The company, which is on its farewell tour of the States, brings three quieter, relatively contemplative pieces, and one barn-burner.

Director William Forsythe's aesthetic, as evidenced by these dances, suggests a mixture of contact improvisation and martial arts, performed at breakneck speeds suggestive of Doug Varone. It's tempting to read The Room As It Was (2002), for four women on pointe and four men, as a series of overlapping stories all taking place over time in the same motel room—trysts, arguments, fights. There are some exquisitely awkward contortions, feet locked behind knees, ankles crossed. A particularly fine passage features Jone San Martin and facing her partner: there is a series of slaps, quick grandes arabesques, repositionings of the arms, culminating in the evening's first lift, a deft morsel of tenderness.

The Room is scored, except at the very end, to the dancers' own grunts, sighs, smacks, and intakes of breath, and composer Thom Willems keeps his music in the background for the next two pieces as well, so far into the background that it becomes an ambient murmur. Duo (1996), danced by Jill Johnson and Natalie Thomas, is the most allusive to classical forms. A couple of times, each woman holds one arm out in traditional port de bras, while the other dangles at her side. At another point, the two take poses on the floor that would not be wrong for the corps in a ballet by Petipa. But everything else is 21st-century. The women, wearing transparent tops, are lit by fluorescent lights from a FOH grid that spills the light into the first few rows of the audience. As company member Dana Caspersen notes in the program,

They make percussive kicks down into the specially-laid floor; the reason for the floor becomes clear at the end of the evening. Almost all of their movements are twinned or mirrored, except when Forsythe breaks the symmetry.

While the women in Duo rarely make contact, (N.N.N.N.) (2002) is a ruck, a collegiate wrestling match for four men. It's a bunch of guys in crowded bar, and a fight could break out at any moment. There's a gesture that's prominent in this piece: two dancers facing each other and one lays his hand on the crown of the other's head.

Which sets up the sensory onslaught that is One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000). From the back wall of the theater, fourteen dancers sprint onstage, dragging twenty aluminum banquet tables. What follows is a third of an hour of barely controlled chaos, as the company uses the tables

• as barres, either singly or in pairs,
• as platforms to be danced or balanced on,
• as shelters to crouch beneath or to crawl under,
• as—what?—banisters to slide down, perhaps, with a multiplicity of partners.

Willems' explosive score isn't quite the punishing music that he created for In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, but it's loud enough.

With the movable tables, it's almost as if Forsythe has found a way to introduce a fourth spatial dimension into dance. And the overlapping passages make you wonder whether he hasn't found a key to time as well. You watch, and you tell yourself that this much activity just isn't physically possible, and yet there it is.

I heard a lobby comment, "It's too much in one piece." Well, in the words of my one-time sister-in-law, chastised at the age of five or seven for piling too much food on her plate, "I like too much."

posted: 11:45:08 PM  

Less than a milestone, but more than an inchstone; call it a yardstone:

posted: 12:05:24 AM