Provincial Dances Theatre.

Provincial Dances Theatre American Dance Festival Reynolds Industries Theater, Duke University, Durham, NC JUNE 26-28, 2006

Tatiana Baganova's Wings at Tea (2001), performed at ADF in an evening-length incarnation by 10 dancers of Provincial Dances Theatre (from Ekaterinburg, Russia), navigated with ease a snaking line between absurdity and profundity. First presented at ADF's International Choreographers Commissioning Program in 2001, the work's deft, earthy dancing, combined with cigarettes, grapes, and a wind-up flying pig, made for a delightful meander through the intricacies of the human condition.

The work embarked at a leisurely pace, with three women dozing in a suspended, tube-shaped frame until a man in a suit jacket ambled onstage, lit up, and offered a cigarette to each of them. Cool light grew slowly upstage left, revealing a woman perched on a row of theater seats, dreamily working a bicycle pump, as more men with lit cigarettes crept onstage from both sides. The scent of smoke drifted into the house as another man wound up a mechanical flying pig and set it loose to fly in manic circles with a quiet chatter, which it did until the end of the piece.

With the pig loosed, dancing began. For close to an hour, accompanied by Chris Lancaster's rich cello score, end less combinations of duets, groups, and solos formed and re-formed, racing, tumbling, or swooping through the space, punctuated by moments of hilarity, thoughtfulness, or just plain silliness. A man crossed upstage, bent forward in a creeping walk with a woman on his back, whose legs echoed his steps in the air. One couple juggled. A man cried in surprise, "I have a pig in my hands!" and all took up the cry, turning it into an amazed question, "He has a pig in his hands?" At one point a woman with big bunches of grapes hanging from her head emerged from behind a white dress suspended upstage. A line of men waiting next to her passionately devoured the fruit until she dismissed them, shaking her hand at them while they exited indignantly.

Shifting dynamics between couples and groups who treaded varied emotional territory--sometimes in unison, sometimes in opposition--sustained the piece. The dance wound down-after a prolonged sequence of women dipping their long hair into buckets and flinging glorious arcs of water across the stage--as elegantly as it had begun, with cigarettes, fading light, the stilling of the pig, and dancers lounging in the row of theater seats, smoking and gazing at the audience. Do as you like with it, they seemed to say, We've done our best to show you the world and can do no more. See www.dance-web.org/provincial or www.americandancefestival.org.

Lea Marshall