‘Furioso’ an Acrobatic Marvel but No Masterpiece

Harnessed around their waists to thick overhead suspension cables, four women in loose velvet gowns soar above the stage in wide arcs, twisting their bodies upward and downward inside the harnesses with spectacular physical freedom but clawing the air as if releasing some long-stifled agony. Welcome to the dead-serious acrobatic movement-theater of Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard: feminism on the ropes.

Brilliant at creating poetic body sculpture and, even more, at defining dynamic energy states, Tankard belongs less to the multidisciplinary dance-theater genre (though she joined the Pina Bausch company for six years) than to such prominent all-dance neo-Expressionists as Canada’s Edouard Lock and France’s Angelin Preljocaj. All explore sexual politics through dark, sensual visions and all have so much trouble sustaining those visions that they must rely, body and soul, on high-risk virtuosity from their dancers.

In the engrossing, uneven “Furioso,” which Tankard’s 10-member Australian Dance Theatre presented Friday at UCLA, groups swung out over the Royce Hall audience in daring gymnastic formations--and even climbed the walls of Regis Lansac’s set for a final coup de thea^tre. Her dancers also brought limitless stamina to the same repetitive, increasingly predictable dance loops that Lock and Preljocaj develop to turn isolated movement ideas into phrases and then into extended sequences of ensemble motion.

Used throughout her hourlong piece, Tankard’s loop sequences incorporated such ploys as bringing more dancers into the pattern with each repetition, tightening the pattern spatially and accelerating the pace--but to no avail. All that these plodding structuralist interludes achieved was breathing space for the dancers before the next athletic astonishment: wild bodysurfing across the stage floor, perhaps, or more rope dancing or maybe an endless jumping spree. Ultimately, the astonishments overwhelmed her theme, making “Furioso” memorable primarily as spectacle and showpiece.

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To her credit, Tankard’s cast spent the first third of “Furioso” floor bound, carefully establishing the male of the species as aggressive but impermanent and the female as passive but enduring. Recordings of Arvo Part’s “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old” and Henryk Gorecki’s “Quasi Una Fantasia” helped establish the meditative and anguished moods of the piece, with Elliot Sharp’s “Digital” supplying the bursts of machine-gun percussion, punctuating and energizing it.

Against a backdrop the color of corroded steel, the women suffered endless competitive assaults during the opening section, remaining stoic against the storm of violence, absorbing and eventually outlasting it. The men, meanwhile, crumpled into lonely self-pity, embraced imaginary partners and, once the cables descended, elevated the women, becoming their devoted servants in the harness dances.

Clearly the men’s contrasting acts of worship and abuse represented the two extremes of the old, poisonous Madonna-versus-whore mind-set, but Tankard’s sense of compassion proved as illuminating as her ability to create airborne action paintings. Yes, she doomed the men with a passage just before the end in which they burned themselves out through one last winner-take-all race to nowhere. But before that, she defined their longings sympathetically through images of them encircling the women’s feet, hanging on them like children or pets, while everyone swung slowly through the air on the cables.

In a few seconds, these wondrous sculptural images outweighed all the obvious bad-boy playacting assigned the men elsewhere in the piece, and established the women’s primacy with no need for further dramatization. But then, what next? How to continue? With creative solos that might deepen the audience’s involvement, perhaps, or inventive formal movement development.

Unfortunately Tankard proved weakest at that kind of conventional dance expression. In 1993, when “Furioso” was created, she could only come up with more loops, more special effects, more displays of the company’s fearless, tireless dedication. So “Furioso” ended up masterly as a vehicle, but nowhere near a masterpiece.

With Shaun Parker deserving pride-of-place because of his fierce, impossibly fast rope solo, the heroes of the night included Justine Cooper, Steven McTaggart, Sarah-Jayne Howard, Ryan Lowe, Michelle Ryan, Fifienne Luvuma, Peter Sears, Mia Mason and Angelo Tsakalos. No further performances are scheduled.