SINGULAR PLEASURES 4

Another column from the series first published in The Age in the dying years of the 20th century

The Bodyspace International Dance Festival

April In Berlin: The Beryl Beavis Dance Company

"Dance" is a multivalent categorisation, incorporating (as it must) a heterogeneous plethora of expressive modes. This multiplicity encompasses everything from classical ballet to folk-dance, and informs various hybrid idioms such as butoh and physical theatre. This diversity has not been lost on the curators of the Bodyspace International Dance Festival, the very title of which embodies the commonality underpinning the 27 items on the programme. The link between the sublime stylization of a 17th century gavotte and the horror of jazz ballet is the dialogue between body and space.

In deconstructing this rich series of colloquies, it is necessary to take cultural specificity into account. While bodily movement is in itself a lingua franca, the Bodyspace programme presents what amounts to a series of dialects, many with their own peculiar syntax. This is startlingly manifest in Coma, a solo piece by Baudouin Spigge of Belgium. Here, Spigge accomplishes two extraordinary achievements: he condenses space to a singularity and distorts the observer's perception of time, both by the deceptively simple expedient of lying utterly still for the duration of the performance. What is 7 and a half minutes of ordinal, "real" time becomes a de facto eternity in which Spigge playfully manipulates our anticipations.

In contrast to Spigge's controlled immobility, The Byelarus Experimental Dance Theatre's Five Lone Yachtsmen Perish From Thirst is a potent study in fluid freneticism. Here too we find a dual discourse: the isolation of the yachtsmen and the individual expressions of their terminal delirium, admirably expressed with a suite of eloquent contortions.

With a programme as comprehensive as Bodyspace, it is impossible to discuss all the works, but several deserve at least some mention. Pubis, from Arizona State University, reduce the dialectic between gravity and the body to its bare essentials in Plummet: one by one, the 15 performers fall onto the stage from a 8 metre tower, allowing impact forces to determine their final positions and acknowledging randomness with the resulting splay of limbs. Staubsaugertanz (Vacuum-cleaner Dance) is a striking piece of post-industrial butoh by The Schlamm Group from Zurich. It is unusual to associate Luxembourg with eroticism, but Les Financiers de Benelux inject a frank carnality into a medley of Luxembourgeois village dances

Naturally, Bodyspace features indigenous dance, but from an unlikely source. The Port Stanley Corps de Ballet presents Hack Away Lads, a traditional sheep-crutching dance from the Falkland Islands, with bagpipe accompaniment that reflects the Scottish heritage of many of the islanders. While this piece could easily be prosaic, it is rendered vivid by the rhythmic squelching of the performers' gumboots.

The Beryl Beavis Dance Company has many ground-breaking works to its credit, but with April in Berlin, Beavis has clearly lost her way. Even the skill of Dutch choreographer Jaap Kakkers founders against the subject matter - the last days of the Third Reich. The venue, a disused electricity substation, recreates the claustrophobic desolation of the Fuhrerbunker convincingly, and the professionalism of the dancers is unquestioned, but the content does not lend itself to the treatment Beavis has given it. Whether the characters should elicit the viewer's sympathy or not is not the question. With shimmying SS guards and the Goebbels family portrayed as the Von Trapps from The Sound of Music, the only possible reaction is derision. The final suicidal pas de deux by Colin Munt (Hitler) and Denise Povey (Eva Braun) is one of the most questionable moments in modern dance, and to see a dancer of Lena Lingstrad's calibre cast in the role of Blondi, the Hitlers' pet Alsatian, is both ludicrous and pitiable.