Horoscopes in collision

Marjorie Morgan at Mobius; Quat'Zarts at the Majestic

by Marcia B. Siegel

Now and then it seems everyone is getting the same astrological advice. All the dance presenters zero in on the same optimal dates, and the audience is left to thread its way through the resulting performance overload. In two of last weekend's five or six dance attractions, women directors fled the confines of "pure dance" to alight in separate territories that were worlds apart in content and attitude.

Marjorie Morgan's "One Man Band" evening at Mobius had six short solos that blended mime, stand-up comedy, and poetic satire with a dancer's total physicality. What's unique about Morgan's performance is the ease and quickness with which she calls on these skills. From the first, you can't tell whether she's dancing or talking or singing or all of those at once, so you just go along with her careering train of thought.

To begin, she came into the space festooned with instruments -- an accordion, a kazoo, ankle bells, and gourds tied to her knees. As she entered, she played them all at once, making a cheerfully embryonic sort of music. She welcomed the audience and promised that she was learning the accordion and would be able to play it better by the next concert. Whatever goofy impression this made was gradually erased by the thoughtful, almost insidious introspection of the work that followed. Lightly though her work may be deployed, Morgan is no lightweight.

Each piece was built on a poetic text by Morgan and delivered in a carefully shaped, musical recitation as she stretched out or cut up or swallowed the words, repeated them, and sometimes simply spoke them like ordinary speech. You couldn't always follow them, and neither did I want to, but written texts were provided for the audience to read later. As she spoke or sang, the sounds sometimes seemed to propel her into a corresponding motion, but often her body would be resisting what the sounds implied.

Morgan seems to embody dualities, especially the allure and peril of affluent life. She overdoses on words, wavering between her urge to spew them out and her fear of what damage they might cause if released (Eating Alphabets). She's a seductive real-estate agent, building environmentally unfriendly developments on a Monopoly board (What the Realist Ate). Or a perky flight attendant giving those safety instructions we all ignore while the plane disintegrates and aliens conduct a hijacking (Crash).

In Brine, she reclined on her side, in a cocktail dress and a string of pearls. With legs together and arms pinned to her sides, she looked like a mermaid. Her lower jaw seemed locked down in a grotesque reverse smile, and she explained this deformity right away: "I have a hook in my lip." What I understood about this piece was the fishiness of it. Her arms and legs virtually disabled, she undulated smoothly along the floor, even rolling and somersaulting, while she called like a whale, chattered like a porpoise, and talked with that awful impediment. ("Part of me likes this," she said to the audience at one point, in a normal voice.) Gradually she discovered how to get rid of the hook, and her face relaxed. "One day I found the thought to pull myself./And on that one day/The other pulling stopped./HA!"

Morgan uncovers the sinister possibilities of life's little comforts, especially food. In My Spammy Heart she wears a pink mini-dress, heels, and olive-drab gloves that make her hands look as if they'd been dipped in wax. She's filming a commercial for canned meat. Take after take goes wrong as her report on the advantages of the product is intercepted by lurid tales of advanced toxicity and its consequences. In Inside/Out she savors the idea of her own internal organs as ingredients in a horrible recipe for self-destruction.

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At the Emerson Majestic, a French company with a Spanish accent arrived after a couple of performances in New York, under the auspices of the Northampton-based Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. Compagnie Quat'Zarts, directed by Catherine Berbessou, does a sort of economy-size tanztheater. A Fuego Lento (A Slow Burn) had almost all the standard elements introduced 20 years ago by Pina Bausch, but with the advantage of lots of real dancing and almost no violence.

Three couples and an extra woman meet in a tango dancehall, with suitably seedy music, and engage in a string of seductions. The men are predictably macho, but the women can also strut and command.

Berbessou and her partner, Federico Rodríguez Moreno, were wonderfully quick, whirling in a tight clinch, their legs gesturing flamboyantly from the knees like daggers. Berbessou tends to collapse in the chest and shoulders; perhaps it's a sign of dependency. Moreno drags her in rapid circles and diagonal paths as she stretches out flat against his chest, steadying herself along the floor with one delicate instep.

All the women wear high heels. By now these are a tanztheater symbol of female subservience, but in tango they also facilitate adaptability to the man's whim. Berbessou seems to see them as part of a woman's arsenal of weapons in the sexual arena. Teresa Cunha wraps one leg around Jarles Sandodden's waist, reaches around his back to grip her heel with the opposite hand, and clamps him in a vise. Later he grabs her by the foot and pulls her toward him. They kiss. Her heel appears to be driving deep into his groin.

Clothes are another useful item in tanztheater's canon of signifiers. A Fuego Lento starts with a naked woman (Corinne Barbara) slowly wrapping herself in a length of cloth that's held, a bit like a horse's bridle, by Eric Affergan at the opposite side of the stage. There are issues of dressing and undressing, but when Barbara gets her turn with Affergan, she strips him only down to his socks and jockey shorts. He retaliates with what seems to be an affectionate putdown, in Spanish.

Claire Richard appears with nothing on and proceeds to dress slowly while the three men look on. As she gets to her shoes, they turn away and leave, as if it were too embarrassing to watch her put on such intimate apparel. In another dance, the men start with their suit jackets draped around their shoulders, mobster style, and as they draw their women into the dance, the women slip their arms into the jacket sleeves, creating a freakish but symbiotic union.

The men bring on wooden chairs, one at a time. The game is to make sure a chair is placed in the row so that a woman walking across can have one to step on without hesitating. More games are played with people sitting on the chairs; more chairs are added, to form a three-sided arena. Tanztheater's allusion here is always to spectatorship, the Gaze, and people sit on the chairs and watch others flirt, display, make love. People dance in passionate embraces, watching the audience. Sex is never private, never unselfconscious, and absolutely never without ulterior motives.

In one long sequence, the three couples danced in a permanent kiss. The men produced balloons and blew them up to about the size of basketballs. They kept on dancing, the swelling balloons held in place between their lips. The music swung into a rumba, "Bésame Mucho," and the balloons somehow descended until they were wedged between the partners' bellies. This dancing and kissing and hip swaying with balloons between them was strangely erotic. Then the balloons all burst at once and the music turned into loud, nasty rock. The partners began to chase each other, pulling each other down in wild falls, and applying ferocious kisses.

After more interludes of provocative undressing and calculated embracings, all the dancers dragged a red velour curtain up from where it had been folded along the footlights, until it covered the whole stage. Berbessou seduced Affergan, growing more and more passive as he got more aggressive. Moreno covered the chairs with the red velour. A blinding light was turned onto the audience. The last thing I think I saw, Moreno was dancing out with a naked Berbessou. By then I wasn't sure who was the catcher and who wanted to be caught.