Festival Mishaps Can't Dim Lyon's Latin American Spirit
'Terra Latina' is the title of this year's Lyon Dance Biennial, devoted to dance in Latin America. True to form, the three-week event, the 10th since 1984, offers what other major international festivals do not: a concentrated overview of dance in a single country or in theme-related regions.
But atypically, the current festival has been a comedy of mishaps.
A political brouhaha erupted when Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the French minister of culture, canceled plans to meet with Mayor Gérard Collomb of Lyon and to attend performances and the biennial's colorful Sunday parade, which celebrated Latin America.
It wasn't the homemade posters of Che Guevara that would have scared him off the parade, as 4,500 participants from the Lyon area pranced for five hours on the left bank of the Rhone River. A brilliant example of community outreach, led by professional choreographers who had worked in diverse neighborhoods, the event included blind tango dancers and a flurry of feathered warriors on cardboard Aztec floats.
For the minister the problem was rather that local members of Parliament from President Jacques Chirac's party, the U.M.P., objected to Mr. Aillagon's meeting with members of the rival U.D.F. party and with Mayor Collomb, a Socialist.
'Egocentric' was the word used about the U.M.P. politicians by Guy Darmet, the biennial's artistic director, who told a roomful of foreign and French journalists that he was 'in pain.' The sequence of events and the minister's absence had been an insult, he said, to the 600 performers from 12 countries and 36 companies invited to the festival.
Always resourceful, Mr. Darmet announced that he had taken to wearing a Korean jade talisman from the 2000 'Silk Roads' biennial to ward off further bad luck.
A significant earlier blow had been the cancellation of the first two performances of a premiere by the ever-ingenious French choreographer Maguy Marin after one of her dancers broke a rib. Ms. Marin salvaged the work, which was commissioned by the festival, in a performance on Monday. The injured dancer's role was split up among others, and 'Applause Is Not Edible,' her premiere, has turned out to be one of the festival's best pieces so far. Concerned with power games and, by extension, dictatorship, it is a sinister and abstract work of great impact.
The touch-and-go category at the festival also included one rained-out performance by exuberant carnival dancers from Bolivia and Colombia at the outdoor Roman theater on the Fourvière hilltop. Other dancers arrived off schedule thanks to a strike by Air France pilots. To round things off, a press agent for the festival was knocked down by a hit-and-run cyclist.
Although most of these mishaps have been made public, the festival's artistic side has been anything but swallowed up.
A meaningful wrinkle was Mr. Darmet's discovery that his original conception for the biennial had no takers among the groups he invited from Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Cuba and Costa Rica. Colombia was an exception. Essentially, Mr. Darmet asked contemporary dance choreographers to concentrate on a political theme related to life under past dictatorships.
'They weren't interested,' he said. This would be no surprise to anyone who has seen Latin American modern dance in the United States, especially at the American Dance Festival over the years and occasionally in New York. Their focus has been on exploring human relationships, including macho aspects.
And so it has been the same during the biennial's first week when, more than in past years, Mr. Darmet has concentrated on small modern-dance groups rather than on historical panoramas that included big ballet companies (as he did with France in 1988 and the United States in 1990).
Mr. Darmet has invited a few folk groups, including the carnival dancers, who also took part in the parade. The Colombians charmed with their colonial-style courtship dances and a duel between life and death figures. But it was the Bolivians who stole the show in their gold costumes and powerfully accented dance, 'Sambos Caporales.' The women, swiveling in short skirts and high heels, and the men, portraying mine foremen of the past, are from La Paz but are associated with the Oruro carnival elsewhere in Bolivia.
Whatever gallantry existed in the carnival dances was not reflected in the violent relations depicted by the modern-dance groups. The saving grace among many of these choreographers is their interest in exploring new kinds of movement.
Nonetheless, 'The Place of Desire' by Paulina Mellado of Chile had more brutality than invention. By contrast, 'Choreography to Listen To' by Henrique Rodovalho of the Brazilian Quasar company, is a genuine find, in which angular movement, folded and unfolded, becomes highly expressive.
A deserved hit was 'Secreto y Malibú,' a dance-theater piece that examines relationships between two women and the fleeting intrusion of a man. Its choreographers, from Argentina, Diana Szeinblum, Inès Rampoldi and Leticia Mazur, were recently represented at Dance Theater Workshop in New York.
A mixed-media novelty by Raúl Parrao, 'Voyage to the Moon,' was a clever but not sustained production based on the 1902 movie of the same name by the French film pioneer Georges Méliès. The work, which required 3-D goggles, was performed by the National Dance Company of Mexico.
Formalist currents have largely been absent, although oddly, it is a hip-hop group from Brazil, Balé de Rua, that deals most with pure movement.
As for Ms. Marin, she is in a category by herself. In 'Applause Is Not Edible,' colored plastic strips on three sides are pushed aside by eight dancers who walk in and out, stop to glare, have fleeting encounters or fall. Some are dragged away, like torture victims. The action is simple. Yet Ms. Marin's acute timing, Denis Mariotte's music and the dimming lights by François Renard create an image of control and oppression. Here too, human relations are explored. But they are also universalized into a metaphor about societies that devour their own.
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