Souls in heat

Prometheus's Impromptus and Intrigues

by Marcia B. Siegel

Prometheus Dance's ambitious and handsomely subsidized Impromptus and Intrigues (The Schubert Project), which played for two weekends at Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, seems to have a fairly conventional dance theme. Couples meet at a dancing party in a bygone drawing room, with musicians and a lieder singer to accompany them, but dancing melts down their manners to expose less genteel feelings. It's not hard to remember several stellar ballets in this vein.

But co-choreographers Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett were evidently working with several other sources, private references, and subtexts. From the couples' first descent down a stairway, things seemed awry. The men wore modern tail suits, the women satin bustiers with black lace leggings under stiff, paneled skirts. Everyone's feet were bare. After elaborate continental kissings and bowings, they began to dance with the fancy, twining arms and rocking dips of ländler, the Austrian pre-waltz dances that Franz Schubert played for fun.

Before this first song was over, the playful dance figures ripened into dangerous low-to-the-floor supported backbends and trick inversions where the women swam between the kinked legs of the men, whose upper bodies drifted like seaweed. These tangled couples swirled throughout the rest of the dance, becoming more and more contorted as they grew more passionate. Women cantilevered their partners out into deep, backbending arcs. At times the whirling seemed almost out of control. Later, the women grasped the back of their partners' necks; the men drew their hands lingeringly down the women's thighs and legs and feet. The women launched themselves horizontally into the rush of the dance, and the men caught them running and skidded to a stop.

Smaller encounters began, recurring and escalating to near-violence. Arvanites-Noya danced with different numbers of men, reaching, splaying out, reversing direction on almost every beat of the music. A couple staggered forward, her black-gloved hand clawing over his eyes. She seemed at times to be leading him, at other times trying to push him back. Other couples took up the theme. Eventually, women were clamped to men's shoulders, knotted around their heads.

As all this was going on, people were taking off layers of clothes -- their own and their partners'. A dominatrix crossed the floor, dropping discarded black lace things, and men crawled on all fours, picking up the lace in their teeth. A woman on the balcony sang Schubert's Ave Maria. People swarmed under a black umbrella. Women slithered down the bannister and were carried into a side room by their partners.

After their most erotic collective frenzy, the couples broke apart. Some slowly climbed the stairs. Two women got onto the window seats and peered out. Other people stood on the dance floor in postures of agonized reflection. "All souls rest in peace," sang the baritone.

The obvious framework for this was German Romanticism. Paintings of craggy landscapes and spook-ridden forests, funeral barges crossing bottomless placid lakes, a couple committing suicide by jumping off a cliff while locked in an embrace -- scenes like this must have been familiar to Franz Schubert, who died before age 30, in 1828, having produced 600 lieder and a trunkful of other music. But the dance's fixation on sexual excess was more symptomatic of Freudian fin-de-siècle Vienna, of expressionism and surrealism in a later, more psychologically hemmed-in time.

The mythic heroism, the communing with the natural landscape, and the fanciful images characteristic of Schubert's lieder didn't really color the dance. Maybe the choreographers just used the music as a springboard and didn't want the audience to focus on it too much. I don't know how else to explain a program that simply listed titles of the 12 musical selections, gave no texts of the songs, in German or English, and failed to show how this musical menu corresponded to the order of the dance numbers.

A string quartet from the Longwood Symphony Orchestra provided the party atmosphere suggested by the elegant setting of Cambridge Multicultural Center's dance space. Even more compelling was the beautiful singing of baritone Frank Haggard (accompanied by pianist Lisa DeSiro), who conveyed the poetry of the lieder with such clarity and directness. Prometheus was working with live music for the first time, a highly publicized coup, but then it didn't bother with biographical material about the musicians, or the dancers, either. How rude.