Shocks and Ceremonies

It was the coldest week of the year, but New York was a winter dance festival. In the space of seven days, some 60,000 people jammed the city's theaters to watch a worldwide assortment of performers. For undemanding viewers, a group called the Siberian Dancers and Singers of Omsk lit up Carnegie Hall with the bounding energy of mad Russian muzhiks--despite several ammonia bottles planted by activists protesting Soviet antiSemitism. More passive dance fans turned up at the New York State Theater to watch homegrown Master George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet hold their own against all competition, despite two disappointing and one merely promising new ballets by young choreographers.

As for the serious visitors, their achievements--which were erratic as well as kinetic--provided moments of explosive joy along with a dumbfounding divergence of styles.

The Australian Ballet at the New York City Center offered traditionalists Don Quixote, a classic first created by Marius Petipa in the late 19th century, complete with romantic story line, richly caparisoned corps de ballet, not to mention assorted gypsies and whirling windmills. Founded only eight years ago, the company is a direct result of Australia's effort to change its image as a cultural backwater. The Australians have already toured 50 major cities in Europe, South America and Asia, but they have yet to develop a major choreographer of their own or a ballerina of international repute. Thus when the company finally got up the courage to assault the U.S. for a ten-week tour, Co-Directors Peggy van Praagh and Robert Helpmann cajoled Rudi Nureyev into appearing as guest artist in his own staging of Don Quixote; they also imported New Zealand-born Lucette Aldous of Britain's Royal Ballet to dance the heroine.

The result was a streamlined reproduction of the Leningrad-Kirov Don Quixote that Nureyev had learned as a young dancer. The old knight, played by Helpmann himself, tottered through a swirl of swinging Spanish skirts, roistering toreadors and intricate incidental dancing in the market square in search of Dulcinea. The Don thinks he finds the lady disguised as a saucy innkeeper's daughter, but from there on Cervantes is left far behind. The daughter, who is to marry a rich old fop, really yearns for a poor barber (Nureyev). The lovers flee, the old knight pursues, and much horseplay and some lovely dancing ensue. What everyone came to see was Nureyev, who (except for an all but transparent set of tights) kept himself unexpectedly unobtrusive until Act III, when he showed by leaps and bounds why everybody comes to see him.

Maurice Bejart and his Brussels-based Ballet of the 20th Century, at Brooklyn's Academy of Music, were trying to demonstrate why European audiences regard them as the most avant of the avantgarde. At 43, Bejart is famous for dealing in shock effects, trying to interest the young and preaching that dance is mass ritual best staged in, say, Yankee Stadium. Other Bejart proclivities include a fondness for propaganda and a belief that the union of male and female, explicitly demonstrated, is a major balletic theme. For music he mixes Wagner with Indian ragas, rock with military marches, and makes use of whistles, thumps and even "the sound of a creaking door and a woman's sigh."

Brought to the U.S. with the help of a $50,000 grant from the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., Bejart faced the most sophisticated dance audience in the world. They swarmed to see him but left mostly disappointed. What seemed radical to European audiences reared almost exclusively on classical ballet seemed banal or naive to balletomanes familiar with Martha Graham, Balanchine, Anna Sokolow, Jerome Robbins and Merce Cunningham. Horizontally undulating arms, borrowed from Hindu dances, spraddled squats that looked like the classic pose of Japanese wrestlers, spastic puppet-like flop-pings and displays of bumping pelvises did not help. Neither did Messe pour le Temps Present, which Bejart billed as his "most important" dance. "This ballet is a ceremony," he explained, "in which we open some doors on problems about love, war, meditation, social life, the press." What the viewers saw was a mishmash of posturings, clacking blocks, pings, bongs and recitals from Thus Spake Zarathustra. In "The Dance," couples simulated copulation or squatted as if on a toilet. In "The World" episode, men ran back and forth reading newspapers aloud in a chorus of French, English, Chinese and Russian. They lined up behind a police barricade, then collapsed as if shot down. Through it all, words shrieked from loudspeakers, and Director Bejart sat in the wings banging on wood blocks.

The Bejart company did have its assets --a large collection of fine male and female dancers recruited from all over the world. The principal dancer proved to be a local ballerina, Suzanne Farrell. Cast adrift by George Balanchine when she married her fellow company-member Paul Mejia, she signed with the 20th Century Ballet last fall. She insists that work with Bejart is fascinating. It may be so. In one pas de deux provocatively labeled Erotica, she spent much of her time standing on her hands with her legs framing her partner's head. But in Bach Sonata, which Bejart fashioned just for her, she displayed the special sharp-edged elegance and individuality that made her Balanchine's most dazzling dancer in a decade.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, though far less ambitious and pretentious than Bejart, was far more successful in attempting to fuse the stylized discipline of classic ballet with the passionate expressiveness of modern. An actor and retired dancer who pioneered in bringing modern technique to Broadway, Ailey skillfully avoids the built-in risk of bastardizing both genres into the choreographic equivalent of franglais. Back from a triumphant tour of Russia and Europe, Ailey opened a two-month-long festival at the ANTA theater with two new ballets. They were, unfortunately, not among his best. Archipelago proved a desiccated exercise in abstraction set to jagged, aleatory music for piano and percussion. Flowers, a rock playlet patently inspired by the life and death of Janis Joplin, was somewhat questionable in taste but theatrically more interesting.

When his dancers swung into old favorites like Blues Suite and his show-stopping Revelations, audiences could see why Ailey is beyond dispute the nation's finest Negro choreographer. The performances conveyed the message that black is not only beautiful but sad and proud and much else besides. Especially in Revelations, Ailey draws upon jazz, folk and modern dance to match the variable moods of Negro spirituals: weary and mournful in I Been Buked, suffused with the joy of baptismal regeneration in an exultant, calypso-tinged version of Wading in the Water.

If there are flaws in the Ailey performances, they are clearly not the fault of his superb racially mixed company. Two of his performers rank among the world's most vibrant exponents of modern dance: Dudley Williams, 30, has the sinewy grace of a panther and the expressive hands of a mime, and towering (5 ft. 10 in.) Judith Jamison, who has both the aristocratic bearing of a Watutsi princess and an earthy comic flair that would break up an audience at the Apollo. On stage, the Ailey group is living proof that whatever problems American choreographers have, it is not with the dancers but with the dance.

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