OBJECTIFS DANSE.

A MOVEMENT SPROUTS IN BRUSSELS OBJECTIFS DANSE LA RAFFINERIE AND OTHER VENUES BRUSSELS, BELGIUM MARCH 9-11, 2001

Say "Belgian dance" and certain names automatically leap to mind: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Alain Platel. These Flemish choreographers and dance-theater practitioners are generally better known internationally than their counterparts in Belgium's French-speaking community, Wallonie-Bruxelles. It is exactly this aesthetic oversight that the three-day Objectifs Danse showcase hoped to begin to rectify.

The majority of works on view were smaller-scale solos, duets, and trios. Most were staged at La Raffinerie, a former brown-sugar refinery converted into a multi-arts center in 1979 by Frederic Flamand (director of both Compagnie Charleroi/Danses-Plan K and the Walloon community's choreographic center). The location did the artists few favors, since nearly all the work was presented in a hall with a roof supported by thick silver columns. Informal, yes, but it created consistent sight-line problems. Yet the event was a valuable means of checking out a dozen individuals or companies working the other side of Belgium's busy contemporary dance scene.

Compagnie Mossoux-Bonte kicked things off with the solo Pompei. Puppet-like Nicole Mossoux sat behind a table in a feather-topped cap, looking drugged and exhausted by civilization or, perhaps, time itself. She pointed, swatted, and convulsed to co-creator Patrick Bonte's varied sound score. The result was a neat intellectual postcard on the subject of the past and how it's perceived.

Mauro Paccagnella is part of a small creative collective called Woosh'ing Machi'ne and one of a number of talented Italians resident in Belgium. His mimetic solo Formol, an attempt to articulate an inscrutable stage persona, featured good use of body language and the performing space. Meaning, however, was harder to convey.

Made in collaboration with the gifted videographer Antonin De Bemels, the American Bud Blumenthal's solo Les entrailles de Narcisse melded mythology and technology. Springy and fit, the dancer was martial and meditative in turn. Set to Cedric Stevens's Cage-like soundtrack, the piece itself sometimes suggested a transplant of Merce Cunningham into Stanley Kubrick's 2001. But some striking effects-- Blumenthal encountering his film reflection, for example--sprouted from an emotional void.

The most accessible, involving solo was Michele Anne De Mey's simple yet artful 35 metres carres, interpreted by the sturdy, appealing Marion Levy. This half-hour dance, which employs a Schumann sonata for piano and violoncello and a television-video system wheeled about by De Mey herself, plays wittily with the rhythms of both music and daily life. It helped no end that the setting was De Mey's own bright, broad studio space.

Mingling music, text, and dance, the jumping-off point for Brazilian Claudio Bernardo's splintery 1993 trio Vas was Italian poet/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's unfinished last book. It had more passion than polish, but you sensed it came from the heart.

One of Bernardo's dancers, the Italian Matteo Moles, fashioned a duet for himself and Sarah Piccinelli. In Scusi, permette the pair play strangers at a social dance who gravitate toward each other. Building on their initial gestural signals and body language, the piece charted familiar territory (the gradations of a relationship) for too long. But it was smartly performed, and the traditional songs accompanying it were wonderfully invigorating.

The brightest discoveries of Objectifs Danse were choreographer Karine Ponties and Italian dancer Alessandro Bernardeschi. They and Paccagnella created the compelling, Beckettian duet Les Taroupes (a word indicating the hairs between the eyebrows). Barefoot in black trousers and white dress shirts, the two men were equally superb as dancers and character actors.

Ponties seemed to bring out an essential something extra in Paccagnella that his own solo didn't release. He and Bernardeschi also danced in her Brucelles, presented in a proper theatre in Charleroi. The fifty-minute sextet featured five men, one of whom was a fine vocalist, and a panther-lean female. Their source material was Swiss author Robert Walser's Institute Benjamenta, a 1909 novel set in a school for waiters. Balancing eccentricity and nightmare, the excellent cast played clockwork crazies who used cutlery, plates, towels, and their own bodies in strangely humorous, controlled rituals of obsessive-compulsive hysteria. Ponties and company produced the weekend's most accomplished performance, and one that, unlike so much new work, never once cried out for an editor.