Amphibians

Meryl Tankard's Furioso

by Marcia B. Siegel

Meryl Tankard's dance seems chillingly nonhuman. On the surface it looks like another survey of contemporary social and sexual relations, a comment on alienation in the style of Pina Bausch with the violence damped down. But the Australian Dance Theater's hour-long Furioso, offered by Dance Umbrella last weekend at the Emerson Majestic, made me search outside the human frame to explain its relentlessly bleak behavior.

One by one, as the audience is arriving, five women appear in ragged dresses strangely cut and wrapped to effect a perfunctory concealment and a rudimentary glamor. (Tankard designed the costumes.) Fixed to their own spots and facing away from one another, they trace individual gesture patterns, neither abstract designs nor dance actions. Maybe these signify women's work -- spinning, smoothing, kneading.

After the houselights go down, a man approaches one of the women from behind and tenderly embraces her. You might not notice how his arms constrict her if she didn't ignore him and keep on with her work. Another man comes and pries the first man off the woman so he can bundle her in his arms.

With variations, this seduction continues until all five men are surrounding and nuzzling and pawing all five women, then being pulled off by a male competitor. The men are insatiable. The women are passive. Each woman is a prize, but not prized, in this game of conquest, or biological destiny. A woman's role is to be discarded as soon as she's won. Preoccupied with her own tasks, she never acknowledges any man's attempt to possess her. She never resists what eventually becomes a mauling, pushing battle. She'll get thrown to the ground in the melee, forgotten until a man notices she's mateless and grabs her.

This opening is followed by a short demonstration of male combat and one of female rage, and then all 10 dancers rush across the stage, diving and sliding on their stomachs. The men pull the women back by their legs so they can all rush back and dive across the stage again.

As the dance continues, the activity changes but the pattern remains. The women are passive, the men manipulate them, and no one acknowledges anyone else except in the most primal types of contact. The gestures of both men and women are faint, indicative but incomplete. The men's movements are mostly phallic, bodies straight and narrow and vertical. The women's movements are curled, circular, inward. For brief intervals they seem to exchange moves, but nothing comes of this.

A man walks backwards in the dark, lurches, falls as if shot, rises warily, jerks around in a crouch as if looking for an attacker, lurches, falls. A woman steps in place, on one leg, then the other, swaying her hips. Women in the wings are seen in shadow, rising, lying back, rising. A shadow hand clutches at another shadow.

In the second part of the dance, the dancers take to the air on cables. A man spins very fast, pushing off from the floor so he can swoop out in big circles over the audience. Four women sit in invisible harnesses on the cables, and men slowly push them as if they were on swings.

The women break free at one spectacular moment, four trapezes soaring in unison above the stage. Men latch onto them, and the big arcs spiral in from their weight. Free again, the women do fantastic acrobatics in the air, their 360-degree harnesses artfully concealed so they seem to be on their own. But they're chased by the men, who grab at their feet. Floored, they stand still like small animals in the tight embrace of their captors, until the men slowly slide down their bodies. When the men are on the ground, the women hang slumped on their ropes. After one more flying release, the women suddenly drop off the cables and the men in an instant are above them, spinning fast, upside down.

Finally the cables are flown out and the women retreat to the back of the stage. The men leap and clump together as if sensing an invisible foe, then recoil with gestures like their previous punches and thrusts, only in reverse. They fall onto all fours, neither flat on their faces nor quite ready to sprint, still and alert like aboriginal lizards.

In a trick of the lighting, the women seem to be inching their way feet-first up the back wall. As the curtain was falling, I thought maybe they were going to Heaven, but later I decided they were more like tadpoles, or pupating insects.