Pas de Ghoul

A SICK LITTLE girl in a woman's body, Empress Phylissa doesn't know her powers. Drooling, a finger hooked over her lower lip, the beauty never guesses that her bedroom's an asylum. She makes you wrench, as do all the characters in The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre's The Menagerie of Empress Phylissa performed last week at the Loeb.

Director Henryk Tomaszewski has turned a traditional ballet scenario--a young princess looking over various suitors in order to choose a husband--into a grotesque, surrealistic fantasy. All Phylissa's wooers first enter gallantly, then run scared as her lust switches on. Little Napoleon, terror-struck, stabs himself in the groin. Max-Pipifax makes it further, to bed with the empress, only to be eaten by her highness--who proceeds to throw up on his flesh. The two are hardly men, nor are the rabble of other lewd cavaliers, truly Phylissa's menagerie of beasts.

The last scene, the "consummation of love", according to program notes, brings together a rabble of Hell's Angels on bikes (had Tomaszewski seen "Easy Rider?") with the empress's ladies--and gentlemen-in-waiting. A robot sputters on stage: can a machine be even more black than the preceding parade of frenetic suitors? At the end Phylissa stares with one eye down an inverted clarion; with the other becoming a wild, monstrous orb she eclipses the entire stage. The stage blacks out. The image of that disembodied eye stays with you, as does the memory of men cut from themselves.

It's revolting theater--unreality becoming superreal--in the tradition of Franz Wedekind, early twentieth-century dramatist of the grotesque whose "The Queen from New Fun Land" inspired the ballet. Perhaps another influence is Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud's heir, whose company is based, along with The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre, in Wroclaw, Poland.

EUROPEAN DANCE, however experimental (and The Polish Mime Ballet certainly is), tends to remain rooted in the art of theater. American dance, on the other hand, is often highly conceptual and not at all dramatic, a fact demonstrated by The Oberlin Dance Collective last week at the Radcliffe gym.

Brenda Way--like most of the collective, both choreographer and dancer--is able to diagram neatly her dances based on "various mathematical systems." Displayed at the concert, her instructions for one dance read something as follows: dancer A does event #1 in a specified time interval; dancer B repeats event #1, adds event #2 and executes the sequence #1 & #2 in the same specified time interval; dancer performs events #1 & #2 & #3 in the same specified...and so on. An entire issue of The Drama Review recently was devoted to similar schemata, labeled "post-modern dance" by the editor.

Although cast in the genre's typically repetitive structure, "Format VI," one of Brenda Way's two works, ironically undercuts the idea of mathematical/conceptual/schematized dance. Six dancers begin standing in formation upstage. Walking forward as a line, they crouch nearer and nearer to the floor until lying belly-down. Pusing themselves backwards to standing, the group returns to its first formation. After several rounds slight irregularities in the pattern crop up: one dancer fixes her hair, another brushes something off her leg, yet another glances quickly at the ceiling. Several rounds later members of the collective blurt out word associations with the "post-modern" aesthetic: "symmetry...precision...logic...formalism." All the while the extraordinarily funny dismembering of the repititive pattern continues.

CAROL DOUGLAS also uses repetition to structure "You Again." Working her way downstage, she repeats one sequence for the entire piece. Her partner, Eric Barsness, at first looks on without reacting, later comes to circle about her, holding the backs of her bent thighs, hovering over her glides, Douglas acknowledging him not in the slightest. As she executes her last turn, she catches Barsness in her grasp--still oblivious to his presence.

Margot Crosman's "Half-Drawn" comes closer than the other pieces to the idiom of the theater. "Half-Drawn" begins with four near-nude women in a room. Three don party shoes and climb under a big quilt; the fourth dresses herself in a long black sheath and black gloves, then opens the door for a man in a tux. No more said.

Remaining pieces, Kimi Okada's tap dance "Hit or Miss" and Pam Quinn's "A Coup from the Blues," return to beat and music and the exuberant physicality of dance. Yet, set against the style of The Polish Mime Ballet Theater, these two works preserve an American earnestness, steering clear of overmuch theatricality--or sensuality.