sarma

If they weren't so young and beautiful, it would be gross," said the man in front of me at the Brooklyn Academy's spiffed-up Playhouse, while the guy behind me cheered and clapped and hugged his girl and asked her for the hundredth time if she didn't think this was the greatest. We had been watching "Ocellus", in which the four men of Pilobolus curl and stretch and slide and somersault slowly over each other until the entire four-man organism has rolled from one side of the stage up to the other. True, the company is spectacular. True too, it's possible to notice that occasionally, in order for the group to build some new and complicated structure, one man has to maneuver his face into another's crotch.

However, you rarely see them this way, because they don't want you to. Pilobolus is a highly flexible creature with many appendages -Robert Morgan Barnett, Alison Chase, Martha Clarke, Moses Pendleton, Michael Tracy, Jonathan Wolken. In its early works like "Ocellus" (1972), the company delighted simply in showing the entrancing inkblot shapes it could build, or in using kinetic humor to caricature societies or social habits (as in the 1971 "Walklyndon"). These days, I sense the company trying to use its gymnastic skills to give psychological or mythic dimensions to drama. The new "Untitled" is a bizarre nightmare depicted literally. ("I dreamed I was at a party, and all of a sudden I noticed a head under my skirt; I went on talking and tried to pretend nothing was wrong, but. . . ") Two shy, slightly awkward women in long white dresses and straw hats glide around the stage. All of a sudden they, like Alice, have shot up into the air to display long bare legs. (They are, of course, sitting on others' shoulders.) Unlike Alice, these pretty giantesses take no notice of their height; they reconnoiter like wading birds, settling down all white and fluffy and then rising up again onto these big-striding legs. Two men wearing identical boaters and summer whites, greet the huge damsels imperturbably and leave. But, as if their advent has aroused dangerous yearnings, the women sprout bulbous stomachs and give birth to naked men. In a beautiful sequence, the women dance with these dream lovers they have spawned; the men seem half asleep and are tenderly nudged into caresses. But then they are left -sort of in cold storage- lying on their backs with their knees bent and their heads held off the floor. The other men return and dance with the now normal-sized women, but not for long. The women again put the naked men under their skirts and shoot up (out of reach?). Things become even more bizarre: The clothed men fight; the women drop their skirts over them and leave them inert on the floor too; for a second, one woman attempts to catch the other woman in her skirt. The dance ends with the two women using the clothed men as rocking chairs and making polite chit-chatting gestures.

"Untitled" is a disturbing, often very poignant expression of sexual fantasies in a repressed turn-of-the-century society; it also makes some unpleasant remarks about woman -as-devourer-of-man. When Pilobolus uses its highly original style to "say something", it's clear that the messages it's best suited to deliver are humorous ones, or fantastic ones, or cruel ones. Since shape-making is such an important feature of Pilobolus's dances, not only does the dynamic tend to be always slow and controlled, but the stage picture is often a flat one -as if there were a single "best angle" for every position. In "Untitled", the company creates a deeper, less artificial space, but can't quite escape the fact that the style is founded upon a spectacular gimmick, and audiences respond to the virtuosity and the oddity more than to the ideas.