding and disturbing. Charmatz's methods are based on selective disorientation: roped-off, empty seating; unreliable or dim lighting with flashes and blackouts; performers whose heads remained entirely covered as they went through simple, brutish, tableaux-style actions, like a doomed civilian militia playing obscure, apocalyptic war games. The flooring was gradually pulled out from under their feet (the audience's, too).

Climactically, giant tarpaulins fluttered down one by one onto a body pile. Think blocked vision, constant interruption, pervasive harm, or dance as muffled nightmare, or a kind of terrorism. No wonder some were angered. But, if you let it, this unforgettable work got under your skin.

England's Russell Maliphant, whose work won the festival's People's Choice Award, is a beautiful mover, weighted yet soft and silky, and an intelligent choreographer who works closely with brilliant lighting designer Michael Hulls. The older solos Shift and Two, each a slice of perfection, were balanced against new duets Knot and Sheer, in which Maliphant danced with, respectively, Yval Pick and Dana Fouras. The first was pitched somewhere between sport and swing dance, with lifts and rollovers in fluid, repeating patterns. Tussling with clarity, the men were sometimes adversarial equals. The presence of Fouras brought a more intimate, romantic touch to Maliphant's almost monastic simplicity. There was a gently athletic courtliness in their orbiting interactions--her languishing over his body, him cartwheeling over hers.

The eleven sleek, articulate dancers in Montreal-based Marie Chouinard's eponymous company looked severe yet chic, with breasts and crotches marked by lines of tape. In Le Cri du monde, Chouinard turned them into a seething, thrusting, fibrillating tribe as much insect or bird as human. This cyberanthropological dance is startling--primitive yet futuristic, alien yet familiar, with a terrible, exhilarating power. Chouinard's bold accessibility was reduced to a more spare, episodic level in Les 24 Preludes de Chopin. Two dozen scenes alternated between solos and ensemble passages--dry here, passionate there, with spiraling leaps and big athletic jumps countering the agitated gesticulations of clustered groupings.

Jean-Pierre Perreault staged the installation-performance Les Ombres at his own venue, a converted church. It was a wonderfully private, quasi-cinematic spectacle, with each audience member ushered into separate cubicles. These ran along two sides of a large performing area in which dancers in dark, vaguely period clothing suffered splendidly via purposeful walking or breakneck running, a cradling embrace or clinging restraint. The men clutched battered suitcases to their chests or lay rigidly beside them as if in their graves. Barefoot women scurried mouselike across the wooden floor, dresses fluttering. Everything they did carried great, stylized feeling. Perreault is a master at exposing furtive human mysteries and rendering aesthetically the painful ecstasy of living. The lighting was gorgeous, stark yet sensitive, and the soundtrack, whether instrumental or natural (for example, rain on metal), similarly moody. The performance lasted over three hours, loosely divided into hour-and-a-quarter blocks. The audience was free to arrive or depart as needed. The dance, like life, would go on. Extraordinary.

These performances were the cream of a large and varied crop. German dancer Thomas Lehmen's straight-faced conceptual comedy trio mono subjects cast a spotlight on relationships between performer, audience, and reality. Nothing profound, but enjoyable. Belgian dancer Vincent Dunoyer's The Princess Project also had its moments. The first half was a dance dialogue with his filmed self. In the second part, he and Sarah Ludi performed a real-body variation on it. Understated and clever. Another technologically influenced duet, scheme, by the young Montreal company kondition pluriel, lacked Dunoyer's clarity of intention. But French artist Rachid Ouramdane's group Fin Novembre scored with Au bord des metaphores, an improvisatory performance that used extreme closeups and handheld mini-cameras to heighten body awareness.

These performances were marked by a spirit of enquiry. That didn't quite redeem 24 x Caprices, by Montreal's Manon Oligny for her Manon fait de la danse. This purgatorial quartet offered few fresh insights into the body images and fractured identities of contemporary women. At least you could intermittently engage with the performers. Daniel Larrieu denied us that pleasure in Cenizas, a moribund ensemble piece inspired by Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations. You could better appreciate Larrieu's resistance of Latin cliches if he hadn't crushed the life out of his dancers and us. The rudimentary movement in this horribly protracted (ninety minutes) exercise in cultural appropriation was too joyless, and the theatrical context heavy-handed. Nothing like somnambulistic Mexicana. Larrieu handily demonstrated the difference between discomfort, which can be interesting (see Charmatz), and enervating boredom.