sarma

Dancing does not simply inhabit space, but carves and molds it - creating and erasing bridges, islands, continents of air. Yet the place where dance occurs is important too, since it imposes boundaries both on the dancing and on how we look at it. (Do we expect anything relating to the stage action to happen in the aisles of one of those velvet-swathed opera houses? No. And if it did we'd shush it and glare at it and tell it to mind its manners.)

The rectangular proscenium stage is terrific for slice-of-life histories or mannerly and extravagant displays. Everyone and everything is seen from its best angle. (The "fourth wall" that has been removed is seldom the bathroom wall.) For the most part, we Americans and Europeans have kept our theatricals as cleanly separated from us as our religious rites. Celebrated in the round, the Mass loses a lot of power.

On our traditional picture-box stage, everything looks flat; the depth is hard to perceive unless you can see the stage floor. Classical ballet is at home there. Those ardently elongated body lines have a twodimensional clarity, and from time to time the flow of the dancing congeals in poses that the eye and mind of the spectator grasp and remember.

The balanced and orderly patterns of Marius Petipa works like The Sleeping Beauty or Balanchine's neo-classic ballets seem to affirm rectangularity. Not only does the dancing stitch back and forth across the stage, but you often see rows of identically dressed people lined up from the front of the stage to the back-as if the choreographer were trying to indicate a vista of depth by presenting a parade of flat surfaces. In cheap imitations or bad examples of this genre the corps de ballet tends to look like vigorous wallpaper.

The late stage designer Arch Lauterer wrote that Martha Graham ought to get off the proscenium stage: her movements were too 3-D to be seen properly from row H. But she never has. Her dances show the circular patterns of early ritual theater and the jagged thrust of modernism, but she wants to enforce a point of view, not change a way of life.

A lot of other important contemporary choreographers have stuck with the proscenium stage. For one thing, it makes touring easier. But some use the conventional stage space unconventionally. Merce Cunningham scrambles his designs in space and time so that what you see on stage seems like a part of something that's also going on in the wings, the dressing rooms and the streets outside. Dancers pass through, each intent on some private business, each doing something different from the others, while your eyes rove over the space, taking in what interests you. Robert Wilson, in his The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1970), organized the stage space into several horizontal corridors, each of which had its own snail's-pace parade of discrete and mysterious activities.

Some choreographers can present their work almost anywhere. Twyla Tharp and new choreographers like Wendy Perron and Rosalind Newman spill their dancing inelegantly onto the performing area, seemingly caring more about molding the space between the lightly jostling bodies than about connecting with the boxy walls of some auditorium. Rudy Perez makes his own rectangles, lines and boxes out of squadrons of dancers, but he can adjust his works to fit a gym, studio, stage, lawn, or parking lot.

During this spring's outdoor festival in New York, Trisha Brown performed one of her small-scale fluid "accumulations" (she executes one movement, repeats that and adds a second, repeats those two and adds a third, and so on) in the sunken plaza of the McGraw-Hill building. To accommodate her dance to the huge space and the unruly drop-in lunchtime crowd, she simply had four women do the movements instead of one, and instructed two men to enter at one point and move the women from place to place, while the women doggedly but gently kept on with their phrase, which by then consisted of over 30 separate moves. The dance ended stunningly when the women were forced by the demands of the phrase to roll down a flight of stone steps where the men had finally placed them.

But if some choreographers make works so unframed and so casual that they can be seen anywhere, others are very specific in regard to space-and sometimes so elaborate that their works can't easily be repeated after the initial series of performances is over. Once Elizabeth Keen created a dance which utilized the drainpipes, ladders, arches, and vents of a particular city roof, and this spring each of Trisha Brown's dancers occupied a roof over a distance of several blocks and relayed the movements from dancer to dancer, from roof to roof, in one beautifully deteriorating sequence.

Meredith Monk, who once used the entire Guggenheim Museum in a dance, situated the third part of her opera-epic, Vessel (1972) in a city parking lot. Armies fought, children played, motorcycles roared through, pioneers camped by firelight-among the hundred other elements embedded in the elaborate and meticulously executed mosaic. Last summer at Connecticut College, Don Redlich's She Often Goes for a Walk Just After Suriset began with a serene lady in an old-fashioned white dress and hat walking out of one of the campus's old stone buildings. A tiny, solitary, gracious figure raising her parasol and strolling toward us over miles of clipped lawn. And it was twilight, and a storm was coming, and the summer wind meddled with her hair and her parasol, and the audience was transfixed.

Sometimes when dances are presented in unusual places, you can't always be sure of the boundaries. Perhaps the old man gesticulating on the sidewalk is in the dance. Are the cramped halls or icy streets you wait in to see Meredith Monk's works a kind of prologue? Is your own discomfort in the dance? When you go to see one of William Dunas's scrupulously made, parsimonious solodances, you walk past the crumbling, decaying empty buildings in lower Manhattan where everything appears both threatened and threatening. The painfulness and mysterious danger that hangs over his numbed dancing is appropriate. Will any of us be able to get home when it's over?

These choreographers and others have made me so aware of space that I can even postulate ideal theaters for more conventional work. Balanchine is a big space man. At the New York City Ballet's summer home in Saratoga, you can leave the amphitheater, walk up the lawn, and, looking back, still understand what's going on, so great is the dancing's clarity in space and time. Certain fast, theatrical, high-intensity styles (take that of Lar Lubovitch, for instance) look phony close up, dionysiac at some distance. José Limón was a middle-sized-theater man. When American Ballet Theatre performs his The Moor's Pavane at the New York State Theater, you see vividly the symmetrical dance patterns torn by the tensions of four characters, but you can't quite see the nuances and fleeting ambivalences in the way those four relate to each other.

The little dances-pieces being made today for lofts and galleries lure the spectator into casual ways of looking. You can't take in the whole "stage picture" at once: you're too close to it. So you focus on details - a single dancer, a single gesture, an area of wall, the run in someone's tights. Even though you're hemmed in and sitting still, the experience is more like browsing through a store: you look at what catches your attention. The dancers can use a very low degree of intensity and very tiny motions and still interest you immensely. But often if these dances are transferred to a stage, they disappear, because they weren't constructed with an eye to vivid linear patterns, or can't be performed with the kind of attentiveness to vast space on the part of the dancers which can pull the audience's attention across the chasm of the orchestra pit.

There's been talk recently about finding a theater for dance in Manhattan. That'd be nice. But I'm not sure any more that one theater could serve all dance. It would have to be capable of being both round and square and odd-shaped, large and small, formal and informal. Myself, I wish that a lot of interesting theaters and other public and private buildings could be persuaded to make space available for dance at certain times (and at reasonable rates). Some churches and office buildings have already begun, in a small way, to do this. We have too many kinds of dances to insist on one kind of dancing-place and then to consider all works that can't be performed there as "experimental," 'far out," "nonprofessional," no matter how intricate the work or how skilled its maker.