When the Power Fails

Nearly a decade ago in the Sahara, just outside Timbuktu, I saw dances by the nomadic Tuareg people--the women in black, the men in deep indigo with turbans that covered their faces except for their eyes.

A one-legged youth kept joining these dances, always with greater energy and bravado than everyone else. If the others danced for their own pleasure, he seemed propelled by another agenda--not, I think, to solicit sympathy, but to show that he belonged, to stay in the game.

In world dance, physical prowess defines an individual’s place in a specific culture, the absorption of its value systems and its ideals of manhood or womanhood. Similarly, in much of European and American concert dance, prowess usually reflects our obsession with youth and fitness, in a heightened and celebratory form.

But as important as prowess is in dance, there is a long tradition of dramatizing its breakdown or destruction as a potent form of movement communication.

After all, the game eventually ends. While some concert dance forms can be performed with high proficiency in old age (notably tap), dancer prowess often erodes quickly and cruelly. Dance makers have long interpreted that loss metaphorically, depicting crises in human endurance or showing the skill that comes with dance training as a kind of mask, with the real dancer revealed only when it is stripped off.

Consider a quote from choreographer James Kudelka, now artistic director of National Ballet of Canada, who once said that he likes to exhaust his dancers early in a piece. “I believe the point of exhaustion is when people move the way they really move,” he said. “All the pretenses drop away and they really start seeing that it’s got to come from another place that’s much deeper inside.”

“A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths,” wrote modern dance icon Martha Graham in her autobiography. “The first, the physical, when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish.”

Although Graham never choreographed a work on that potent theme, you can find plenty of dances that depict the destruction of physical power.

In the ballet “Giselle,” for instance, the title character dances herself to death, her unwelcome suitor Hilarion soon succumbs to the same fate and her beloved Albrecht dances nearly to the point of extinction at the end of the ballet.

In such passages, the priorities of a veteran dancer summoning all his resources to perform a taxing role can neatly dovetail with the priorities of a choreographer showing a character attempting to survive a dangerous ordeal.

When Argentine ballet star Julio Bocca first danced Albrecht, he feigned exhaustion, he said recently. “But when I do a ballet, I use what I feel, and now, at 35, I’m really tired at that moment, and I show it.”

At 34, Ukrainian ballet star Vladimir Malakhov also says that Albrecht’s dancing leaves him “without energy because I give everything away and put all my energy [into Albrecht’s need] to survive somehow.” However, he, like Bocca, is careful about the shape he makes when Albrecht collapses, trying “to fall in a nice position, not with one leg to the left and one to the right.”

One of the 20th century’s earliest and most strangely personal depictions of prowess’ destruction comes in “The Rite of Spring,” a seminal one-act evocation of pagan Russia choreographed in 1913 by Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest virtuoso of his time.

In the finale, a village maiden is sacrificed by dancing herself to death in a twisted turned-in movement style that was wildly controversial at the work’s premiere. “Everything you do is pulled down into the earth,” according to Carole Valleskey, one of two dancers who alternated in the role when the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed the ballet in 1987.

“Dancing it, you really became exhausted and glad when the end was near,” she remembered recently. “But that feeling served the role really well because the character has to come to an acceptance of her fate, a sort of welcome that all the pain is going to be over.”

“When you read Nijinsky’s diaries, you understand that he saw himself as a sacrificial victim,” Valleskey said. “So I used to identify the role with Nijinsky himself. What he gave the dancer to do was something he was noted for: jumping. But instead of creating straightforward jumps, he made them inverted, awkward and desperate, leading to collapse.

“In that sense, Nijinsky showed himself being offered up as a jumping sacrifice. That role was him.”

The over-reliance on technique in all forms of concert dance inspired major backlashes in the last half of the 20th century: such anti-prowess idioms as postmodernism, with its initial emphasis on everyday movement and rejection of virtuosity, and radical Japanese butoh, with its focus on cycles of decay and regeneration alien to the concept of dance as hyper-athletic.

Emerging from the aftermath of World War II, butoh began in violent improvisation but soon grew so meditative, so anti-physical, so much about sensibility rather than skill, that its principal founder, Tatsumi Hijikata, once called it “the dance of the unmovables.”

“Tokyo people are now very busy talking of things like ‘Health Management’ and the ‘Utopia of Total Health,’ ” Hijikata wrote in 1985. “I, however, prefer to use the principle of ‘weakness’ as a gauge. I try to measure men on whether or not they are overly pliable and their lives too easy.”

So even though its performers have developed their own forms of prowess--such eerie disciplines as dancing with their eyes rolled so far up into their heads that only the whites remain visible--butoh remains focused on immersion in preconscious states of being, incremental processes of nature and earthy movement that resolutely denies or camouflages technical skill.

If Western-style “modern dance is like a thoroughbred racehorse,” wrote leading butoh choreographer and company leader Akaji Maro, “then butoh is like a camel. The difference is like the difference between diamonds and cork, though both have the same elemental base.”

When 50-year-old former ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov danced to his own amplified heartbeat in the plotless solo “HeartBeat: mb” four years ago, he brought to a wide audience a number of radical concepts of prowess long simmering in the avant-garde.

Some of the choreography reiterated prime postmodern commitments to everyday, non-dance movement--jogging, for instance. And performing the solo at his half-century mark inevitably made it teem with intimations of mortality, the ultimate end of prowess. The piece may have been created by Sara Rudner and Christopher Janney, but that role was unquestionably him.

Throughout, its documentary quality linked it to a realm of new work sometimes contemptuously dismissed as “victim art” but elsewhere praised for a kind of truth-telling that dance had never attempted.

In 1992, for example, contemporary Bay Area dancer-choreographer John Henry began creating a piece titled “Singing Myself a Lullaby” that charted the effect of AIDS on his ability to dance. Installments of the piece were performed through 1996, with Henry dancing as much as possible each time and videotaped segments supplying what he could no longer do. The final performances took place one month before his death.

A video documentary about the piece shows Henry seeming to age 20 years in one-fifth the time, fusing the two dancer-deaths that Martha Graham spoke about and making the process of staying in the game--and the examination of prowess--extend to the extinction of physical being.

Closer to home, the breakdown of prowess became a central issue last year in “Feeling for Open Spaces, None for Crowded Areas,” a self-portrait in dance by locally based postmodern pioneer Rudy Perez. Slowly feeling his way across the stage with a cane, the 72-year-old Perez used the limited movement options imposed on him by severe visual impairment to make deeply involving statements about isolation and the courage to go on.

“In that solo is a phase of my life that I needed to deal with and acknowledge,” Perez told The Times recently. “The path that I go through with the cane, the stumbling, the searching: All that reflected my desperation and need. It’s not only the business with my eyes, it’s also being older and trying to maintain the essence of the intuition and the passion and the drive that I’ve always had.

“I’m trying like the Titanic to stay afloat and go forward,” Perez said with a grim laugh. “I’m desperately wanting to adjust to whatever the changes will be. But it’s very hard when you really can’t see, and the future is going to be quite different from my past life.”

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.