LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : MAGUY MARIN : SIMPLISTIC PROFUNDITY OF ‘BABEL’

The curtain rose on “Babel Babel” Thursday night at the Raleigh Studios, and the innocent viewer thought it was Pina Bausch revisited.

The stage, bathed in poetic shadow, revealed a vast grassy vista punctuated with gentle hillocks and soothing valleys. Ah, the neo-expressionist allure of phony realism.

Soon, a dozen dancers, the Compagnie Maguy Marin, strolled and rolled through the verdure in ever-artful clusters, their movements defined in careful rhythmic unison.

The brave participants exhibited nice, imperfect, normal bodies. They also happened to be naked. Ah, innocence.

The taped music--blasted, of course, via rocky loudspeakers--offered the symphonic benediction of Gustav Mahler. Ah, classy Weltschmerz .

But Maguy Marin, the choreographer-scenarist for this gimmicky excursion, isn’t really the Gallic equivalent of the sordid, sodden and angry earth mother of Wuppertal.

Marin--who had favored the festival earlier with her interesting doll-house perversion

of Prokofiev’s “Cinderella,” courtesy of the Lyons Opera Ballet--does not specialize in Germanic Angst marathons. Her aesthetic is brighter and prettier, tighter and even less sophisticated. She got her training with Maurice Bejart.

Using minimal dance and maximal dramatic gesture, she and her company give us simplistic show-biz maneuvers masquerading as eternal profundity.

The ideas are expensive. The metaphors are cheap.

The frame of reference is Biblical. Sort of.

At the beginning, the languid innocents greet the dawn and nature. As the accompanying musical impulses move from the Mahlerian to the maladroit, our protagonists experience the advent of civilization.

They put on clothes. They enact strenuous, mechanical labor rituals while, oh-so symbolically, they stomp the ground and toil and till. Soon they begin to flirt with the tools of industrial revolution. Ah, the birth of corruption.

They bang their agricultural artifacts with anvil-chorus gusto and awful precision. They play variations on “Ring Around the Rosy.”

They also do a lot of repetitive chanting, cackling, yelling and grunting. Some of the sounds emerge as discernible francais . Others suggest primitive babble. Ah, expressive liberation.

Now, it obviously is time for modern debauchery. To indicate the ruin of the human race, Marin transforms the nature boys and girls into vacationing Frenchpersons of the wicked 1960s.

The dangerous dozen sport bathing suits or piquant variations thereof. Some of the men acquire mock-paunch bellies. Some of the women don hair curlers. Everyone is issued a de rigueur baby doll. Ah, the banality of domesticity.

The primeval lawn becomes a kitsch campground replete with picnic tables, tents and latrines. Dante’s Inferno was never like this. Ah, stridency.

A mean, high-heeled chanteuse with a massive, bright yellow beehive emerges, mike in hand, to warble unreasonable facsimiles of period pop tunes. Most notable, we think, is “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.”

Something may be lost in translation, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Ah, witty satire. Ah, pretty decadence.

The cartoon singer, not incidentally, is Maguy Marin. Herself. Her gig includes a glitzy number sung in the lap of the audience, down the aisle between the bleachers. Ah, immediacy.

Now, at last, it is frenzy time. Ah, apocalypse.

The rock music rolls louder and louder. The revelers begin to abandon sex games in favor of war games. Soon the lawn is strewn with garbage, with discarded dolls, and with the spent bodies of the corrupt celebrants.

The end? Not quite. Too bad.

The 90-minute ritual has yet to deal with transfiguration.

The lights go dim again. That makes one suspect that it is time for man- and womankind to undress again.

Sure enough. The nasty clothes are peeled off. The troubled participants dance in blessed freedom. The moment has come for spiritual cleansing, for reaffirmation of truth and faith. The cycle is complete. Ah, uplift.

For musical reinforcement, Marin turns back to Mahler. Unfortunately, it is the wrong Mahler.

While the survivors execute their expanded crouch-dance rituals, while the explicit message refers to issues of cataclysmic impact, the sound track (uncredited, as always) invokes the “Kindertotenlieder.”

These poignant songs on the death of children create excruciatingly personal, bleak, intimate--and specific--images. In text and tone, they stubbornly contradict the generalized agonies and ecstasies delineated by the choreographer. It is almost as if Marin doesn’t understand the German words.

Ah, insensitivity. Ah, pretension.

The uninhibited dancers exhibited dedication, flexibility and discipline throughout.

Philippe Guilloux created the resourceful set. Pierre Colomer controlled the light and shade, as well as the inevitable abstract squiggle projections on the cyclorama. Yves Bouche engineered the noise.

Louise Marin and Montserrat Casanova concocted the towels and aprons and swim attire and night clubby frills. The best costumes were designed, however, by a higher power.