Modernity Undanced

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION grows more and more impossible, it seems. Our civilization's relentless progress towards a controlled creation has brought us beyond test-tube babies to DNA-making; we don't even need the sperm and the egg any more. Careful analysis, research and thought have unraveled the fundamental mystery of human life. Soon our children won't be merely the fruit of our desires, but of conscious intellect. "I think, therefore I am" takes on a new dimension.

In the arts, the distinction between the conceptualized and the realized, between the thought and the thing, has been getting fuzzier for some time. Poems about writing poetry are now cliche--indeed since Yeats's "circus animals," his faithful images deserted him, verse has turned in on itself to the point where most poems seem to be written about being unable to compose poetry. Prose, too, introspects to analysis or suggestion modern novelists seem lost in a funhouse of potential trips that stay potential, journalists discuss other journalists' intents in the New Yorker and the 20 most interesting minutes of the Carter-Ford debate were those in which the newscasters debated the concept, aim and probable effects of the broadcast while the candidates stood silent in Philadelphia.

Not just verbal, but visual art-forms stress the unseen. Recently a smudged piece of paper entitled "Drawing by DeKooning erased by Rauschenberg with the artist's permission" sold as a work of art. When idea triumphs over image in this way, the art evades sensory comprehension; we can't reach it through sight, taste, smell, sound or even touch; the only way it can be grasped is with the intellect. The question that should be asked last gets asked first: "What's it all about?"

Somehow, it's seemed unnecessary to ask that question of dance. Movement has preserved its mystery longest; the essence of dance hasn't been cerebral, but corporeal. Leaps done with the legs, turns of the body--this sort of creation is uniquely sincere. Blake called touch the only unfallen sense. Dance is perhaps the only innocent art.

OR WAS. Conceptualization is snaking its way into the paradise of the body's motion, too. The Tanz-Forum Koln, a modern dance company from Cologne, Germany, exemplified the insidious trend at the Loeb this weekend. They didn't dance so much as they intellectualized movement. What hung in the air weren't bodies, or gestures, but unformulated notions of a conceptual framework. One left questioning (what was it all about?), mentally provoked, but sensually frustrated.

Tanz Forum Koln relies heavily on acting for expression; their dancing is not exceptional. The effortless quality that marks great technique is missing; with few exceptions, the dancers of the company don't finish their movements, are off in their timing by that fraction of a second, fail to spark the pattern with the extra inch of height or breath in a leg or leap.

"Sinfonietta," for example, states the musicality of movement--melody and harmony visualized. The themes heard and seen in the first sweeping movement break into four couples, who complete a cycle of elemental meetings, four seasonal couplings. And as the piece that relied most on sheer dancing, it was the least effective of the three presented.

The "Ragtime Dance Company," which closed the evening, came closer to technical ease. This melange of music hall parody is designed for soap-operatic hamming, and the company isn't formed from the Cologne Opera for nothing. Again, the essential humor of the piece was unrealized. Suggestions of parody were thrown out: the troupe member who always upstages the others, the girl on roller skates pushed toward--oops--the audience...but the performance tripped on the untied shoestring of its imperfect technique and fell flat. The man who was to catch the roller skater stepped out from the wings about 100 feet of stage too early, etc. Slapstick succeeds only if there is a firmly controlled base, an unshakeable structure in time, space, and the coordination of the two; the Tanz Forum, lacking this, could only slap.

"Sinfonietta" and "Ragtime" illustrated the company's problems with dance and compensation for this by acting, their tendency to think onstage rather than move, the first piece, "That Is the Show," was the best indication of their strengths and weaknesses. In "Show," there was a Message being projected by the troupe's collective mind, facial expression and dramatics. But in the dancing per se the message remained uncatalyzed, unseen.

"That Is the Show" is about being moved by others, not about moving. None of the thought-like dancers consistently puppeteered the others; the waxing and waning of their powers made the manipulation more threatening because it was unpredictable. For much of the piece, the "hero," an Adam figure, is carried frozen about the stage. A woman, the ordering spirit of the whirling white chaos, tries to activate this statue, in a reversal of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth of artistic creation. Her attemps to infuse him with life are frustrated by the score, the other dancers, all the externals. Only in a brief moment of silence, when the score ceases to beat messages, the dancers stop gyrating, do the two find each other and come together in harmonious movement. Choreographer Norman Morrice briefly allows some ceremony of innocence, then things fall apart again.

The company holds Morrice's work together better than they do the other two pieces; remarkable, because it is the most difficult of their repertoire, and the only piece not choreographed for them. Part of the viability of "Show" is due to the four really fine dancers of Tanz-Forum, given leads in this work: Heide Tegeder (by far the best of the company), James Saunders, Svenbjorg Alexanders, and Ralf Harster. (Michael Molnar, an impressive statue, is too tight when asked to move.) The company's affinity for this ballet, however, goes beyond good dancing by the leads. Morrice's analysis of a creation manipulated by the forces of a consciousness (represented by the dancers), where spontaneity is possible for only an instant before everything dissolves into the confusion of introspection, is the perfect vehicle for the Forum, whose three works demonstrated their belief that imaginings of the mind supercede bodily imaginings.

Perhaps this indicates no trend, perhaps the work of one "modern dance" troupe connects not at all with the current inward spiral of the arts. Hopefully, it's only Tanz-Forum that needs to be reminded that in dance, it's the present, not the thought, that counts.