The Gender Trap

One woman dreams of genteel romance. Another learns she will have a baby. Others participate in societal courtship rituals. And all of them, without exception, are big losers in the mating game: led blindly, hurled about, victimized by their illusions and ultimately abandoned.

The dance-theater of modernist Angelin Preljocaj looks at women with a pitiless curiosity, asking provocative questions about their passivity and collaboration in their own oppression. With his updated “Romeo and Juliet” at UCLA in mid-September and with an equally idiosyncratic Ballet Preljocaj mixed bill at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Tuesday, the French choreographer retells familiar stories in ways that emphasize a sense of helpless individuals overwhelmed by events--and of women cruelly used every step of the way.

In “Le Spectre de la Rose” (1993), he turns an early Diaghilev Ballets Russes classic into a playoff between perfumed fantasy and sweaty reality. On the left: a gauzed stage-within-the-stage, periodically lit to show two couples dancing a brittle parody-ballet to fragments of Weber, the women wearing antique blue gowns, the men dressed in glittering matador suits. On the right: Claudia De Smet dreaming all this and soon visited by a mysterious, petaled partner, Stephane Loras. But instead of Fokine-style lyricism, Preljocaj supplies one of his fierce, high-risk gymnastic duets, the dancers hotly swirling and violently coupling to sound bursts by Marc Khanne. So much for modern romance.

In “Annonciation” (1995), the superbly expressive De Smet plays the messenger-angel sent to Mary, mother of Jesus, and perhaps the agent by which she is impregnated. (Preljocaj’s program note raises the possibility “that at the very moment when the message is delivered, the biological fertilization process is underway.”) As danced by Julie Bour, the wistful Mary must be hypnotized, physically manipulated and ultimately seduced into submission. Meanwhile, scraps of Vivaldi remind the audience of conventional Christmas card iconography while the squealing / rumbling music of Stephane Roy adds force to the postmodern severity of Preljocaj’s movement language.

Except for his engulfing duets, he tends to choreograph in action-modules, not so much developing as repeating them in changing spatial configurations for as long as the narrative situation warrants. The result gives even the most intense character confrontations an icy formalism--as if human relationships were being logically dissected by a superior intelligence with no sympathy whatsoever. “Noces” (1989), another Ballets Russes remake, relies heavily on those modules in its long middle section.

Unlike “Annonciation,” “Spectre” and “Romeo and Juliet,” this ensemble vehicle doesn’t cut or interrupt a well-known score but leaves Stravinsky intact: something of a tactical error, since Preljocaj proves better at staging dramatic juxtapositions than sustaining choreographic buildups. Otherwise, he again shows us women who literally can’t see what’s happening to them--not asleep or hypnotized this time but led with hands over their eyes to something like a quasi-folkloric sex party. The five men are uniformly voracious and when they temporarily tire of mauling real women, they play catch with five life-size rag dolls in bridal gowns, eventually hanging them up like trophies. By that time, the five women have become as pliant as the stuffed effigies and repeatedly run back for more abuse.

Moments of tenderness lighten all these remarkable dance dramas, but the unyielding sexual power structure inevitably leaves the women either drained or degraded. If Preljocaj’s “Romeo and Juliet” made sex seem the ultimate act of rebellion in an imprisoning contemporary society, his approach here makes it seem the ultimate trap.