Marin’s Ode to Individuality

There’s no point in reviewing Maguy Marin’s “Points de Fuite,” a puzzling, complex, 80-minute postmodern abstraction performed at UCLA on Friday by her 10-dancer Compagnie Maguy Marin.

Obsessed with fugal structures and individual action within a group, the piece continually recycles a spoken text by poet Charles Peguy that makes any criticism pointless by insisting that “the stock of ideas is exhausted,” and “everything has been said....”

“For 6,000 years, others have said it before you or haven’t said it or were able to or could have said it,” one dancer after another declares. So it’s irrelevant to point out that “Points de Fuite” co-opts movement ideas and processes developed more than a quarter century ago by American postmodernists--innovations recently revisited on this same Royce Hall stage by Mikhail Baryshnikov and his White Oak Dance Project.

“Ideas are cadavers,” Peguy and Marin’s dancers emphasize, and, by implication, the future of human culture and choreography is “purely a matter of management.”

In “Points de Fuite,” management begins with dancers in street clothes executing various structural ploys on a bare stage, each of them from time to time moving to a microphone for text recitations and to the assortment of electric guitars and drums at the left to play a texture-dominated but often assaultive score by Denis Mariotte.

Running in circles, the dancers introduce new motifs with each lap: lifts, falls, pulling someone back. Other sequences develop into chains of gestural acts (heads being shoved down) or gymnastic feats (women hurled from a moving cluster of bodies) or shifts of position (dancers flinching and twisting as they lie in a line on the floor).

Ulises Alvarez usually initiates the segments, and at one point his leadership turns nasty, with Marin having him shove people around in a weird passage of fugal abuse.

There are no conventional dance steps, and Marin has said that the piece shuns virtuosity. But a sequence of hopping moves, with the dancers nearly lying down on their sides but propelling themselves on their right knees and palms, looks impressive. And their stamina alone seems virtuosic.

But it’s a trap to describe what happens in “Points de Fuite” because we hear, over and over, that the only important issue is the human element, “what comes from you.” The first text serves as a warning: “Don’t talk to me about what you are saying.... I’m asking you how you are saying it.” So the core of the piece is supposedly the interaction among dancers, the way each moment of physical contact becomes an intense relationship event for the participants.

Besides choreographing intimate face-to-face lifts that dramatize her dancers’ closeness as an ensemble, Marin ritualizes their self-examination and even provides a string of solos that shows them alternately befuddled, eccentric, inquisitive (“Are you feeling alive?”) or likable. And she brings in 10 more individuals drawn from the local community as surrogates for the rest of us.

In this sense, the work serves as a metaphor for the set structures of our lives: the inescapable repetitions of the daily grind. How we affirm and deepen our individuality within those structures is what interests Marin most: how intently Marcelo Sepulveda balances on a rock, for instance, and how tenderly Ennio Sammarco rescues him from that precarious task.

“Points de Fuite” isn’t improvised, however, and when Alvarez turns into a control freak or Thierry Partaud ends a group run by becoming too much of a jock and disrupting the formation, we feel Marin manipulating her dancers into roles: characters who may or may not be true to life.

Based in Rilleux-la-Pape, near Lyon, Marin is best known locally for vivid theatrical concepts: her ghostly evocation of characters from plays by Samuel Beckett (“May B”), a divertissement for dancers in bodysuits that made them look grotesquely fat--and naked (“Grossland”)--and, most of all, a “Cinderella” set in a giant dollhouse. A profound sense of estrangement has colored all these works, including a contemporary reinterpretation of “Coppelia,” seen locally only on cable.

Deliberately stark and unadorned, “Pointes de Fuite” is not the first abstraction by Marin on our stages, but its declaration that idea-based human achievement has reached a dead-end is a peculiar stance indeed for a choreographer who has always found ideas about staging dance more compelling than the act of dancing.

Moreover, even her humanism here may well represent just another staging ploy: reality-based dance in which company members garnish and freshen dry movement etudes by playacting her fictionalizations of them.

If so, the result qualifies as “a matter of management that is more or less well organized,” in Peguy’s words, but is still profoundly estranged from the human individuality that it tries to celebrate.

Besides the dancers mentioned, the company includes Preciosa Gil, Isaias Jauregui, Sylvie Pabiot, Livia Patrizi, Cathy Polo and Brigitte Valverde.