sarma

The dancing of Viola Farber's people is passionately intense and as insistent as sirens, but fogbound. Their limbs flail and slash and punch the air around them; they collide with each other and startle into tender stares and gestures. They had, perhaps, been thinking of themselves as alone with the violent intricacies of the movement. "Dune" has hills and valleys -a strained calm: June Finch in a steady flow of slow balances for instance. A sudden whirlpool: Larry Clark whizzing through a turn that seems precariously out of balance in about five different ways. Alvin Lucier's taped voice -"I am sitting in a room"- becomes more distant until it drowns in its own resonance or the room's overtones and becomes a high ringing sound.

"Willi I " is Farber at her most violent. The dancers wear slick, wet-looking red jumpsuits; Lucier's score, "The Fires in the Minds of the Dancers", is wonderfully thunderous -it sounds like waves crashing down, like sirens and alarm bells. The dancers appear to be trying to impede each other's movements. Lifts, falls, and carries have a drastic look. Everything happens fast, but your eye remembers people clumped around a fallen body, people dropping from above; tangling with each other. The dancers (Clark, Finch, Susan Matheke, Ann Koren, Ande Peck, Jeff Slayton) are formidable, but Farber herself looks more appealingly human. They tend to seal themselves off in what often look like tantrums of dancing; she remains susceptible to the movement. She doesn't, in the usual sense, "motivate" the dancing; it might have been flung onto her body from outer space, but she allows it to change her from moment to moment.