In its U.S. premiere Tuesday night at La Maison Francaise, the remarkable French troupe Compagnie Christine Bastin tunneled deep into emotion to produce movement/theater rooted in role characterization. In painfully accurate detail, each character played out his frailties and frustrations. The humanity the performers depicted was painfully familiar.
In both excerpts from the longer works "Grace" and "Guele de Loup," the central element was a series of violent couplings. The characters were physically connected but emotionally distant. Their coupling was lustful, hungry. They quickly detached. Each character threw his own foibles into the sexual fray -- the macho lover whose body slithered like a sneer, the submissive young man whose seething, repressed emotions erupt as his body climaxes.
The staging is built up of relationships of every kind -- spatial, psychological and numerical. A man perches on a ladder, a woman on the floor rubs a blackboard. Water gurgles, and a man in a suit twirls a flower between his legs. Each element is nonsensical in itself, yet together they produce a compelling visual scene, a statement about isolation, and the inevitability of one plus one never really adding up to two.
There is no gentility in this choreography, no dithering or filler. It is definite and steely.
The Spring Dance Festival, through which Compagnie Christine Bastin was presented, was the first venture into presenting dance by La Maison Francaise, and hopefully not the last.
