E-Mail This Article to a Friend American gothics Paul Taylor and Prometheus Dance BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

For his 50th-anniversary season, Paul Taylor revived two of his best, baddest dances. We got to see Big Bertha and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) together on May 21 at the Shubert Theatre. Company B replaced Big Bertha for the other two performances, the last of this season’s dance offerings on the Bank of America Celebrity Series. Taylor’s new Klezmerbluegrass ran all three nights.

Big Bertha (1970) and Sacre (1980) belong to Taylor’s devastating critiques of American culture. Along with From Sea to Shining Sea (1965) and Speaking in Tongues (1988), they take on big social questions within a dance context. Lots of choreographers claim to be doing this, but usually they’re hoping the audience will make the jump from readymade music and indicative movement to some profound insight they had in mind. Taylor can do this dance with ease. In Company B, the dancers jive to the Andrews Sisters, and soldiers pursue their deadly missions across the backdrop. We get the message: the 1940s weren’t all Tico-Tico and rum-and-Cokes. But we can let the uglies slip by while we enjoy the swinging action in the foreground.

Big Bertha and Sacre are something else. First of all, they’re theater pieces, not suites of deceptively entertaining dance numbers. Characters distinguish themselves from one another; they claim our sympathy or aversion. They’re American pop icons: the matronly drum major at the head of the town parade, the sleazy gangster and his moll, the goofy cops and the stereotyped Chinamen. But soon we begin to suspect they aren’t as simple as they seem. Comic strips can harbor nasty subtexts, and possibly the toys are us.

You can tell that Taylor really loves these benign and sinister cultural artifacts. You know he’s put a coin into the slot of a 19th-century band machine, looked at the instruments being played by invisible fingers, listened to their out-of-tune renditions, and imagined what kind of human person would have orchestrated them. Since he’s Paul Taylor, it’s not John Philip Sousa he comes up with but Big Bertha, a bosomy, bossy lady with a yen for a mate.

A typical 1950s American family on holiday visit the amusement park, stop to hear a tune from Big Bertha, and meet their doom. Taylor spares us none of the horrid details. You could say Mr. and Mrs. B and their teenage daughter stumble into a fairy tale and are bewitched by an evil magician who turns them into sex fiends. Or you could say they’re just in a happy mood and, dancing to Bertha’s catchy tunes ("My Blue Heaven," "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans"), they get carried away.

At first they’re a little shy, but Bertha leads them on with her mechanical baton until they can’t resist the swing and the bounce. She flogs them on to high kicks, hip grinds and wiggles, lascivious contractions, and then total abandon. After an orgy of masturbation and incest, a glassy-eyed and submissive Mr. B is claimed in macabre matrimony by Big Bertha, and the mother and daughter drag themselves away.

For the first time in my viewings of the dance, Big Bertha was played in drag, by Robert Kleinendorst. Maybe this was meant to give an added dose of sado-sex to the proceedings. Orion Duckstein was the father, Heather Berest the mother, and Annmaria Mazzini the daughter, secret sensualists all. You could say Big Bertha is about the consequences of Freudian desire unleashed, or the ordinarily sublimated excesses of dancing, or the nightmares of a Middle American moralist. Whatever, I think Taylor was brave to bring this work back right now, maybe even subversive.

Although the Saturday-night audience held its breath through Big Bertha, it was Le Sacre that got an audible reaction. This dance looks like a cartoon but ends up in tragedy — or was it all just a show-within-a-show? The audience started to giggle right away, I assume because Taylor invented a crabbed movement vocabulary for the piece that advertises it as a noir comic strip. The dancers’ bodies are locked and turned in "Egyptian" profile to the audience while their feet skitter them through space. They turn or bend with their whole torso; they gesture with the whole arm and the fingers curled tight at the first knuckle. In duets, they jump up and butt their chests together.

They’re like cheap animations, where only the legs change, so the artist didn’t have to redraw so many frames. In a way, the movement style is like the two-piano reduction of Stravinsky’s score that Taylor uses for the ballet, a condensation that has the outlines of the real thing but not the orchestral flesh and blood.

Taylor’s Sacre is not the easiest piece in the world to follow. Besides the cops-and-robbers plot — the baby gets stolen by the mobster’s girlfriend, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around corners, and then a showdown with daggers between the mob and the cops — the dance has a surrounding plot about a dance company.

Heather Berest plays a militaristic Rehearsal Mistress who exhorts the dancers and directs movement sequences that are mirrored by the cops-and-robbers characters. This role was danced originally by Bettie de Jong, and so was Big Bertha. Not only does Taylor imply that there are similarities between the two dominatrixes and therefore a relationship between the two families of dancers under their control, he probably wouldn’t mind if we saw the Rehearsal Mistress as a modern dance matriarch very much like Martha Graham, with whom he danced at the beginning of his career.

Since the dance company plot shadows (literally) the cops-and-robbers plot, we could find other wry analogies too. The crook hands out stolen diamonds to his henchmen, imitating the action with which the Rehearsal Mistress doles out paychecks to the dancers. The economics of the dance company depends on ill-gotten gains?

When the hero, a Private Eye (Sean Mahoney), is thrown in jail after a raid on a speakeasy, the Girl (Lisa Viola) visits him with a red bundle in her arms. Suddenly the bundle gets dropped and the audience gasps in mid laugh when it realizes it’s looking at a baby. Later on in the story, the baby gets stabbed along with just about everyone else, and I thought, wow, baby death on stage, Taylor is really pushing it.

But it’s still a comic-strip murder, and we’re allowed to keep our distance until the Girl dances out her grief to Stravinsky’s Sacrificial Dance. In Vaslav Nijinsky’s scandalous 1913 choreography, a Chosen Maiden dances herself to death for the survival of the tribe. Taylor parallels Sacre’s scenario only tangentially throughout his dance, but this solo takes on the ferocity of the original with a brutal five minutes of jumping and desperate endurance. Created by Ruth Andrien, the dance was severe and held-in. She slammed into the air, threw herself bodily to the ground, and wrenched against the constricted shapes of the choreography. She struggled to do it; we saw this and prayed for her.

Lisa Viola’s interpretation was much more sympathetic, more conventionally and outwardly sorrowful. She twisted and thrashed in torment, rounded off the movement’s angularity. Her dramatic intensity broke and perhaps redeemed the impersonal façade of the rest of the dance. Perhaps she even made sense of the piece for some in the audience.

I didn’t know Paul Taylor when he started his company in 1954, but I’ll bet he was as much of a curmudgeon then as he is now. Maybe more so. I think he’s a deeply cantankerous soul, and whenever he tries to make a nice piece, I feel bamboozled. All through Klezmerbluegrass I was waiting for the sting of cold steel under the ribs, but it never came.

The dance, like the score by fusion composer Margot Leverett, mixes vaguely Yiddish dancing with allusions to square dancing, Greek line dancing, Celtic stepdancing, and familiar scenes of resilient Americans on the frontier. It’s entertaining in the most soothing way.

It had some of the same attitudes as Diane Arvanites-Noya’s Crazy Girl, one of five new dances shown by Prometheus Dance at Boston Conservatory Theater last weekend. Choreographed for eight women in flimsy print dresses, Crazy Girl began with intimations of women’s work — scrubbing the floor, washing clothes — before sliding into a series of semi-hoedown dances and fooling around, with a stageful of old-fashioned galvanized washtubs, pails, and garbage cans.

This reads like a lighter piece than it is. Arvanites-Noya and her co-director and co-choreographer, Tommy Neblett, can make arresting stage images, but they don’t give us the relief of humor or even the satisfaction of satire. Their own duet, Wreckage, was set on a park bench, next to a grove of real birch trees planted in crumpled newspapers. An idyllic spot for a lovers’ tryst, perhaps, but the pair cycled through what might have been a lifetime of oppositions. Upended, slithering on the bench, crouched under the bench, thrashing and groping, they made contact almost without realizing it and ended almost where they’d started.