Over the past five years, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has become the Lincoln Center of modern dance. The dance series of the three-month Next Wave Festival presents the works of choreographers on the forefront of contemporary dance. Past seasons have included Nina Wiener, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, and others.
In 1981 the dance series of the Next Wave Festival offered a core of experimental established choreographers familiar to new York audiences: Trish Brown, Laura Dean, and Lucinda Childs. Since then the Next Wave Festival has continued to program New York choreographers with large followings, but has also brought in lesser-known foreign artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Carolyn Carlson.
Spectacular Success
There have been spectacular successes at the Next Wave Festival, most recently last season's Rosas Danst Rosas by De Keersmaeker. De Keersmaeker returned this year with Elena's Aria, a ninety-minute work for five women. This stark, minimal piece was by far the most inaccessible of the dance offerings. The choreographer conceded nothing to the audience, did not pander, did not try to entertain. What we saw on stage is purposeful, diligent exploration of space and time, not diversion.
Chairs from kitchenettes of times past line the back of the bare stage; others are scattered along the sides. Like an empty dance hall, the setting suggests nostalgia, history, past loves. Seated at the far side of the stage by the proscenium, a woman reads in halting English from Tolstoy, "I cannot overlook a certain sorrow that has lurked in my heart." Although passages from Brecht, Dostoyevski, and Castro are read over the course of the production, this is the line that remains in the mind, setting the theme of the work.
The movements De Keersmaeker uses in Elena's Aria are few. Women move from chair to chair, twirling as they rise to sit in the next chair. They walk the circumference of a chalk circle in high heels, with tight, bound steps. Seated, the women cross their legs at the ankles and nervously gather up their skirts, exposing taut, sinewy legs. The dancers move about with the rushes and hesitations of conversation. There are also long moments when very little happens or the dancers are motionless, leaving us to absorb the emotional desolation of the work.
During the dance, a film is projected on the back wall of the set. Depicting buildings being dynamited by a wrecking company, each falling in slow motion, the film is fascinating in its beautiful portrayal of destruction. Perhaps serving as a metaphor for the stunning demolition of the soul that seems to be occurring among the women, the wreckage is disturbing and awesome.
In contrast to the chill distance of Elena's Aria, the works of Maguy Marin were immediate crowd-pleasers, accessible and familiar. Compagnie Maguy Marin performed two works, Babel Babel and Eden, on alternating evenings at BAM. Based loosely on biblical themes, both pieces are a kind of quiltwork of currently popular modern dance styles.
Eden is a collection of non sequiturs: people in flesh-colored bodysuits, Adam and Eve, knights in
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