Minimalists 3

By Michael Walsh

The avant-garde steps back

The stage is thrust up from the floor and split into two unequal planes. Enter eleven dancers clad in black, red or white pajamas, their costumes slit wide to flash inner forearms and thighs. Slowly they start to spin, hop and shuffle in smooth synchronicity. Out of huge loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling comes the foghorn blast of a low note--like the opening of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra--played by a synthesizer; later the music rises in a blast of brass to a Brucknerian apotheosis.

Such are the arresting components of Available Light, a 55-minute collaboration of three prominent minimalists that premiered last week in Los Angeles. Created by Choreographer Lucinda Childs, Composer John Adams and Architect Frank O. Gehry, Available Light is less a milestone than a signpost. Today's avant-garde has had to circle back on its forebears: the same impulse that gave rise earlier in this century to atonal music and flamboyant attitudes in dance now deals in the certainties of plotless movement and assertive major triads.

Just how far the pendulum has swung is evident in Available Light, which travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month. Childs, who collaborated earlier with fellow avant-gardists such as Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo.

Both Gehry and Adams have a surer sense of drama. The architect's installation, in a converted downtown warehouse, is strongly articulated by his fondness for raw wood surfaces and chain-link fencing. The precariousness of the dancers' position--the lower and larger of the two stages reaches second-story height--emphasizes the fragility and remoteness of Childs' work. The audience is perched even higher, on bleachers, and peers down at the action onstage.

The most impressive element is Adams' score, a synthesized 24-track tape whose only "live" sounds are the brass near the end. Bearing the independent title Light over Water, the music is cast in six mostly continuous movements. The piece reaches a new level of complexity for a minimalist work, moving away from the school's strict repetition and steady-rhythm tenets toward something more expansive and formally flexible.

Striking though the individual elements are, they do not always mesh. Although Childs says her dance is closely allied with Adams' music, too often the two clash: the sounds urgent, the movements passive. Further, visual minimalism palls more quickly than its aural counterpart, and beside Adams' expanded vocabulary, Childs' monochromaticism looks dated. By definition, being a member of the avant-garde means always being in motion, like running up a down escalator: if you are not actively moving forward, you are surely moving backward. --By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.