AVANT-GARDE CHIC IN BROOKLYN : HIPPO JOINS PINA BAUSCH ‘ARIEN’

Avant-garde chic definitely is “in.” So is glitzy ennui. Therefore, the “innest” place in Fun City on Tuesday night had to be the sweet old Academy of Music in Brooklyn.

It used to be a rather stuffy opera house and concert hall that tried, in an admirable but impotent way, to emulate the Met and Carnegie Hall. Now it is a haven for all that is daring and experimental and difficult and different and obscure and foreign and glamorous.

The current attraction at 30 Lafayette Ave. is billed as the “New Wave Festival.” The opening event is modestly heralded as “The Most Sensational Dance Company Ever to Be Seen in New York.”

The company in question is, of course, the Tanztheater of Wuppertal, a.k.a. the Pina Bausch Dance Theater. This, you will recall, is the gang that brought all that Angst and Weltschmerz Sitzfleisch agony and exquisitely ugly adventure to the opening of our Olympic Arts Festival last year.

New York didn’t pay much attention to Bausch & Co. in far-away, hopelessly and intrinsically provincial Los Angeles. But when the German psychodancers subsequently showed the same wares to the mod and myopic East Coast, the local Establishment instantly clasped the Tanztheater to its bosom.

In some perspectives, things just don’t happen until they happen here.

The return of Pina Bausch was, in any case, an Occasion. The capital O is imperative. For $500, the Beautiful People--some in T-shirts, others in black tie--got to attend a reception, a dinner, a disco party and, somewhere in the middle, the U.S. premiere of “Arien,” a 6-year-old, intermissionless, 2-hour-and-15-minute endurance contest for performers and audience alike.

In this historic concoction, the Bauschians splash, sprawl, strut, stride, muse, roll, kick, languish and stroke their not-so-merry way through an increasingly chaotic nightmare that happens to take place on a stage full of water.

That’s right. Water.

At the stage apron it was four inches deep. At certain crucial recesses, it was deep enough to accommodate some serious diving and dunking.

A program insert, incidentally, advised that “the water used in the first performance will be saved and recycled for the subsequent three performances.”

Oh, yes. I almost forgot. In addition to her confrontational ensemble of talking-singing-acting quasi-terpsichoreans, Bausch brought on a hippopotamus.

It wasn’t, alas, a real live hippo. But it certainly looked like one. It looked like a big, round, friendly, glistening beast. Slowly and benignly, it waddled--with the aid, I think, of two actors imprisoned within the rubbery carcass--from scene to scene, sometimes as a bemused observer, sometimes as a subtle participant in the action.

The hippo, like everyone else, made waves. New waves, we must presume.

As a perverse fate would have it, however, there almost were no waves at all. Because of the local drought, 4,000 gallons of water had to be trucked in from New Jersey. Unfortunately, that supply turned out to be contaminated, and the desperate Brooklynites turned instead to the tanks of Long Island.

An emergency shipment of precious H2O arrived late and then, woe of woes, first the pumping system and then the heating system malfunctioned. At 7 p.m., the announced curtain time, the stage was still cold and dry.

A house spokesman begged the indulgence of a good-natured opening-night crowd that included Bianca Jagger, Diane Keaton, Joan Kennedy, Calvin Klein, Martin Scorsese, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Peter Allen and Steve Reich. The dancers, it was explained, would catch pneumonia if the water wasn’t warm enough.

Finally, after a wait of an hour and 40 minutes, “Arien” began.

The title is simply the German equivalent of arias . That explains the presence of Beniamino Gigli on the sound track, though it doesn’t explain the “Moonlight” Sonata of Beethoven, the “Nachtmusik” of Mozart, the Rachmaninoff preludes, the Schumann “Kinderszenen” or the various pop ditties.

The musical smorgasbord ornamented a number of familiar Bausch rituals.

Men humiliated women. Men dressed and preened as women. Contrapuntal snippets of poetry and anecdotery and nonsense jargon were hurled at the public. The protagonists lined up and stared us down, laughed at us, mocked us, jostled our passivity.

Leitmotifs came and went. One man kept snapping photos of his colleagues in various stages of dampness and distress. A tall man held a short woman in zombie-like embrace as they crossed the stage, stunned and/or stoned; when he released his grip, she slid to his knees in the water.

A woman carried on a debate with her image in a mirror. A fellow squatting in wet undershorts limbered up, wrapping his legs around his head. Several men in wet tuxedos engaged, literally, in a spitting contest.

Then there were the isolated happenings, fraught with inner meaning. A bashful man in gray flirted with the hippo. A dancer fled to the balcony and, encouraged by his colleagues, threatened to jump. Water sprinkled from the proscenium arch provided a singin’-in-the-rain interlude. A woman injected some chemical substance in her veins. A nude swimmer floated on his back.

There was much mugging, much grotesquerie, much running and racing and swishing and splashing and slipping, much play with image reflections in real mirrors and on the watery surfaces, much indulging in children’s party games, much lining up for Dada-esque confessionals, much manipulation of tables, chairs and costumes.

It was, we were assured, terribly new, terribly daring, terribly startling, terribly significant. Actually, it looked a lot like Bausch’s “1980,” which we experienced at the Olympics, except that the ubiquitous grass was exchanged for a wading pool.

No one can deny the theatrical daring of Bausch’s visions. No one should belittle her concern for the examination of profound socio-erotic and socioaesthetic relations in a sick and sarcastic world. No one can devalue the stamina, dedication, individuality and character of her dancers.

Some observers, however, soon tire of having to unravel all those symbolic knots. Marathon navel-gazing isn’t everyone’s idea of a collective water sport. A little overstatement, no matter how imaginative, how fluid and how bizarre, can go a long, long way.

Some impatient, obviously unenlightened participants--this one, for instance--can enjoy and endure only so much psychic water-treading.