Not Just for Kicks. - dance review

Dance Magazine, April, 2002 by Gus Solomons, Jr

Rainer Behr led off, running down the rocky gray mountain that spilled into the trapezoidal white room, where set designer Peter Pabst placed the action. Later, the ladies sunbathed atop the hill; otherwise, it served to up the difficulty of dancers' entrances and exits.

Supine men passed Ruth Amarante along their uplifted arms as she sighed into a microphone. Men popped lanky, sexy Julie Anne Stanzak's balloon "gown" with the cigarettes she lighted for them. Blase Bausch veteran dancer Nazareth Panadero (a reincarnated Bette Davis) kissed men--including some in the first row--on the forehead, sighing "It's a job!" A chicken nibbled on smashed watermelon, and dancers swam in a plastic water flume, and a fake walrus lumbered across the stage. The visual punning made us smile, sometimes guffaw. Heightening the cinematic effect were films, projected over the dancing, of Brazilian musicians, panoramas from a bus window, strutting flamingos, and the ocean: Bausch's Brazilian home movies?

The festival finale was a return of William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt with three of his less balletic works. This intriguingly reckless choreographer fuses movement and light; he designs both, and gives each dance an unusual stage concept. The premiere of Woolf Phrase, on a bare stage, featured Richard Siegal speaking passages by Virginia Woolf and frisking like a puppy as Prue Lang limned a seagull, cawing and all. The 1989 Enemy in the Figure has a snaking wall mid-stage and a rolling light, pushed by the dancers, to illuminate solos and duets, while leaving some dancing in shadow. Fringe-layered costumes, also by Forsythe, turned spinning dancers into blurry projectiles.

Even in Quintett (1993)--a tribute to his dying wife, in which dancers periodically exited into a gravelike opening in the floor--the movement was lavishly violent, albeit comparatively subdued and more lyrical. Forsythe transforms the ballet lexicon into a jagged blizzard of flying limbs that wrench their attached bodies into distended shapes. Like few other choreographers can, Forsythe extracted virtually life-threatening physicality from his dancers, and made them--and his audience--love him for it.