‘Blush’: Not a dance for just anyone

France and Belgium loved it. Britain hated it.

“Lively and strong, sensual and explosive, wild and elegant,” said the French newspaper Le Soir.

“The performance swarms with invention, alternating the gentleness of love and the sorrow of impossible lovers, with couples, head against head, in love-fights,” raved Belgium’s La Libre.

On the other hand, “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the British public’s appetite for adolescent humor,” sniffed the London Sunday Telegraph.

The piece, one West Briton newspaper critic wrote, was born of an “often cluttered and downright dirty imagination.”

The work in question -- “Blush,” by Belgian choreographer and two-time Bessie Award-winner Wim Vandekeybus -- opens with a woman straddling a sleeping actor and bringing herself to sexual climax.

It goes on to have a dancer ask members of the audience provocative questions about their sex lives.

Aptly named, “Blush” will receive its Los Angeles premiere Friday and Saturday at Royce Hall as part of the UCLA Live series.

“I never read critics. Not at all,” Vandekeybus said with a laugh during a recent phone interview from his studios in Belgium.

“The first thing you must realize, I don’t come from a dance education. I come more from cinema and photography. I performed, myself, 18 years ago, then made my own group” -- Ultima Vez. “I wanted to see the necessity of movement, rather than its beauty. I still do things in this way. I never let people [just] dance. I need a reason where movement comes from. It has always a theatrical or emotional background.”

“Blush” puts 10 live dancers, including Vandekeybus, in front of filmed sequences projected on a screen. Occasionally a dancer dives under the screen, only to reappear a split second later on film.

“Blush” also features a rock soundtrack created for it by Denver-based singer-songwriter David Eugene Edwards, of Woven Hand and 16 Horsepower.

Although the opening scene, the general nudity and the frank language riled British critics, almost everyone has admired the beauty and wonder of those moments when live dancers disappear beneath the screen, then emerge upon it.

“The timing for that has to be very precise,” the choreographer said. “It’s a big challenge.

“But that’s not the most difficult thing now. As I work with things revealing a lot of emotion and the inner space of the person, the most difficult thing is to continuously make it fresh.

“If theater is false, if the theatrical part is really wrong and I cannot really believe it, then you lose for half an hour the attention of the public. For half an hour, they don’t forgive you.”

*

-- Chris Pasles