Frankfurt Ballet - Theatre du Chatelet, Paris, France, October 20-30, 1993

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Roslyn Sulcas

For its second Paris season this year, Frankfurt Ballet presented two programs: an evening-length work, Alie/n a(c)tion, and a triple bill - The Vile Parody of Address, Steptext, and the just-made Quintet - all by director William Forsythe.

Alie/n a(c)tion first performed in Frankfurt in December 1992 but notably altered since, is composed of three parts, each of markedly different choreographic style and atmosphere which nonetheless work together to constitute a coherent universe. Part I is certainly the most disturbing and difficult section to watch. Ten dancers scramble around, under, and over long wooden benches in apparently random complicated patterns, urgently driven by some unknown and unseen imperative, perhaps incarnated by the two overhead television monitors that face upstage (we can't see what they show). One man manipulates a complicated apparatus (a pole of microphones, a television screen, vague technological protrusions) while another implacably counts out the passing time in seconds and minutes. The effect is curiously upsetting: The dancers seem to inhabit an inaccessible and frightening world in which their movements are "ordinary" (walking, running, jumping) yet divorced from any context, and they are compelled to traverse the stage in odd and complicated sequences - rather like a child's game turned into a nightmare.

In Part II, an extraordinary sequence of solos takes place on a denuded stage to growling, long lines of music by Thom Willems. The sequences are presided over by Dana Caspersen, who issues commands and maintains a one-sided dialogue from a directorial position at the back. A row of seated dancers, dressed in an ingenious variety of brownish grunge outfits by Stephen Galloway, watch the complex, passionate dances that draw from, yet move far beyond, balletic parameters. Slowly, and barely perceptibly - one of Forsythe's particular talents is to construct theatrical effects in this way - activities multiply. A pistol-wielding, tall, black dancer (Galloway) delivers (in English) a host of evangelical statements about the privileged and the poor ("only rich girls do ballet") and about racism and riots; three men tap dance; a woman shrieks (in German) about the deutsche mark; a man barks like a seal; and sweeping lines of dancers counterpoint a series of jazzy solos on pointe. Just when the chaos seems unbearable the stage empties, and a woman shuffles across inside a kind of tepee, alternately smoking a cigarette and screaming "fire!" A banner scrolls down slowly: "I don't want to be hypnotized," we read in the instant before the lights are cut.

The last section of the ballet finds the dancers, dressed in wonderful sheer, stretchy blue or black dresses and body tights, moving in large classical formations to sober and minimal Schoenberg piano music (admirably played onstage by Margot Kazimirska). A man stands center stage, uttering (again in English) variants on a sequence ("everything will be all right"), or counting out the time. The dancing is cut (like the film sequences described in Part I) by a repeatedly falling curtain, which keeps rising to reveal new wonders and rendering increasingly precarious that which is presently on stage - a vertical line of women facing croise, arms high, across one another, a gorgeous interwoven, endlessly flowing trio (Francesca Harper, Regina van Berkel, Christine Burkle), and a wonderful symbiotic pas de deux. The grave sadness of this section and the juxtapositions between the bizarre speeches, the visual ruptures and the calm, formal dance make for a remarkably beautiful and coherent whole that both links to and seems to quiet the torments of the earlier sections.

Quintet, premiered in Frankfurt a week before the Paris season, sets five dancers (Caspersen, Jacopo Godani, Thomas McManus, Jone San Martin, and Galloway) in a strangely white and empty universe. initially stationary at the sides of the stage, the dancers become newborn creatures (the metaphor extended by a trapdoor, which they retreat into and reemerge from periodically), moving at first with uncertain movements that dissolve into and collapse upon each other. Gradually they appear to acquire strength as Forsythe invents a whole new way for them to dance, extending the buckling, boneless movement already in evidence in his Loss of Small Detail and creating seamless, bewilderingly poignant duos in which the kinetic reactions, the falling, swooping, skimming movements, look so spontaneous that it's hard to conceive of this as "choreography." Set to haunting music by Gavin Bryars, and excellently danced, Quintet offers what one wants and rarely gets from a work of art: a whole new world.