Nur Du.

Nur Du (Only You), a piece by Pina Bausch, premiered in Berkeley on the occasion of the Tanztheater Wuppertal's first visit to the Bay Area. The result was predictable mix of groans ("It's four hours long!") and accolades. Nur Du is Bausch's first piece created outside Europe, the result of a commission by four American university presenters (after its University of California premiere by Berkeley's Cal Performances, it was performed at UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, and Arizona State University). As such, it is Bausch's reflection on American culture after a whirlwind four-week residency in California and Texas last February.

European intellectuals reflecting on America have created some distinguished products - Alexis de Tocqueville's grand portrait of American democracy, for example - but Bausch's project suggested a certain mismatch from the start. Bausch is a miniaturist, an artist who has consistently focused more on the murky emotional terrain of interior drama than on the expansive images of society that this commission would seem to invite. Given its Wagnerian running time, Nur Du is surprisingly narrow and superficial in scope, and more than a little mean-spirited in its quick-take approach to such American phenomena as Elvis fans and 911 calls.

Nur Du is a string of visual one-liners about the American West, primarily California, ranging from Hollywood films to sushi take-out containers and hairdressers who give a string of beauties cookie-cutter dos. The set is Peter Pabst's menacing environment of massive redwood tree trunks; one is a mesa-like stump and another has an ax's wedge-shaped bite just big enough for Jan Minarik to crawl into. Nature, however, is never more than an ominous background here.

Australian-born Julie Shanahan opens the work by reclining across the backs of several men and purring, "Excuse me, I'm naked under all my clothes." This tone of teasing come-on, which recalls any number of advertisements (not exclusively American), saturates many of the evening's episodes. Marion Cito's costumes of loose Italian-cut suits for the men and stiletto heels and strapless satin ballgowns for the women leave Shanahan looking unsteady and vulnerable, as if her clothes were about to slip down - which they in fact often do. Nudity in Nur Du, however, de-eroticizes the body because it is so often coupled with a crude victimization of the individual, as when a woman folds the top, of her gown down to her waist and has a man perfunctorily draw a pair of black eyeglasses on her bare breasts.

The strongest cultural references in Nur Du are to Bausch herself, to her earlier works like Cafe Muller, and to the pervasive sense of isolation and the brutality of life that pervades her dances. At several points in Nur Du the scurrying woman in red heels from Cafe Muller skitters nervously across the stage, yanking off pair after pair of undies like some terrible curse of chastity.

Yet, for all that happens while thirty-four popular English and Latin tunes - the musical backbone of Nur Du - play on, few cohesive statements are actually made. The work remains an album of vocation snapshots. Bausch speaks of America with a heavy accent and in a language more of gestures than phrases, more of sensations than sentiments, and more of photo captions than essays.