DANCE REVIEW : Movement Versus Text in Frankfurt Ballet’s Mixed Bill

With a heroism that audiences instinctively recognize, William Forsythe has freed his choreography from servitude to the priorities of 19th-Century classicism. But he remains enslaved to a European literary tradition, and that bondage can prove just as frustrating as if he wasted his time (like so many others) in homage to Franco-Russian ballet tradition.

On the second and final program by Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, Wednesday at the Wiltern Theatre, his choreography again often paralleled patterns of deconstruction established in spoken texts. Sentences and dance phrases were fractured and their components rearranged. Drone-texts were superimposed on content-oriented texts (some of them facetious), just as dance passages were doggedly layered, one upon the other.

Some of us have had classes in this stuff (and at times like this wish we’d taken better notes). Others have sat through endless evenings of post-structuralist dance and performance art. We’ve paid our dues--and, along the way, we’ve come to suspect that artists like Forsythe aren’t really questioning the nature of communication. No, they just don’t find dance expressive enough, important enough, intellectual enough without running commentary.

Consider “The Questioning of Robert Scott” (1986), which replaced “Skinny” on the Wednesday program. Through planes of speech, music (by Tom Willems) and process-oriented motion, Forsythe dimly evokes a doomed 1912 expedition to the South Pole: one of the epic events of British exploration and, of course, a powerful symbol of the artist who risks everything to explore uncharted territory.

There could be a great ballet in this subject--but Forsythe deprives us of both knowledge and experience. Instead, we get stale Expressionist claptrap (a fellow with a pail on his head painfully slogging across the stage) that refers to Scott’s ordeal in a way that distances us nearly as much as the overlapping speakers portentously yammering about ventriloquism, the spectacle of the future and little lost doggies in the snow.

The choreography is full of compelling semaphoric accents but the ideas don’t link up--they don’t have to. “The Questioning of Robert Scott” doesn’t depend on dancing. It is essentially an oratorio--and so is “Artifact III” (1984), in which Ann Maree Bayard unleashes a spectacular, non-stop tirade about perception and memory while over a bullhorn Nicholas Champion invites her (and presumably everyone) to “step inside.”

Champion sounds like a carnival barker and soon a rack of five scenic panels falls, one by one, revealing dancers in short “promo” solos--all very much like the classic Massine/Picasso/Satie ballet “Parade” in its structure and satiric preoccupation with attracting a theater audience.

The dancers again look shot from guns but they don’t make much difference because spatially and conceptually they’re usually on the fringes of “Artifact III.” The primary experience is vocal: Bayard scrambling familiar rhetoric in speeches about “hearing the same things you’ve always been seeing . . . doing the same things you’ve always been thinking. . . . “

Curiously, she never gets to the heart of the matter: the issue of dancing the things you’ve always been saying.

Happily, “Artifact II” and “Behind the China Dogs” both provide heady doses of Frankfurt classicism without labels, captions or footnotes. Against the majesty of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, “Artifact II” unfolds in a series of contrasting tableaux--each divided by the fall and rise of the curtain and involving major formal realignments of the large corps.

These startling spatial displacements and the percussive group movement (led by Amanda Miller) counterpoint the lush flow of two extraordinary and often simultaneous duets: Elizabeth Corbett with Leigh Matthews and Jennifer Grissette with Glen Tuggle.

Forsythe here asks the impossible and gets it: gyroscopic steadiness in supported adagio passages that radically redefine the woman’s center of balance moment by moment.

Corbett can also breeze through similar challenges at allegro speed when dancing the ballerina role in the doubly daring “Behind the China Dogs” (1988). Against a forceful score by Leslie Struck that melds Webern, barking dogs and Louis Armstrong, Forsythe here makes classical steps incrementally erode and warp until they fairly liquefy--but never more brilliantly than in the whiplash, furioso solos by Thomas McManus.

Forsythe choreographed the work for New York City Ballet: a cataclysmic occasion in the highly politicized Manhattan dance world. Here was the Frankfurt pariah invading the Temple of Balanchine. And, of course, the ballet can’t generate the same frissons when danced by Forsythe’s own company.

What it can do, however, is objectify and perhaps even parody certain New York City Ballet mannerisms that we’d never notice with an actual NYCB cast. For example, isn’t Corbett’s suddenly assumed (and just as easily dumped) goddess-hauteur awfully familiar? What about all that temperament (including arm wrestling) she inflicts on lanky, virtuosic Stephen Galloway? And aren’t those three women flipping their wrists refugees from “La Valse?”

Did Forsythe do the unthinkable: leave a time bomb as an offering in the Holy of Holies? Who knows, but sometimes guts and genius can be the same thing. Ask Robert Scott.