Next Wave Festival - Brooklyn Academy of Music performances

Dance Magazine, March, 2003 by Wendy Perron

Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn, New York October 16-November 24, 2002 Reviewed by Wendy Perron

The Next Wave Festival, which presents experimental work on a grand scale, celebrated its twentieth year in 2002. In the beginning, it showed mostly American choreographers, but as it progressed it featured more groups from abroad. This year's dance premieres were from Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan. (The only two American entries in dance-Meredith Monk and Mark Morris--did not perform premieres.) The companies who performed first in this year's series lived up to the festival's reputation for exciting, sometimes controversial performance.

The Brazilian company Grupo Corpo, whose artistic director and resident choreographer are brothers (Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras, respectively), featured a snappy, infectious fusion of jazz, ballet, and Afro-Caribbean styles. The elasticity of the dancers, particularly their torsos, was a marvel. But in both pieces, 21 and O Corpo, the beat was as constant as a metronome, leaving one thirsting for some breathing space (music by Marco Antonio Guimaraes and Arnaldo Antunes, respectively). In the first piece, the respite came in a lovely section where the dancers simply walked across the stage, one woman advancing further than the others, while the lighting (by Paulo Pederneiras) made them look like they were floating slightly above the ground.

Some of the duet work in 21 was startling. At one point a woman, curled tightly around a man's arm, was lugged along as though she were a leaden basket. At other times, women looked like windup dolls or birds or apes. But for the most part, the choreography relied, quite unimaginatively, on unison and canon.

Ballet Preljocaj gets under your skin. The program comprised two visually stunning works by Angelin Preljocaj: Helikopter and Rite of Spring. In the first, six dancers moved against and through each other in clusters--a toughened version of contact improvisation. A mysterious projection from above (video scenic design by Holger Forterer) made the ground look like runways, propellers, and then puddles of water. This last created a thrilling illusion whereby the dancers' legs activated the apparent ripples. But the starkest moment was when the loud music (Helikopter Quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen) abruptly dropped off, allowing the action to subside in silence. The sole dancer left onstage suddenly seemed more visible as a person, more vulnerable and free, as if she had just emerged from an oppressive state.

PRELJOCAJ'S RITE OF SPRING EQUATED SEXUAL FRENZY WITH THE EARTH ERUPTING INTO SPRING, The women teased the men by dancing with their panties dropped to their ankles, but later seemed to quake at the ferocity of the male sex drive. Preljocaj's characteristic combination of inventiveness, energetic defiance, and ominousness reigned over a mating season with occasional hints of rape. Toward the end, the dancers, who had been using separate plots of grass as their coupling turf, pushed the plots together to form a single terrain of undulating earth (scenic design by Thierry Leproust). As the Chosen One, Isabelle Arnaud (alternating with Nagisa Shirai) danced the final, nude solo with strength, determination, and bewilderment. Though not as primal as the Nijinsky-Hodson version performed by The Joffrey Ballet in the 1980s, Preljocaj's response to the earth-cracking Stravinsky music was powerful and provocative.

New to most New Yorkers was Sasha Waltz, who brought Korper (Bodies) from Germany. As with Preljocaj, there was an ominous edge. The dancers treated their own and each other's bodies with a perverse curiosity that occasionally veered toward cruelty. They didn't just fall; they slammed to the ground. They didn't just drift; they were squashed by a glass case. In a disturbing episode, two men grabbed swatches of flesh of a third man and carried him by these flesh handles. As in the early work of Pina Bausch, bits of horror alternated with bits of whimsy. In a light moment, a many-armed insect or goddess, each arm clasping a dish, clapped the dishes together. Unlike Bausch's company, these dancers perform deadpan rather than relishing their eccentricities.

During a moment of scattered silly actions, the huge black wall that bisected the space and housed the glass case toppled (set design by Thomas Schenk, Heike Schuppelius, and Waltz). Afterward, the group seemed to coalesce, creating scalloping lines reminiscent of Trisha Brown's Line Up. A reprieve from the thudding interactions was a monologue by the Australian dancer Grayson Millwood. He gently pointed out body parts that contradicted his words, like when he said, "She kissed me in a funny place ... in that little groove between the nose and the upper lip," and displayed the crook of his elbow. Similar incorrectly illustrated monologues had appeared before, but as Millwood performed it, something pleasing and charming crept in. The poetic confusion of the body became clear. His was a great addition to a piece that could have been called "Battling Bodies."