Next Wave Festival 2003.

BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 

SEPTEMBER 30-DECEMBER 13, 2003

FOR SHEER radiance of movement, the European companies outdid the groups from the United States and Taiwan in this quintessential New York festival.

The soon-to-be-disbanded Ballett Frankfurt provoked, agitated, and delighted audiences. Artistic director William Forsythe challenges his dancers to the nth degree, wildly decentering the pelvis while delivering strong pointe work and expansive upper bodies. His choreography looks chaotic at first, but sly congruencies give it order.

In the terrific (N.N.N.N.), four men were part of a giddy puzzle, fitting their bodies into each other's negative spaces. Their movement was contagious, like the Marx Brothers's passing around physical jokes in the blink of an eye. The leggy Duo, for two women dressed in black with transparent tops, was both luscious and austere. The odd or elegant folding and unfolding sequences seemed to turn the dancers inside out. Like much of Forsythe's choreography, Duo transformed pointe work from something ethereal into something earthy. The two dancers, Jill Johnson and Allison Brown, earned their moment of peace at the end when they came to stillness, facing the audience. One Flat Thing sent a horde of dancers scurrying amid a forest of rectal tables, scrunching under and bounding above them. They turned the stage into a school cafeteria, a game room, and a prison, showing boldness in a thousand personal ways.

Forsythe teaches us to see complexity. Packing in umpteen moves per minute, he creates a new sense of continuity, flail of witty moments and daring physicality. His choreography is an onslaught at first, but after riding the momentum, one may find it satisfying, galvanizing, and thrilling.

In Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Rain, ten dancers, surrounded by a semicircle of hanging ropes (by Jan Versweyveld) and backed by Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians played live, loped and leaned inward with centrifugal force. One could see them either as gliding, bumping molecules or as men and women mystically connected to one another. They gradually picked up speed, and it was beautiful to watch them move consciously from one body state to another.

Pattern was primary here, but there was also room for personal style. One dancer was rangy and goofy; another mischievous and full-bodied; another possessed. De Keersmaeker's style draws on that of Trisha Brown (her dancers have been to Belgium to teach the company), with much swatting and lashing, scalloping lines, and simple runs. The dancers seemed to get energy from pauses or stillness, embedding kinetic bursts within this rigorous and sensual movement. They kept changing their soft and revealing costumes, which went from beige to pink (by Dries Van Noten). Someone streaked across the hanging set, rippling it to make a wave, as a prelude to a sexy duet on the floor.

Susan Marshall's Sleeping Beauty and Other Stories were very different pieces: the first using release-y partner work among duels and trios, the second featuring slightly absurdist group actions. There were some clever connections between them, for example a large lamp in the first piece that showed tip iii a smaller version in the second piece. But both works meandered. At the center of Sleeping Beauty was Kristen Hollinsworth, who, with her bare midriff and vacant look, seemed like a runaway flour an MTV video. Other Stories, with its assortment of props and random-seeming actions on a table, supplied some inventiveness.

Dayton Contemporary Dance Company's The Flight Project encompassed six pieces created between 1996 and 2003. The easy-to-remember ones were Sir Warren Spears's On the Wings of Angels, an ode to the Tuskegee airmen (in Program A) and Doug Varone's The Beating of Wings (in Program B). Angels, with constant saluting and pointing, built up momentum, but relied too heavily on canon and unison to create any sense of craft or depth. In Beating, Sheri "Sparkle" Williams went through a rite of passage--of independence, of attaining freedom, or perhaps a passage into dying. Williams has dramatic power, and the whole piece rested on that. It was stirring when she finally got hooked up to wires, and floated, soared, and lifted straight up to the rafters. But the music--Stravinsky's Firebird--is too eventful, mysterious, and long for this single-idea piece. Plus, the other dancers served as mere assistants.

Admirable aspects of the other four dances included Dwight Rhoden's sharp rhythms in Sky Garden, especially when danced by the loose and rangy Daniel Marshall; Bill T. Jones's stringent but loving group work in and before...; Bebe Miller's soft entanglements, often playing three against one, in Aerodigm; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's disturbing moments of sexual abuse in Eurydice's Flight.

Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan's Moon Water, with its reflecting panels in a high corner like a moon (set design by Austin Wang), was very pretty. The fluid and strong dancers do fabulous backbends, and their spines and arms ripple like water. Karate kicks accented the modern dance sequences. But sometimes, in slow extensions, feet were sickled, just, it seemed, to add a dose of crazy butoh. Worse, the dance didn't connect to the Bach cello suites played on tape. A subtle but stifling self-consciousness prevented Moon Water, choreographed by Lin Hwai-min, from moving beyond pretty into the beautiful category. However, the final episode, in which real water mysteriously appears on the stage, was pretty spectacular.

The opening night thrill of Merce Cunningham's premiere Split Sides depended on one's age. For the young set it was that the bands Radiohead and Sigur Ros were playing live. For the older set it was seeing Carolyn Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns throw the dice to determine the order of the music, lights, and decor.

In the first half the dancers wore unitards tie-dyed to look like winter twigs al dawn (all costumes by James Hall), and the backdrop by Robert Heishman looked like frost on windows. So the total effect was one of coldness, containment, and hibernation. In the second half the dancers wore rainbow-lined overalls with loose pant legs, and the backdrop by Catherine Yass was a rosy-hued smudged cityscape: a warm spring day in midtown.

The movement vocabulary of wide, grounded positions, rooted jumps, and semaphore-like arms didn't change much. As always, the groupings were endlessly interesting. The music sounded similar to aural collages Cunningham has used before, with Radiohead using heartbeats, chants, and drones for the first half and Sigur Ros using the tinkling of a music box and the grinding of a nutcracker for the second half. Split Sides was a lesson in perception.

Although we knew that the pre-show toss determined the outcome, our own eyes created a sense of wholeness.