Premier Cru Troupe Displays Swiss Precision

Sharply honed theatrical instincts and great technical versatility marked the dancing by the Swiss consortium Premier Cru on the opening program of this year’s Feet Speak series at Occidental College on Friday.

Classically trained, but as impressive in Dominik Schoetschel’s pantomime-based theater piece “Beyond Punch and Judy” as in the balletic interplay of Lucas Crandall’s pas de deux “The Bough Breaks,” the Cru dancers moved between genres flawlessly, with Matjash Mrozewski especially virtuosic in three works on the four-part program.

However, Schoetschel really ought to retitle his contribution “Beyond Petrushka,” since his theme of puppets seeking freedom from a tyrannical puppeteer and many of his specific dance images (a puppet plunging through a wall and dangling, for example) came straight from the Mikhail Fokine classic. With Schoetschel and Mariene Grade playing sweet-faced mannequins and Vitorio Casarin as their power-hungry master, the piece cleverly developed its familiar, enduring premise, using mobile scenic units to turn the whole Keck Theater into a giant puppet stage.

Essentially a showpiece, “The Bough Breaks” exploited Mrozewski’s exceptional partnering skills and the supernatural pliancy of Aya Sugisaki in intricate, high-speed linkups with tantalizing but unresolved emotional implications. However, Crandall’s trio “Nitecap (anything can happen)” focused as much on the volatile relationship between two suitors and their very, very indecisive object of desire as on an alternately ballroom-influenced and gymnastic movement style. Indeed, when Casarin and Mrozewski grew increasingly weary of competing for Lucy Nightingale--and increasingly interested in one another--the piece took on the resonance of a satiric parable. With his distinctive conceptual sophistication and dazzling choreographic fluency, Crandall proved Premier Cru’s major discovery.

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Less successful: Kate Ketchum’s trio “Couvade,” which found no reliable premise or structure to unify an intriguing vocabulary of idiosyncratic movement--offhand shrugs, slumps, twitches and other eccentricities (including repeated tugs on their loose, gold tank tops) by Schoetschel, Sugisaki and the tireless Mrozewski. Major changes in speed, direction, level, intensity and impetus challenged the dancers but led nowhere, though a final image of Sugisaki being tied up inside a sack and some facial playacting along the way suggested a dormant expressive agenda.

Compared to their Stateside counterparts, Premier Cru looked far less intimidated by the starkness of neoclassicism and postmodernism, more willing to experiment with infusing popular theater and dance forms with a contemporary perspective. Their latest (second) Feet Speak visit was both refreshing and instructive.