sarma

We know, don't we, that the dancers in the Louis Falco Company are all beautiful -that they have shapely bodies and movie faces? We know, too, that they're marvelous dancers. They stretch the dancing from the centers of their bodies and fling it out into space -often not any real or imagined place, but a frightening void. They stare at each other, or talk, or flop onto each other; yet their dancing -whether it is a Dionysiac frenzy of joy or a cosmic yowl of despair- seems unfocused. Their huge gestures, their blazing intensity never gets them anywhere. The lavishness with which they expend their energy can make you impatient as well as thrill you.

The more dances I see by Falco and Jennifer Muller (also one of the company's associate directors), the more I feel them to be concerned with human desperation. But Falco in works like "Sleepers", "Soap Opera", "Avenue", "Two Penny Portrait"; Muller in "Nostalgia", "Biography", and parts of her "Tub" don't deal with humanity as a whole, nor with concrete disasters like hunger or death. They explore the forms desperation takes in restless, chic society. They turn sex and the quest for identity into games -pleasant and unpleasant; characters in these dances often express the states of their souls through the clothes they put on or take off.

The characters are obsessed with their childhoods. They talk about them, move with the uncivilized violence of children. They may cuddle teddy bears ("Two Penny Portrait") or need to be rocked to sleep ("Sleepers"). Sometimes they use sex as a form of thumbsucking -something to snuggle into when they're too tired to do anything else.

Once, I thought I learned quite a lot about Juan Antonio from a dance called "Day of the Dead" which Erin Martin made with him and about him. But in Falco/Muller dramatic works, although the dancers call each other Louis, Jennifer, Juan, Georgiana, Matthew, Mary Jane, I have never learned from any of these dances how Louis or Jennifer or Juan or Georgiana or Matthew or Mary Jane feel about anything outside themselves. I've learned their names and a few statistics, and I've learned that they have the same basic greedy drives we all have, but I don't know specifically what they're like. In "Sleepers", Falco and Antonio often alternate in one of the roles; only the names and the inflections change. I didn't see Falco's latest work, and I'm sorry because it sounded interesting. I guess I just don't like to watch such enormously gifted people going around and around in the same track.

In Muller's "Biography", the choreographer and Mary Jane Eisenberg present us with an identity crisis. While their taped voices recite their vital statistics -which occasionally coincide- the two dance stormily alike. They're wearing trendy white suits, black boots, skullcaps. As the dance progresses, Muller tries to break away: "Mary Jane, we are not alike!" Eisenberg disagrees, hangs on as if her only hope of identity lay in staying with Muller. Taped memories of childhood hint at parental pressures to conform. At the end, the two look disproportionately shocked when Muller slowly removes their skullcaps to reveal that one has straight hair, and one has curls. What a puzzle. I don't for a single moment believe those two women are alike, any more than I'd believe that a variation in hair style could make them different. Even in the adolescent world of copycat looks, individuality is predicated on more complex matters. It moves me to see Eisenberg inch her leg a triumphant fraction higher than Muller's: she's found out what she has to do to hold her own on a stage full of superstars. Neither of the Falco company choreographers seems to want to deal with that specific kind of struggle.

Although Falco's "Two Penny Portrait" is one of the most decadent dances he's made, it's also one of the most vivid and succinct. In this duet, he was able, for the most part, to resist pouring out a virtuosic flood of dancing; he lets us see the characters stopping, wondering, changing their minds. He and Georgiana Holmes are blown and tumbled onto a stage littered with trashcans. He's wearing the pants to a tux; she has on what might be a bridesmaid's outfit, and she's carrying a teddy bear. They stagger about, colliding occasionally. She hangs perilously over his back, and he doesn't even know she is there. Finally they recognize each other -or, at least, acknowledge each other as ports in a possible storm- and clomp around gleefully together. But they're so un-alive to reality that they don't even notice when they slip from each others' embraces, any more than they notice the garbage or the traffic noises. Scott and Zelda with the polish gone -reduced to their infantile, drunken rock-bottoms.

Muller's new "Speeds" gives the company a chance to show off its classy dancing with nothing in mind but exuberance and changes of speed. Some of it is lovely: a long line of dancers just walking; Eisenberg and Diamond very slowly folding around each other while a fast-dancing group swings and bounces beside them. (This is one of the few times Muller shows two speeds at once.) The dancers shout "Change!" now and then, and that's nice too -especially when the commands produce a change you can immediately perceive. It's exhilarating to see the Falco dancers just dance, as an alternative to playing those glamorous, dissatisfied people who bear their names.