On Dance

...Still, the works presented were not without interest...

...Although a final procession owes something to Fellini's 8 1/2 the conclusion is pure Monk and provides a touching key to the evening...

...JL^rown has written that audiences have learned from the new dance that they need not be entertained at concerts...

...One long sequence, for instance, begins and ends with a young river goddess walking two sphinxlike creatures wearing sunglasses...

...Still, her works lack the slick theatricality of Robert Wilson's, to which they have sometimes been likened, and where his are surrealistic hers are sprawling...

...They face each other in a courtly bow and melt into a ballroom dance...

...Chacon" ("Chacon...

...The work of these three women is free of the limits of traditional theater space, of the hierarchical placement of dancers on the stage...

...In "Paris" ("Paris, France—population 8,653,000," a program note helpfully informs us), Monk and Chong stroll about a darkened stage side-by-side, harmonizing to a plaintive, lulling reiterated sequence of notes played by a pianist...

...The cup was made of porcelain," she says quietly...

...despite some moments of startling visual imagery, too often it simply looks silly...

...Two of the happiest inventions are the excerpts from "Sticks," where five dancers hold long poles in a horizontal line close to the ground while maneuvering their bodies around it, and from a "Spanish Dance," where five women dance into each other one by one, hips and arms waving, until their bodies jam together in a comic-seductive conga line...

...at its worst, it can become a kind of half-hearted artistic navel-gazing...

...As it unfolds, company member Lee Nagrin paints a mural of a dry Southwestern mesa landscape across the back of the performance space...

...The three choreographers sprang up some 15 years ago in the wake of the descendants of pioneers like Martha Graham, and were involved at that time in the free-wheeling, seminal Judson Dance Theater at Washington Square...

...An obese hostess hides behind a screen to intone such lessons as "Un elephant e'est un animal," and later leads the cast in several rousing verses of Purcell's "Man is for the Woman Made...

...Taken together, the evenings offered a good illustration of the state of modern dance's third generation...

...Mosaic," created in memory of the painter Moses Soyer (who died while working on Neville's portrait), begins with three women, as still as slender monoliths, sharing a clear stage with a free-hanging, empty picture frame...

...Meredith Monk's productions over the last five or six years have been variously described as opera, dance and theater...

...another may sink slowly to the floor...

...While all three designations are apt...

...The piece, a selection of excerpts from other dances, all with the common—if not always apparent—theme of forming and reforming queues, has more than its share of abstruse moments...

...Venice/Milan" ("Venice, Italy —population in 1450 149,000"), here given its New York premiere, is a rich weave of tableaux...

...The dance itself is not much help...

...Then, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Lepercq Space, Trisha Brown and her troupe played their wittily abstract movement games...

...In "Oracles," Neville's most accessible piece, the choreographer strikes a perfect balance between her ratified sculptures and good, meaty dance...

...Early in March, Meredith Monk presented one of her circuses of the unconscious at the Roundabout Theater's Dance Umbrella Festival...

...In the course of the production Monk, her collaborator Ping Chong, and The House, a company of 24 actor-dancers and musicians, spilled out across the floor impersonating solitary lunam-bulists, gondoliers, countesses, and farmers...

...It was well used...

...The three late-winter concerts demonstrated that even if they have eschewed such theatrical trappings as costumes, scenery and props, these new choreographers share a sensitivity to lighting...

...Her program of three long pieces explored an Eastern conception of the passage of time, as well as her concern with the sculptural aspects of dance...

...Our buried past is part of our immediate present, and Monk has used its fragments to recreate dreams dreamt in deepest slumber...

...Trisha Brown once referred to herself as a bricklayer with a sense of humor...

...The performers, usually dressed in ordinary clothing, often look downright scruffy...

...The evenings showed, too, that the new dance is an art form where parts are as important as the whole...

...But a dance for two women in water-sprite tatters skilfully creates the dappled, languorous effect of a slow-moving stream, and the closing image—the blue-robed goddess pushing herself across the stage floor, cradled between her sphynxes—is memorable...

...True as that observation may be, Phoebe Neville was in danger of completely losing the interest of her viewers at the Manhattan School of Music...

...In contrast, composer Carole Weber's Monk-like warbles and batting about of household utensils at the side of the stage almost sank the premiere of Neville's "Tigris...

...To a chorus of three women who stand and sit like classical columns and move as if hinged at the joints, Neville herself performs an oracular dance that is alternately gnomic and birdlike, and always frightening: One has the feeling that some unidentifiable creature has crawled up from another world to twist and stretch atop its wooden cube...

...much of their movement is inspired by everyday activities and gestures, rather than by some meticulously developed technical idiom...

...Previous pieces explored the immediate environment —as dancers walked along walls or cued each other from Manhattan rooftops—but Brown's current efforts are made of movement that is expressive of nothing besides itself...

...At its best, such freedom can be exhilarating...

...Thus the four dancers on stage moved very little, their gestures generally being restricted to an occasional spreading of the arms or shifting of the head...

...Paris Chacon/Venice/Milan, the three-act travelogue she presented at the Roundabout, was shapeless, but it had the irrational reasonableness of a dream...

...Finally, the Phoebe Neville Dance Company turned the auditorium stage at the Manhattan School of Music into a bleak de Chirico plain...

...At times, in fact, they seem to have just come off the street...

...Monk herself composes the purposefully monotonous piano scores and wailing chants...

...In one segment, for example, four dancers respond to sudden impromptu commands to reverse, repeat or complete three given phrases...

...The pieces they dance in—unlike ballet and even the more traditional forms of modern dance—give few cues to the audience...

...And in a very funny gloss on medieval fabliaux, vividly dressed sinners are pointed at and called away by a beckoning red hand...

...Beverly Emmons' design for Monk, Edward Effron's for Brown and Nicholas Wolff Lyndon's for Neville were all exemplary...

...Unfortunately, Brown's organizing principles are often too esoteric for the layman, as was demonstrated by her Line Up at the Brooklyn Academy...

...One woman—silhouetted or bathed in soft light—may turn very slightly on the central axis of her torso...

...She concludes by announcing the date of the performance...

...Indeed, her dances appear to consist of simple phrases, developed through accretion of related phrases by chance or intention, skewed repetition or what the choreographer calls structured improvisation...

...Some of Line Up is more successful, though...

...After this fractures into disjointed movement the two pause, weeping, at a doorway in the rear of the stage...

...A gondolier collapses in a coughing spasm...

...Monk, Brown and Neville's parts may be erratic, but at times they approach brilliance...

...The piece is an exploration of shapes poised in delicately arranged suspension and almost interacting...

...As is usually the case with Brown, the choreography is too spare and businesslike to yield as much beauty as the almost mathematical precision of its design...

...Nagrin walks front and, seemingly reciting from a newspaper, tells of finding shards of a blue-and-white cup in a cave...

...The dance suddenly ends when Neville, darting behind the frame, extends her face and a hand through it in living and very poignant portraiture...

...One of the most interesting experimentalists working today, Neville nevertheless seems to be going through a refining process that has flattened out her dances...

...The solo is striking evidence of Neville's dark genius...

...Mededith Monk's doodling piano score for "Mosaic" provides almost incidental background noise...

...Monk, Brown and Neville each possess very distinctive styles, but they also have a great deal in common...

...Monk's innate sense of drama is probably her most important quality...

...They have since become seasoned experimentalists, a breed that may not have long to live—especially judging by the current crop of bland abstractionists...

...New Mexico—population 84") suggests a fragmentary story of a farm woman subject to fits, a hirsute mad doctor, and a chorus of peculiar local characters...

...Her choreography is stylish, never stylized, and capable of a luminous playfulness...