Synthesizer Chic in North Carolina

By J.D. Reed

But what ever happened to intimacy and grace?

Since its beginnings in 1934 at Bennington College in Vermont, the American Dance Festival has been a movable summer proving ground for modern choreography. Early Greats Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, for instance, welcomed the summer respite from battling ballet in New York City to present new works in sympathetic surroundings. At one point, they also welcomed the opportunity to snub each other: they led their companies to opposite sides of the school cafeteria. But in the decades that followed, the rivalries waned. The festival has nurtured a range of choreography--Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, Jose Limon and Pilobolus. Now held on the Duke University campus in Durham, N.C., the 47-year-old A.D.F. is a raucous gathering of the barefoot clans. Even ballet is now taught as part of the curriculum for the 230 multinational students of new dance.

One aspect has remained constant: after 233 world premieres, the A.D.F. is still the incubator of the eclectic, divisive energy of the art form, a center of experimentation. In its "Emerging Generation" series, as many avant-garde oddities as real innovations have appeared. Overall the record is commendable: the series gave Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean and Senta Driver a widening public acceptance. Says Festival President Charles Reinhart, 50, who took over the A.D.F. in 1969: "For these kids, this is like a bullfighter appearing in Madrid. It's the big time."

This year a quintet of newcomers showed off a variety of styles. From the deep end of a swimming pool to the electronic headache of synthesizer music, dancers writhed, swam, ran and lifted above and well beyond the ordinary. The curtain was pulled back on the future of dance, and the revelation was loud, sometimes disturbing and curiously clinical.

This emerging group of three women and two men are 30 or under. Each had the opportunity to work with young composers. Over the campus came the cries of tortured pianos and punished brass. Exotic instruments punctuated classes in Afro-American, jazz and a variety of modern dance disciplines. The Erick Hawkins technique had students working on the floor of an old gymnasium to the music of Chinese gongs, while others moaned in the transports of "deep muscle therapy." Even professional critics engaged in feisty controversies at the A.D.F. commissary, the Barre. And when attention turned to the six evenings of new dance performances, the arguments intensified. Was it dance or an Esther Williams routine?

Choreographer Johanna Boyce needed an Olympic-size pool to stage, or float, her commissioned piece Waterbodies. Five harps were moved to the pool deck at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the nearest suitable pool, to play Jack Eric Williams' score. A backdrop screen showed footage of underwater escapades while Vermont-raised Boyce and her nine mostly nonprofessional performers splashed, sang, burbled, slithered and dived de deux. Far from synchronized swimming, Waterbodies explored movement with the playful exuberance of a midnight swim.

Next door in Stewart Theater, Boyce's Pass even resorted to old-fashioned 1960s nudity to exhaust the conceptual theme of the dance. Boyce is never prurient, however, and she consistently entertains. But the naive awkwardness of her troupe gives the work an unintended resemblance to rock group movement.

Marleen Pennison has traveled a very different road. Free Way follows the for tunes of a group of blue-collar teens from school to early marriage. Her characters are dressed realistically in polyester. With their unhurried, natural movements, they might have stepped out of Pennison's Louisiana childhood. Like some other new choreographers, she has left the abstract world of myth that some early practitioners of modern dance favored to locate her dances in real geography and time. The result: autobiography that enchants.

Bill T. Jones employs a trio of singers that would do Ray Charles proud to accompany his four-part Social Intercourse. Jones succeeds best when he goes beyond a slide show of Martin Luther King Jr. and a vocal background of the James Earl Ray trial. His considerable talent lies in choreographing street reality with a raw vitality, evident in the most exhilarating soul-handshake in the ater and the use of a "ghetto blaster" portable stereo.

Both the best and the worst of these new dances expanded from the same conceptual and musical frame: the relentless electronic synthesizer. It powers the whiplash pace of Molissa Fenley's Gentle Desire, which only the droogs of A Clock work Orange might find romantic. Stabbing the air, twisting in undefined space, three expressionless dancers--blankness being a hallmark of new wave productions--fail to establish their point. Behind the deafening music there lurks a mad vision of the future: postsexual, postmelodic movement.

Minnesota-born Charles Moulton, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, employs the windshield-wiper synthesizer beat to create compulsively complex patterns in Nine Person Precision Ball Passing. Three tiers of three performers each pass colored balls to one another like robots playing an electronic game. Though it was the most professionally polished choreography of the series, Moulton's vision, like Fenley's, occurs in a hyperspace between the mind and the heart. Neither triumphs, and only motion itself, divorced from experience, is explored to its banal extreme.

If Graham and Humphrey might be called the Einsteins of modern choreography, this emerging group plays the part of latter-day physicists examining minute particles to prove the grand principles. In the process, intimacy and grace have been lost. Paul Taylor, after one performance, was a bit frightened. Said he: "My God, have these people ever been touched by life?" Perhaps not, but the answer will not come with the next turnout. Mean while everyone into the electronic metronomic pool.

--By J.D. Reed

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