La La Last Night at BAM

Edouard Lock reclaims ballet for the 21st century. My introduction to the company, La La La Human Steps, was at BAM previously where I was dazzled by the speed and mesmerizing vitality of Amelia -- this was ballet unlike anything I'd ever seen -- the visceral rush of vertigo and elation. This time, I was prepared, not just to experience but also to look more carefully. Last night's production, Amjad, provides an ideal opportunity for this analysis. A collaborative fusion of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, with its clear references to both choreographic and musical leitmotifs of the original 19th century ballets, it creates a context for viewing Lock's deconstructed and reworked ballet vocabulary. The dancers' arms, a willful and highly charged nod to swans of the past, the echappes passes from the dance of the cygnets, and the calm stately balances on pointe, conjuring images of the Rose Adagio, are a few of the direct references to the past.

With his collaborators, the dancers, composers, musicians and designers (video projections of pearls and overgrown vines come and go throughout the piece), Lock has created what seems to be a resetting of the familiar tales of good vs. evil in what really feels like a modern day chamber piece. There's something incredibly intimate in the darkness, with the musicians onstage, barely seen but vividly present in the music's surge of painterly sound, deep and lush, at times grating and otherworldly. This setting is not a book illustration of murky lakes, violent swans, and the moral perils of good vs. evil. It is a postmodern setting of light and sound and movement in which the dancers are not symbols or characters come to life, they are dancers engaged in the pursuit of a disciplined movement form that evokes a time and place without needing to literally recreate it.

One of the first things that stands out in the work, you love it or hate it, is the speed of the movement. The speed. An inexplicable tour de force of rapidity that, but for the fact that we're watching actual human beings execute it, seems humanly impossible. But it's not merely the speed, it's the clarity of motion that really resonates and takes this work beyond a trick or gimmick. For these dancers it seems to be a fundamental form of communication.

Like flying particles of split atoms, the dancers and their bodies seem propelled and constantly redirected and realigned in split seconds. In order to negotiate this new relationship to gravitational forces, they have to let go of comfortable dancerly habits that a modern audience identifies with virtuosity. In this mode, form follows function: leg extensions are rarely above the hip, the working foot is in coupe (against the ankle) rather than passe (at the knee) in pirouettes, arms are lowered in a chaine turn resembling the position used in the 18th century French noble style. Yet the movement develops and soars in its ingenuity and discovery.

At BAM's Gala dinner after the performance, I had the chance to talk to Edouard Lock who spoke about the experience of seeing; by compressing time you clarify perception -- because they're closer together in time, the mind's eye retains the image of the previous movement while it's taking in the new one. This idea reminds me of Boccioni's famous sculpture "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space", (the one of a man walking forward with a sort of drape of curving forms following him); you perceive the present and the trailing memory of the past simultaneously.

Ironically, in its modernism, this makes a case for the justification of the pointe shoe in postmodern dance. The pointe shoe has a place here as a highly evolved dancer's tool -- beginning in the 19th century when Marie Taglioni rose on her toes to create the feeling of romantic flight; Balanchine's dancers wore them as comfortable extensions of themselves; Twyla Tharp democratized the pointe shoe by using it alongside sneakers and jazz shoes; and now they are aesthetic instruments used by dancers to explore the compression of time and space and human movement -- highly effective pivot points -- the smaller surface area allowing for less friction and thus greater speed and spatial agility.

Some reviewers have complained that Amjad's approach is no longer "fresh", that there is too much repetition and the darkness is bleak. To me, this production looks back to the source, the original brothers Grimm, and reveals the warnings, sexual constraint and eery nightmarish qualities that pervade our classic fairy tales. The choreographer uses a postmodern reworked classical vocabulary to tell the tale, and in this way, reclaims ballet for the 21st century.

Performances continue at BAM through November 15th.