Love and Sex at the Ballet

A man in a curled white wig jerks his head, filling the air with dust as he moves. Bubbles spontaneously appear onstage, and the 14 ballet dancers begin to play with them; a woman pops the one in front of her, another tries to gather them in her arms.

In “Black and White,” the U.S. premiere of five ballets choreographed by Jirí Kylián between 1986 and 1991, decorum is literally cast off and left excavated on the stage like a mask behind which no face appears.

Variations of an elaborate, rigid 18th century dress appear in each of the five ballets: “No More Play,” “Petite Mort,” “Sarabande,” “Falling Angels,” and “Sechs Tänze.” A presence just as prominent as the Boston Ballet dancers, they became the embodiment of Kylián’s social critique.

The Wang Theatre’s heavy curtains first opened to reveal a white dress and a male dancer. Amidst a tense silence, a spotlight rested on the ruffled costume. The lighting was simple, a method used by Joop Caboort throughout the show to emphasize the minimalist nature of Kylián’s choreography. A dancer, concealed behind another until this moment, shifted to the right quickly and almost imperceptibility, revealing that there are in fact two.

Without regard for a definitive start or end, the curtain then fell, rising again as “No More Play” continued. “Black and White” revels in such play between the evident and the hidden, the proper and the audaciously inappropriate. It is a dark game that questions the relationships we have with others and illuminates the artificial apparatus through which those relationships are mediated.

While the “players” in “No More Play” shift constantly between duets and trios, in “Petite Mort”—an established euphemism for “orgasm” in French—the contact between bodies is intimate and pointed. Kees Tjebbes’ costume design is again impeccable. The skin-tight, pink-toned boxers that the six men wear and the similarly colored leotards for the ballerinas harmonize with the soft lighting to render them all naked.

Though the elaborate swordplay with which “Petite Mort” starts later seems incongruous, it charges the piece with aggression from the very first slash. The sexual tension continues to grow through the way in which male and female dancers weave their bodies together; at times it is impossible to distinguish where one body ends and the other begins.

Yet this intimacy is never crass; the dancers don’t fuck, they make love. Still, Black and White is imbued with a brazen forthrightness; often the dancers bend their feet instead of pointing them or scurry across the stage on all fours.

The next two pieces, “Sarabande” and “Falling Angels,” destabilize gender. Each performed by exclusively male or female groups, the dances play with societal conceptions of masculinity and femininity. “Sarabande” much like Egon Schiele’s “Self-Portrait Masturbating,” centers on male bodily function in both music and movement.

Under hovering dresses, the miked dancers pulled off their pink t-shirts, stretching them in front of their genitals, while their grunts sounded eerily. In another similarly masturbatory moment, a male dancer gyrates and touches himself while the others watch.

The eight female dancers in “Falling Angels,” alternated between blowing kisses and flaying inelegantly, echoing the juxtaposition of surface and interior that underlay the entire work. If the 90s is known as a period where art concerned itself with the body’s extremities, “Black and White” is certainly no exception.

Despite the ethnic flair of Steve Reich’s “Drumming, Part I” to which “Falling Angels” was set, “Black and White” was noticeably blanch. The aesthetic poignancy of perfectly interlocking bodies or the impression of nude figures could not have been created in the presence of a darker skinned dancer.

As “Black and White” deconstructs the way in which we interact, it challenges, rather unwittingly, the way race characterizes those relationships. Yet, though the ideological ramifications of the work resound, they never undermine its artistic integrity.

In what was arguably the most arresting and indelible moment of the evening, six female dancers were de-robed. They glided across the stage, seemingly bound in black dresses, but then stepped back. They tilted the dresses to the left and then aligned themselves with its form, recreating the illusion that they were seamless extensions of their figures.

The fallacy of the presumption that the costumes were inextricably connected to their bodies, their very selfhood, became pitifully and utterly clear. In a time when Proposition 8 reminds us of the debilitating effects of convention, “Black and White” calls for us to remove the trappings and cast aside our rigid codes. Perhaps then, intimacy will displace the levity that dominates the relationships of our generation.

—Staff writer Ama R. Francis can be reached at afrancis@fas.harvard.edu.