The Human Touch

The meditative dance poems of Jiri Kylian yield their possible meanings slowly, as a collaboration between choreographer and viewer. So the return of his magnificent Nederlands Dans Theater main company, in works seen during the last decade at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, allows local audiences another opportunity to savor complex expressions of a uniquely challenging yet life-affirming worldview.

At the Wiltern Theatre on Thursday, Kylian’s somber “No More Play” (1988, to music by Webern) and his sardonic “Petite Mort” (1991, to Mozart piano concerti) filled the stage with antique black and gray ball gowns that moved under their own power: symbols of a traditional, decrepit European culture still capable of oppressing individual identity.

These unyielding garments also came to represent imprisonment for those who briefly wore them--and the sense of confinement extended to the ever-shifting, geometric shafts of light designed by Joop Caboort in which the dancing of “No More Play” took place.

Dance structure became another way of abstracting oppression, showing individuals sublimated to a rigid process. The opening of “No More Play,” for instance, divided the five-member cast into a duo (facing front on the left half of the stage) versus a trio (dancing in profile on the right half), each isolated in Caboort’s sharply delineated rectangles of light.

Fencing foils in “Petite Mort” added another symbol of antique Euro-culture, though their manipulation here included such unorthodox maneuvers as the men bending them in hoops around the women’s necks. Elsewhere, the men pinned the women to the floor and hovered over them, arms spread wide as if we were watching carnivorous birds swooping down on their prey.

Kylian’s emphasis on gymnastic body sculpture connected these works to the very different “Bella Figura” (1995), a masterwork set to music by a constellation of Baroque composers and dedicated to showing his dancers (and, by implication, everyone) at their most beautiful and humane.

From the beginning--in which two nude effigies hung overhead in glass cases--to the four overlapping lyric duets of the finale, this idealized portrait of the human body in action grew increasingly rhapsodic, with an elaborate array of moving curtains sometimes telescoping down to the size of a small window and at other moments zooming out to wide letterbox format.

The seminude central section (the nine-member cast bare to the waist in crimson skirts) emphasized sheer physical splendor but, throughout, the choreography cherished human eccentricity as much as any other quality, building motifs out of quirky physical idiosyncrasies--most notably an irrepressible shoulder twitch.

When dancing topless, the cast softened that twitch into a sensual pulse, but even when re-clothed for the finale duets, they made it seem an artifact of our indomitable, bone-deep individuality. Indeed, it proved the last thing Kylian showed us as the lights faded.

However, the ultimate celebration of eccentricity on Thursday came from British choreographer Paul Lightfoot in “Start to Finish” (1996), which used another assortment of Baroque music to support a cornucopia of oddities that began with Jorma Elo jabbering in Finnish and finished with him watching “Nosferatu” on television, while bald Stefan Zeromski rose from the grave (a.k.a. the orchestra pit) to stalk Elo’s companion, Sol Leon.

In between came a demonstration that once people step out of line, you’re never gonna get them back--so better let them solo, especially when you’ve got one of the world’s great companies at your disposal. Lightfoot may even have parodied Kylian’s fluid stagecraft in sequences featuring descending panels of illuminated arrows that pointed at the dancers below. But his own loose-limbed, quasi-anarchic style owed nothing to Kylian’s soulful amalgam of ballet and modern dance.

Kylian is no longer artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (he stepped down to “artistic advisor/resident choreographer” in 1999 at age 57), but the company remains a monument to the uncompromising contemporary expression that he has brought to it for the past 28 years. We are indeed lucky to see it again at such an exciting level of mastery.

* Nederlands Dans Theater ends its run tonight at 8 at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. $30-$60. (310) 825-2101.