The Predators' Ball: Hucksters of the Soul.

With the former head (axed) of Drexel, Burnham, Lambert in attendance, along with an array of arbitrageurs not generally seen at performance art affairs, Karole Armitage was playing to the converted at the premiere of her amazingly lackluster farrago, The Predators' Ball (subtitled Hucksters of the Soul).

Long, long, long on exposition (voice-overs, acting-dancing doubles, singing, et cetera) and short on kinetic interest, the work incorporates a banal script by John Gould Rubin, not-bad songs and music by Phillip Johnston and the rappers Public Enemy, among others, some tepid yet hideous decor and video via David Salle, and a veritable dog's dinner of dance forms These include a traditional ballet blanc, an Indian number (weirdly akin to the "Coffee" variation in The Nutcracker), hip-hop, techno-modernism, and some Eurotrashy ballet-as-aggression. They all look pretty much the same; they look, in fact, just like Armitage, half ballerina, half Rockette.

By far the most interesting aspect of the work was Armitage's utter identification with her purported subject, Michael Milken. Naturally enough, given the gestalt of the nineties she sees him (and by extension, herself) as a victim of tFfe eighties. (There is actually a character called Thyades--the eighties, get it?--which gives you some notion of the intellectual content of this piece.) But where Milken went to jail, Armitage went to Florence (some exile!), whence come these two hours and twenty minutes of entrepreneurial solipsism. The cast includes members of MaggioDanza, the attractive ensemble she now heads.

Conflate Wall Street with Weimar and what do you get? How to Succeed in Business meets Cabaret. We even encounter the creepy, white-faced master of ceremonies who has become de rigueur in everything tanztheatralisch. Which is not to say that Armitage is much like Pina Bausch, the mother of that form, but rather that she is in the grip of a cliche--in fact, she is in the grip of one cliche after another (as, by extension, are we) and trapped in facts to boot. By the time she gets around to what should be her most compelling scene--the actual ball of the title--the choreographer has long since emptied her tiny bag of tricks. Poor Mike Milken. First junk bonds, now junk choreography.