Music and Dance Reviews : ‘Tibetan Ritual Dance’ in UCLA’s Royce Hall

How often does an audience watch dancers spiritually prepare for a performance? How often is an audience instructed to prepare itself in the same way?

“Dances From the Diamond Realm: Tibetan Ritual Dance of Namgyal Monastery” certainly began on the right track, Friday in Royce Hall, UCLA. “This is not a theater,” declared actor Richard Gere, chairman of Tibet House (a co-sponsor of the tour). “This is now a celestial mansion.”

Both Gere and narrator Philippe Goldin helped clarify the proper Tantric context of the program--explaining the purpose and symbolism of these dances by 17 monks of the Dalai Lama’s own monastery (now located at Dharamsala, India) and reminding us that they usually take many hours or even days to perform.

Accompanied by deep-toned chant, blaring woodwinds, and the bleats of horns twice as large as the men who played them, the excerpts that followed provided quick takes on ancient, fabled relics of an endangered culture.

Here was “The Dance of the Cemetery Lords” (performed last September at the Philosophical Research Society by the far less opulently costumed monks of Drepung Loseling Monastery), with its four skeleton-figures wagging their gleaming skull-masks and scooping the air with their talon-fingers.

Here, too, was a gentle, eloquent solo, “The Deer Dance,” full of sweet benediction: graceful gestures out from the mouth of the animal mask that seemed to represent both speech and a gift to those within the sweep of the dancer’s arms. The lyric, processional “Kalachakra Offering Dance” involved its five unmasked dancers in intricate sequencing patterns. The powerful, weighty “Black Hat Dance” included subtle manipulation of scarfs and tassels. And the narrative “Dance of the Old Man” (originally from Mongolia) contained a wealth of charming character mime.

Of course, this highlights program couldn’t suggest how the formal repetitions and sustained energy of Tibetan ritual manipulate time for the observer--and it can scarcely represent the real thing for the monks themselves. A few moments of the characteristic intense, dynamic turns on one foot (the other flexed at knee-height) do look remarkable, but what kind of concentration does it take to continue, full-out, for hours? The Namgyal monks left us unenlightened.

A pity--and possibly needless. Weaned on minimalism, butoh and other cyclical, process-oriented movement forms, the contemporary American dance audience might just be ready to look at unabridged Tibetan ritual and appreciate (if not enter into) its sense of expanded consciousness. A performance that, at the very least, offered one extended excerpt after intermission (instead of more snippets) could have relieved some of the frustration that possibly existed on both sides of the footlights on Friday.