DANCE REVIEW : Frankfurt Company Introduces Its Street-Style Ballet to L.A.

Not long ago, ballet was the torchbearer for contemporary art, but, these days, the Anglo-American audience pays handsomely to be insulated from its own time--to be lulled with visions of an Imperial Russian past and to encounter modernity, if at all, through the softening filters of neoclassicism, neo-romanticism, neo-expressionism, neo-vaudeville.

Well, the ballets of William Forsythe aren’t neo- anything , and that’s the first shock of seeing his Frankfurt Ballet: watching this 39-year-old American make the ballet vocabulary speak powerfully in the present tense.

Abrasive, idiosyncratic, yet somehow deeply familiar, Forsythe’s choreography has graced a lot of repertories lately. But at the Wiltern Theatre--where his 37-dancer company made its West Coast debut Tuesday, courtesy of the Dance Gallery’s new presenting network--it isn’t a novel change of pace. No, this time it is simply all the ballet you’re going to get and you’d better be prepared to dump any highfalutin notions of nuance, hierarchy or glamour.

Forsythe and his house composer Tom Willems understand the rhythms and sonorities of the moment, the information overload, sense of irony and simmering frustrations that disconnect urban young people from any soothing backdated art. Their work identifies strongly with those young people, maybe most of all with their anger.

Beyond anything else, however, their creations harness the energy we find stifled in our society and project it so forcefully that the codified steps and shapes of ballet fuse with street style and pop dance in potent, liberating experiences.

Created for the Paris Opera Ballet two years ago, “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” finds the nine-member cast coiled up and kicking out--but the kicks end in positions straight from the classical lexicon, just as the mobility of the upper torso and the loose slump-walking come from other idioms entirely. Ballet is in the bones of this work, rock ‘n’ roll in its blood, so as Willems’ score dramatically thumps and wheezes along, the overlapping solos and duets are double-edged. We see an aggressive contemporary sensibility heightened into art, and also classical virtuosity freed from courtly manners.

The recent San Francisco Ballet production may be clearer in its juxtapositions, but Elizabeth Corbett of the Frankfurt cast need yield to no one in stamina or precision as the leggy lady in the pageboy--the closest thing to a ballerina role on the entire program. With its dramatic lunges on pointe and intricate contortions, the duet between Maia Rosal and Glen Tuggle also typifies the molten virtuosity of this showpiece, a pure statement of Forsythe’s ability to strip classicism of its cultural accretions yet keep it full of feeling.

In “Same Old Story” (1987), Forsythe stages two simultaneous stage events: a spoken minidrama at a kitchen table, center, and another of his surging dance abstractions for a large corps. The three people at the table and the dancers don’t notice one another, us or the curtain continually falling and rising in front of everyone. Self-absorption is a condition of existence here and we all know why.

Sometimes the dancing relates to the spoken text (normally fairy tales, but on this occasion a bizarre collection of newspaper clippings), but that could be happenstance. In any case, Forsythe’s point seems to lie beyond easy ironies in all the big contrasts he sets up: between speech and movement, of course, but also between naturalism and classicism, solo and corps dancing, an expansive versus an intimate scale.

Distinctive voices are also central--with small introductory dance solos proving as sharply individual as the timbre and accents of the speakers. Once again, colorless light from directly overhead re-creates the generalized fluorescence of public spaces, but Willems’ effects vary from subdued clicks and heartbeats to an assaultive blare.

In the audaciously non-balletic “Skinny,” we see Forsythe transforming his own paranoia into a defiant life-affirming statement. This apocalyptic full-company vehicle (a replacement for the scheduled “Questioning of Robert Scott”) was choreographed by Forsythe and associate Amanda Miller in 1986 after the American bombing of Libya and arose from their fears of retaliation against Americans abroad.

Thus we see the flicker of offstage fires and people running desperately with pails. We hear a text relentlessly evolving from cheery platitudes to a warning about dreams going up in smoke. We feel the panic of people at risk--and yet. . . .

These hand-clapping, arm-swinging, shadowboxing phalanxes in their loose T-shirts, shorts and street shoes are dancing at an awesome pitch, not so much consumed as released by the fear that inspired Forsythe and Miller. They are fully present, completely alive, incandescent, and in the theater how can we ever feel sorry about that ?