Can’t See ‘Woud’ for the Ploys

What does it mean when a respected European choreographer fills the stage with images of tree trunks, fallen leaves and the death of love many months after Pina Bausch explored a strikingly similar landscape in her widely publicized “Nur Du”? What does it mean when that same choreographer identifies herself in her program biography as “a minimalist,” yet depends on film sequences, lighting effects, quasi-classical virtuosity, acrobatic stunts, overwrought playacting and music drenched in intense romantic longing?

Premiered in December, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s “Woud” (The Woods) came to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Tuesday in an exemplary performance by her Brussels-based company, Rosas, and the musicians of the augmented Duke Quartet. The four-part piece began compellingly with a film directed and composed by Thierry De Mey in which De Keersmaeker prowled the woods like mad Ophelia, acting and dancing a traditional nursery rhyme about a woman who devises an improbable chain of violence to force her child to come home.

Accumulating like the animal sounds in “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” her gestural dance-motifs soon passed from the movie screen to Samantha Van Wissen at the front of the stage: the first example of role expansion from one dancer to a second and then others, that became a major structural gambit in “Woud.”

Unfortunately, with the start of Alban Berg’s passionate “Lyric Suite,” De Keersmaeker introduced other ploys that proved far less durable. She assigned the men of Rosas, for instance, a clumsy amalgam of gymnastics and barefoot ballet--with classroom turning leaps and lifts galore--while the women suffered under the burden of constantly hurling themselves onto their partners’ shoulders only to collapse limply in a heap.

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The incompatibility of these pointlessly buoyant men and these hopelessly desperate women dominated this section, and make no mistake: Rosas superbly realized every hackneyed, ranting moment of it. As a result, watching “Woud” resembled seeing the greatest artists of the Bolshoi animate the god-awful “Legend of Love” or seeing Baryshnikov in his prime sustain American Ballet Theatre’s dreadful pop “Requiem.”

But even Rosas couldn’t put over the aggressive, stupendously unmusical wallow-in-the-leaves sequence set against Schoenberg’s atmospheric “Verklarte Nacht,” much less the finale: a predictably agonized women’s duet danced amid fallen trees and accompanied by a film in which the whole forest comes down, replaced by a highway. The music for this crude ecological warning? “Im Treibhaus,” from Wagner’s mercurial Wesendonck] song cycle, powerfully sung by Kerstin Witt.

You could argue that De Keersmaeker deliberately created a kind of elephant’s burial ground where all the cliches and preoccupations of 20th century dance-theater come for interment or, if you like, deconstruction. You could also conclude that “Woud” found her at a moment of dangerous artistic drift, intent, like many choreographers of the ‘90s, on achieving a deeper connection with her audience but not exactly grounded expressively. Either way, Rosas’ first Southern California performance in 12 years offered merely a bizarre footnote to other artists’ accomplishments--plus the sense that the end of this century may be also the end of the line for this grandiose, self-aggrandizing way of physicalizing feelings and ideas.