Next Wave festival.

TANZTHEATER WUPPERTAL PINA BAUSCH, BALLET PRELJOCAJ, BANGARRA DANCE THEATRE, AND RALPH LEMON BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC, BROOKLYN, NY OCTOBER 19, 21-23, 26, 28-30, NOVEMBER 3-6, 16-21, 2004

Pina Bausch's newest work to come to the United States glows with heart and artistic maturity. Only a woman could have made Fur die Kinder von gestern, heute, und morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow), and only a woman of a certain age. In one vignette, children of a remembered family, embodied by the family of today's Wuppertal dancers, build an elaborate sand castle, reenacting a childhood memory as art. Fur die Kinder beads together many such memories--jumping tope, riding skateboards, drawing hearts--breaking down the barrier of time in a kind of playroom of the imagination, with visitors from a friendly Freudian past.

Among the old-timers are the avuncular, slyly sexy Dominique Mercy and his on-again, off-again mate, Nazareth Panadero, still lusty and glamorous at 40-plus. Both have been with Bausch for ages and honed their onstage personas in her works. Now they add to the company's increasingly diverse profile, which includes dancers from all over Europe and Asia. Well-trained, skilled in several techniques, they give her work a 21st-century flavor and a renewed emphasis on dance.

The men's number toward the end reveals this new emphasis, along with a receptiveness to contemporary styles such as hip hop. Although Bausch's work can be emotionally intense, the physical drive and explosive energy of this number are new, contributed almost certainly by the dancers. Cheery sambas, honed athletic bodies, clinging Pucci-style silks (by Marion Cito), and clean white spaces (by Peter Pabst) add to the contemporary atmosphere. To be sure, sudden encounters still lead to erotic games, but the tone is often light and the themes of domination and humiliation gone (although scenes involving Ditta Miranda Jasjfi, an unusually short dancer, have unpleasant suggestions of pedophilia).

Despite its fragmentary structure, Fur die Kinder holds together because of its recurring themes--the wonderment of childhood (and the child in us all), the experiencing of middle age, the recuperation of memory, its effect on the present. This is not the case with Angelin Preljocaj's disappointing Near Life Experience, which loses its way well before the halfway mark.

Preljocaj's program note makes ambitious claims, calling the piece "a quest into different states of the body ... when we near zones [that] hover on the edge of existence." What one saw was a clean white space, bathed in light, with two towering, white chairs and a congenial company of young people. Some clambered on the chairs. Some rolled balls. One had clinking wine glasses taped to her body. Everyone played cat's cradle. Duos--many, many duos--dallied, moving in tandem and often in slow motion. At the end a man crawled out of a ball of red yarn. Often the movement was sensuous, with a fine sculptural sense of mass. But the piece floundered dramatically, using props to make up for a dearth of movement ideas. Next time Preljocaj should stick to the center zone. --L.G.

Journeys into unfamiliar territory linked two very different dance works at the Next Wave Festival. Bush, performed by Australia's Bangarra Dance Theatre, follows the evolution of the universe as seen through aboriginal eyes. And in the third part of his "Geography Trilogy," Come home Charley Patton, Ralph Lemon traces his own steps and the paths of others in his exploration of racial issues in America (after examining Africa and Asia in the previous two parts).

Arnhem Land lies at the very northern tip of Australia's Northern Territory. Stephen Page, the director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, culled the sacred region's Dreamtime stories and translated them into a hypnotic hybrid of dance and theater. ("Dreamtime," to aborigines, refers to an altered state, achieved through ceremony, that taps into the vibrational essence of Earth and the source of all creation.) The dance of genesis included squirming male totems, slithering primeval creatures, three women shimmering like ancient pointillist paintings, and--most striking of all--dancers with splinted limbs boogie-woogieing like stick spirits, both evil and good. Bolstered by a surprisingly jazzy score by Steve Francis and David Page, Kathy Balngayngu Marika, an actual elder of the Rirratjingu clan, presided over the ceremonial pageant with the grounding of a true earth mother.

With a whimsical computer-generated animation of the author James Baldwin serving as a looming sage, Lemon served up a stream-of-consciousness narrative in Charley Patton. Film. text. and dance evoked places and events as diverse as juke joints with buck dancing and grisly lynchings. The six dancers engaged in aerobic off-balance slides and falls, as if being kicked to the ground, culminating in a sequence where Lemon battled with the hostile spit of a fire hose. But as in Bush, the heart of the work is entrusted to a woman, in this case the charismatic actress/dancer Okwui Okpokwasili. In the most disturbingly direct segment of the evening, she vividly related the story of a kindergarten classmate who brands her a "nigger." Each time the "n" word is hurled, a deafening cymbal crashes. At the end, the Baldwin phantom recites from a 1974 lecture on race: "The center of the earth has shifted and the definition of man has shifted with it."

Lemon doesn't offer concrete answers to the problems of fluctuating racial tensions; that was never his intention. But with its jumble of memories and its fixation on the disorientation caused by change, Lemon's multimedia meditation finds an unlikely relative in the aboriginal state of Dreamtime.

--J.C.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.pina-bausch.de, www.preljocaj.org,

www.bam.org, www.bangarra.com.au