Montreal Danse Follows Two Lines

Narrative without irony is a rare occurrence in new dance (which is the category rapidly overtaking modern dance these days). In new-dance circles, it seems as if any elements that threaten to tell a story are quickly put in a blender and stylized into abstraction. Simply saying what you mean is just not done, as if all truly innovative people had no more straightforward stories to tell.

But Montreal Danse, at the Luckman Theatre on the campus of Cal State L.A. on Saturday night, had one--and a good one: Susan Marshall’s “Lines From Memory,” with music from Philip Glass’ “Mishima.” Made on the seven-member company in 1995, the 40-minute piece has--and this is more unusual than you’d think--a beginning, a middle full of complication and an ending that makes you feel that something moving has happened. It’s an idea that never loses its appeal.

The narrator is a young woman (Manon Levac) who recalls her infatuation with Sophie and Arnaud, an enigmatic couple who dominated her life for a while. The duo is actually played by three couples (most prominently by Annik Hamel and Martin Bernier), emphasizing a plurality of moods and their overweening presence in the narrator’s life as they draw her into their arcane word games and their small, bent tangos. Part of the piece’s appeal has to do with Marshall’s successful interweaving of spoken text, dancing and Glass’ dramatic, painterly score.

You hear about the couple’s eccentricities and see their dips, swoons and stylized pacing, while rhythms throb like a heartbeat and cathedral-like bells crescendo. When the trio becomes mired in sexual tension and angry undercurrents, there are rhapsodic swerves in the score that match the aggression in a reckless spin or the anger in a too-tight embrace. The ending juxtaposes a spoken assumption of assumed bliss with a physical statement of loneliness.

The second half of the program, “Ciudad de Hierro” (City of Iron), by Jose Besprosvany, was meant to create “an urban version of ancient rituals” but really offered a kind of faux primitive jam session. On a cavernous, dark stage, dotted with bits of sepia light, dancers banged on cans, strafed metallic objects and clacked bits of wood--percussive stabs in the dark, with jagged rhythms and unison hand claps that strayed. The movement seemed mainly a distasteful riff on someone’s idea of native dancing--wide-stance stamping, crouching, loose necks and backbones that waved like sheaves of wheat.

It was a night of contrasts--old-fashioned storytelling with stylish new twists in “Lines From Memory,” to new-fashioned ritual with a bad aftertaste in “Ciudad de Hierro.” Obviously the evolution of new dance is a tricky process.