Provocative Start for ‘Feet Speak’

Bravo to “Feet Speak,” a significant new dance festival that kicked off Friday at Occidental College’s Keck Theater with the North American debut of Premier Cru.

The seven-member troupe, a consortium of aggressively bold dancers and choreographers from such major European companies as Nederlands Dance Theater and Cullberg Ballet, presented four works from 1996, the year it united. The evening, sometimes fascinating, sometimes frustrating, was arguably provocative.

Stijn Celis’ “Fox” featured Fred Firth’s ambient track of frogs and other bucolica. It sprang to marvelous life with the prodigious footwork of Lucy Nightingale and Kate Ketchum in a quasi-mating dance as they vied for the attentions of an adorable stuffed fox. Sensual and sly, with a splash of Schubert and a small-stepped minuet, “Fox” charmingly titillated.

Ketchum’s duet “You’d Cry Too, If You Were Painted Blue,” set to Alfred Schnittke and Philip Glass, found Nightingale in Lady Macbeth mode, scrubbing invisible spots, as the object of Miranda Lind’s erotic desires. Lind executed wonderful leaps, maintaining waves of tortured emotions in this push-pull spasm of amour.

More complex--indeed, sometimes incomprehensible--were Dominik Schoetschel’s “Fall Over Backwards” and Celis’ “L’Odeur de L’Ombre.” Schoetschel’s work, with Lind, Vitorio Casarin, Carl Inger and the choreographer himself, involved control issues and men’s suits. Imagine Jerome Robbins crossed with Edouard Lock, where bodies crawl backward amid slow-motion twirls, intermittently propelled by Claude Tschamichian’s heavy breathing score.

Celis’ opus, a bow to insensitivity with Casarin embodying the word “Meat,” also gave us ruby stilettos and a house sitting atop Ketchum in this Oz-like landscape. A sequined-miniskirted Schoetschel punctuated the hallucinatory texture of this plucky group. In all, a “Feat Speak.”

* “Feet Speak,” Keck Theater, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Eagle Rock. Festival continues, with different programs and groups, on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through Aug. 16. $5-$10. (213) 259-2922.