Not Just for Kicks.

Brooklyn Academy of Music 2001 Next Wave Festival Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn, New York October 10-December 20, 2001

Writer and composer Fred Ho, with writer Ruth Margraff, director Mira Kingsley, and martial arts choreographer Jose Figueroa (who staged fights for the hit film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), concocted a blend of martial arts and jazz music, Once Upon a Time in Chinese America. A cast of martial-arts mavens--including virtually no Chinese-Americans--geared the hourlong production for young audiences, and children in attendance appreciated its broad humor, simple narrative, and action sequences. The performers were energetic, but their kung-fu practice frequently lacked precision. Ho said, "Martial arts can kick the butt of modern dance any day." If he'd seen the work of his colleagues in the festival, he might have been forced to revise that opinion.

Two dances by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek featured the six able dancers of his Australian troupe, Chunky Move. The vocabulary comprised leggy, ungainly movement. In Crumpled, the women, clad in wrinkled paper dresses, tumbled and flopped on a gym mat that covered the stage. A man's plastic suit crinkled, amplified by an invisible body mike, as he danced. In Corrupted 2 a diamond-shaped screen revolved, threatening to clip the dancers, who scampered through their predictably unpredictable gyrations.

Tall, rotund, ebony-skinned Djakapurra Munyarryun is cultural consultant, musician, and senior dancer with Australia's Bangarra Dance Theatre. Director/choreographer Stephen Page collaborates with him and the company's thirteen dancers, all with aboriginal roots, to create visual spectacles based on ancestral lore. Page's brother, David, and Steve Francis devise scores from traditional chants and rhythms mixed with modern electronics. Corroboree depicted aspects of life: hunting and gathering, birthing, and, more contemporarily, racial profiling, in a series of visually breathtaking rituals. Dancers slathered their bodies with paint and scuffled in sand on the floor. Smoke delineated Karen Norris's and Joseph Mercurio's elegant, hard-edged lighting.

In her 1997 Drumming, Belgium's Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker transformed a Composition 101 premise--mining all dance material from a single phrase--into art of the highest order. Using Steve Reich's towering hourlong score for percussion and voices and the talented dancers of her troupe, Rosas, she again proved her mastery of movement manipulation. Twelve musicians, the Ictus Ensemble, played live onstage, separated from the freewheeling kinetic perambulations by a waist-high translucent partition.

Petite Marta Coronado, in a delicate orange shirt over a white dress (costumes by Dries Van Noten), introduced the long, skipping, arm-swinging, back-pedaling phrase, spiked with angular gestures and quick direction changes, rich with potential. Compact Roberto Olivan de la Iglesia, all in black, joined her; both brimmed with stamina and burst-flow action. Two more dancers joined in, then more, twelve in all. Recombined motifs, mostly in unison, were skewed on diagonals to enrich the textural complexity.

The dancers moved in precise interlocking, arcing paths as well as seemingly at random. Their camaraderie lent lighthearted wittiness to the aerobic, head-bobbing motion, and they breezed through it with athletic aplomb. Willowy Ursula Robb, in a wispy, silver shirt, and fiery Rosalba Torres, in a shiny silver sheath, were standouts.

John Jasperse, in collaboration with his three other dancers, discovers unlikely, floppy, sensuous movement. Having danced with de Keersmaeker in 1988-89 after graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, he has a sophisticated theatrical sensibility. He integrates setting and lighting (here brilliantly conceived by Matthias Bringmann and Stan Pressner, respectively) into his choreography.

Giant Empty, a seventy-five-minute exploration of Jasperse's inventiveness, moved between legato and adagio, richly supported by Michael Floyd's sound design of highly amplified mechanical sounds, white noise, and modulated tones. Juliette Mapp stepped precariously across wood blocks scattered along a diagonal. Then a long, adagio duet moved her and Parker Lutz, in tight unison, from near touching to wide apart. Unison duets of ever-changing partners--men, women, mixed pairs--merged into a quartet.

Mapp hauled on a pile of garments and wrapped herself into a ball of laundry as Miguel Gutierrez, nude, precariously traversed the wood blocks. He balanced on one while the others, bundled like Mapp, tossed the remainder upstage. The climax of the piece exploited the men (for a change) as sexual objects. In a naked duet, they stayed in physical contact, rubbing, sliding, sitting on each other's heads, bumping fannies, but never touching with hands. It was X-rated, but objectified to noneroticism.

Returning and again taking New York by storm, Pina Bausch brought her twenty-two-dancer troupe with Masurca Fogo, a wry meditation on life and love in Portugal and Brazil. For more than two and one-half hours, a panorama of zany activities unfolded, punctuated by solos of pure dancing. Like a Fellini film, Masurca sprawled in a barrage of provocative images. But it often segued from one disparate episode to the next, in most cases missing a punch line. A selection of popular music accompanied the piece: Portuguese traditional to Brazilian Top 40 to k.d. lang, whose resonant vocal delivery can make inveterate urbanites sit still for country music.

Rainer Behr led off, running down the rocky gray mountain that spilled into the trapezoidal white room, where set designer Peter Pabst placed the action. Later, the ladies sunbathed atop the hill; otherwise, it served to up the difficulty of dancers' entrances and exits.

Supine men passed Ruth Amarante along their uplifted arms as she sighed into a microphone. Men popped lanky, sexy Julie Anne Stanzak's balloon "gown" with the cigarettes she lighted for them. Blase Bausch veteran dancer Nazareth Panadero (a reincarnated Bette Davis) kissed men--including some in the first row--on the forehead, sighing "It's a job!" A chicken nibbled on smashed watermelon, and dancers swam in a plastic water flume, and a fake walrus lumbered across the stage. The visual punning made us smile, sometimes guffaw. Heightening the cinematic effect were films, projected over the dancing, of Brazilian musicians, panoramas from a bus window, strutting flamingos, and the ocean: Bausch's Brazilian home movies?

The festival finale was a return of William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt with three of his less balletic works. This intriguingly reckless choreographer fuses movement and light; he designs both, and gives each dance an unusual stage concept. The premiere of Woolf Phrase, on a bare stage, featured Richard Siegal speaking passages by Virginia Woolf and frisking like a puppy as Prue Lang limned a seagull, cawing and all. The 1989 Enemy in the Figure has a snaking wall mid-stage and a rolling light, pushed by the dancers, to illuminate solos and duets, while leaving some dancing in shadow. Fringe-layered costumes, also by Forsythe, turned spinning dancers into blurry projectiles.

Even in Quintett (1993)--a tribute to his dying wife, in which dancers periodically exited into a gravelike opening in the floor--the movement was lavishly violent, albeit comparatively subdued and more lyrical. Forsythe transforms the ballet lexicon into a jagged blizzard of flying limbs that wrench their attached bodies into distended shapes. Like few other choreographers can, Forsythe extracted virtually life-threatening physicality from his dancers, and made them--and his audience--love him for it.