sarma

Maurice Béjart strikes me as a man who has forgotten what simplicity is, and just now, when he seems to want badly to deal with basics - man's private innermost center, the structures by which he guides his life, the stages he must inevitably pass through - he's hampered by the oratorical tone that has mysteriously and untraceably stolen away his own voice. Looking back over this sentence I've just written, I see that I've unconsciously encapsulated in it something of the Béjartian style: he can't make dances about men and women, because he wants to make dances about Man. How ardently portentous his simplicity is in the new and relatively austere Stimmung, set to the Stockhausen score of the same title. The singers (members of the excellent Collegium Vocale Cologne for whom the Stockhausen music was commissioned) walk one by one onto their little elevated platform and sit cross-legged around their red lamp: the dancers walk one by one onto the dim stage, striding in dancerly fashion, toes first, to neatly spaced-out stations on the stage. They sit, open their crotches carefully to the audience, and begin a slow pulsing breathing whose rigidly controlled exhalation takes them down to a lying position and back up again. Well, but Stimmung is supposed to be a ritual; the program says so. Ritual has become for Béjart a theatrical modus operandi, by which he can deal with human life without having to sacrifice the orderly formations and unison dancing which he obviously feels are an integral part of ballet.

So in this simple, sincere, but overwhelmingly unnatural theatre piece, the dancers work with great sobriety and intensity to depict for us what they already are. “NOW MANKIND PLAYS," their bodies say; "LOVES," they roar; "COMMUNES WITH NATURE," they sigh. And I don't mean the dancers are phony; they're splendid, just unflaggingly intense. They play - or one group of them does - by sitting on the floor in a spraddle-legged position, grabbing up imaginary jacks with gleeful zeal. They love by making complicated frozen-in-action lotuses out of prone men, split-legged women descending on them, and, occasionally, symmetrical groups of eggers-on. They commune with nature by picking imaginary flowers-looking like grandly skillful mimes bent on making every gesture important. God, but they're stately, these II attractive dancers in their flesh-colored practice clothes.

Stimmung, the music, is also intensely serene. You hear a texture of wordless, nasal tones shifting harmonically. Buddhist chant, but more restless. You hear fragments of a German text, "magic names" of gods and goddesses from every known cosmology, occasional flat, spontaneous-sounding sentences. Stockhausen's plan is complex, with a carefully controlled indeterminacy which involves great sensitivity and rapport between the six singers.

The dancers also have certain options with regard to the number of times they repeat a phrase or the order in which they combine several possible motifs. At all times, only 10 of them are active; the 11th stands on a mirror looking down at himself (a metaphor for self-examination that seems appropriately dancerly, if shallow). Everyone gets a turn on there's a minimum of virtuosity. Others involve ritualistic gestures or stylizations of natural ones. Because of the element of indeterminacy, the dancers often work in loose canon - each of them at a different point in the movement phrase, and this gives Stimmung, despite its austerity, a freer and livelier look than many Béjart spectacles.