Singing Myself a Lullaby.

Buddhists think of being as threaded with nonbeing; the infinite spills into the spaces between our thoughts; death cossets our dreams. But in the secular, modern West death has been an outlaw, an enemy--until AIDS and its attendant illnesses put so many in death's path so early, demanding that we at least contemplate the terrible enigma from which we're spawned and into which we disappear.

Choreographer Ellen Bromberg, formerly of the Bay Area and now living in Tucson, was commissioned two years ago by San Francisco dancer-choreographer John Henry to make a dance about AIDS. Bromberg didn't know that Henry had the disease when she began, but as she figured it out she helped the dancer create his own swan song--dying swans are thought to sing--called Singing Myself a Lullaby. Collaborating with them were videographer Douglas Rosenberg, composer Victor Spiegel, and lighting designer Jack Carpenter.

The contemplation of death can lead an artist to haunting and gripping reveries on the nature of existence. But for the unreflective, there is no philosophy, and without philosophy there can be no transcendent summation of a single life, just a cave full of the shadows of private minutiae. In Lullaby Henry strives eagerly to find a design to his life events, but the pattern remains episodic and serial, as though he is taking us through a scrapbook rather than expressing the poem that might give structure to it all.

The poetry is left to the collaborators. Bromberg created such elegant touchstones for Henry as having him outline his form in red chalk, then smearing it; outlining his body in sand and dispersing the grains; and molding a hunk of clay into a human shape. Spiegel's score is deftly elemental; Carpenter's lighting is painterly; and Rosenberg's video is sensuous as well as archival--he documented the work as it was being built and uses some of it as a visual echo. All of the elements are beautiful but many of them are ultimately timid.

Meanwhile, Henry's delivery is fidgety; he is unable to evoke silence, empty space, or death as he carries out the rituals. He's also oblique. He never directly tells us he is dying, or how his tour of duty in Vietnam is linked with life now, and his obliqueness drains the rites of their metaphoric power. His collaborators might have used his limitations as inspiration--manipulating his photographic images, tightening the meandering text to sting us like shrapnel, or making the squatting, rocking, terror-maddened Vietnamese farmer that Henry brilliantly portrays into a persistent symbol, suggesting each of us face to face with our own mortality.