West Meets West

by Allan Grey

Susanne Linke Brooklyn Academy of Music December 3

Tim Wengerd

Riverside Dance Festival

December 5

usanne Linke and Tim Wengerd are solo dancers/choreographers associnations'

ated with their respective modern dance mammoths. Linke was one of Mary Wigman's last students. She succeeded both Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffman in her current position as director of Kurt Jooss's Folkwang Studio in Essen. Wengerd danced in the Martha Graham Company for over a decade and, during that time, created seven original Graham roles. Linke and Wengerd are also both forty years old, a convenience which might make them speak clearly on the current delineation between German and American modern dance sensibilities. Might, but not quite. There is evidence of cross-breeding. Since his departure from the Graham company, Wengerd briefly essayed the directorship of the Groupe Recherche de l'Opera de Paris, the Opera ballet's token modern dance alternative. He would certainly be abreast of the continental drift. Linke is very nearly unique among her German contemporaries in her adherence to more traditional dance values, like pointed feet and denouement (influences often derisively described as "American"). The simultaneous Linke and Wengerd programs recently seen in New York suggested that, for the first time in a long time, categories like "German" and "American" might actually be relative rather than mutually exclusive.

Linke's season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music marked her American debut. The first shock was seeing her define her terms, which, considering that she is not only German but German-trained, is only slightly less startling than the fact that she allows for alternate points of view. Her program included four works. Orient-Occident and Flood explored forms of omniscience seen from

alternative theatrical perspectives. Both works were essentially visual and linear. In both, Linke divested herself of her immediate humanity in search of bigger game. Orient-Occident marked a progression through a single shaft of light shot through a crushing darkness. Linke's form oozed through the light, defining itself as she went along. At one point, she briefly unfolded onto all fours, her head hanging, her mane of rusty blond hair falling forward. The tumbled hair shaped a new head for the crawling quadraped, a preternatural bird's head with a swooping beak. As soon as it was identifiable, the form was swallowed up by the progression; the flow remained paramount and inexorable. In Flood, that same force was freer. Linke trailed a stream of smoky blue cloth in her wake as she progressed across the stage. The stream was ultimately engulfing.

In Swan's Weigh, Linke's target was classical ballet. That apparently separates the frau from the fraulein. Rather than indict

Susanne Linke in Bath Tubbing.

either ballet or its technique, Linke incorporated them, both into their own assessment. Ballet, as a result, was not invalidated as a metaphor for man. Ballet's obsessions and idiosyncracies, as well as their cruel allure, remained expressed in human terms, with something of all of us in them. Costumed in an overgrown Romantic tutu and a man's black evening jacket, Linke waddled on stage following an obviously familiar route back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the stage--a second-string swan or a beaten bayadere mapping out the real ballerina's turf. Throughout, Linke remained one phantom in pursuit of another, afraid of the spotlight, afraid of the wings, afraid of her own arabesque. At the work's conclusion, Linke froze in a hunched-up arabesque penchée, her face spotlit, her extended leg in dark-the exhausted human element in the fugitive search for an ideal, or, more personally, the victim of a dashed hope that would not be shaken off.

In Bath Tubbing, Linke placed the same

Tim Wengerd in Journey to the Mouth of the River. WONROY.WEY

44: NEW YORK NATIVE/DECEMBER 23-29, 1985-

Tom Brazil

conflicts in a more mundane setting. The porcelain but proletarian props were a toilet and a bathtub. After relieving herself on one, Linke proceeded to the other for the main event. This bathtub obviously had extrautilitarian functions. She cleaned it before beginning a ritual exploration more absolution than ablution, and without resolution. Although at least visually aligned with the work of Linke's German contemporaries (considering the work's ubiquitous scatology and the presence of Everytub), Bath Tubbing as stringently assessed Linke's contemporaries as Swan's Weigh did ballet. In a fit of quasireligious frenzy, Linke knocked over the bathtub-the People's Stage Property-and then crawled into the hollow it (or she) created for her(self). Linke hid there, frozen and fetal, swallowed by means which had engulfed the end. Linke herself, paradoxically, avoided that fate by remaining mistress of her own very real techniques.

If Linke translates her technique, Wengerd still speaks in his native language. In fact, because Wengerd is also essentially narrative in his interests, his choreography is most effective when centered by the dramatic potential inherent to his facilities. Whenever Wengerd subjugates those facilities to a fully linear progression, he deprives himself of the drama that is his validation. For example, Bone Song employed the same central conceit as Linke's Orient-Occident. Wengerd was enshrouded in a mass of black cloth, the pelvic bone of some very big animal crowning his head like a skull. Unfortunately, the costume's contortionist potential upstaged its narrative validity. When the beast finally learned to stand, the achievement seemed a loss. Similarly, Brahms Lento was Wengerd's single essay on pure movement possibilities, with him as a dervish whirled off into alternative orbits. Those alternatives, however, were too easy and too obvious to retain focus. They became just so much spinning.

Wengerd's other works were more vital. Up and Down the Days was a majestic progression of shapes, all of them fighting for control. Their struggle was realized in the demands of the choreography placed upon Wengerd's own formidable powers of control-form and function fused in the dancer's person. Journey to the Mouth of the River, set to a ritualistic score by David Koblentz, further characterized its combatants with masks suggestive of primitive deities. Their specific stylization was the logical result of the general pulse drawn by the choreography out of the score.