Two Cigarettes in the Dark. - Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, New York - dance reviews

Pina Bausch is usually expert at accumulating illogical incidents into a solidly thematic, expressionistic whole. The arrival on our shores of her Tanztheater Wuppertal always stirs the kind of excitement that the Jones/Zane company has just begun to generate, partly because of her genius with mise-en-scene. Bausch, a German dancer and choreographer who, years back, trained in the U.S., has in the past drenched the BAM stage in water, spread it each night with hundreds of fresh carnations, and sent a five-ton cinder-block wall toppling into the performance area. After such exotic hijinks, we expect to be dazzled; what we got in her latest presentation was a pulled punch.

In November, Bausch brought to Brooklyn the American premiere of a 1985 piece called Two Cigarettes in the Dark, named after the Alberta Hunter song. It's a great tune and it closes the show, following its only genuinely amusing and inspired moment: an extended, lyrical, astounding display of nerve in which eight dancers rocked to and fro on their bottoms, criss-crossing the stage in the guise of a drunken boat lost in a high sea. In reality, they bumped across the floor of a low-ceilinged, white box of a room designed by Peter Pabst and built into the Opera House stage. In the first half, the box included three huge windows set into the walls. One held a jungle of plants, another was empty but for some sand and cactus, and the third was lined with fish tanks containing goldfish, into one of which a flippered dancer plunged.

Two Cigarettes was less theater than divertissement; but at three hours long, it was a pretty tedious way to seek amusement. The program served to point up how limited the Bausch movement vocabulary actually is: 150 redundant variations on a few simple motions that include standing up and smiling, lying down and screaming, running into walls, headstands, sudden slaps, waist bends, leg spreads and apoplexic hand gestures. Lively as all this can be, without a unifying principle it becomes a wearisome display of cabaret skills, making clear how much Bausch depends on imaginative staging and her dancers' own good-humored energy to lend her ideas coherence.

Up until the amazing butt dance, Two Cigarettes had featured unresolved vignettes and repetitive, music-hall-style specialty numbers--a man swallowing a lit cigarette or slicing a navel orange with an axe. These eccentric snippets might better have been left on the cutting-room floor. The result was certainly more amiable than the usual Bausch program, whose theme is often a kind of sexual terrorism. This was a jokey show, replete with sight gags (two men in tails dribbling champagne from lips frozen into smiles), non sequiturs ("Why don't you come in?" "My husband is at war") and spacedout posturing. It was all very casual and, in the end, more disappointing than refreshing or provocative.

Bausch's work always carries with it a pervasive sense of moral decay, here signaled by the ripped bodice of a dress that the effusive, whiskey-tenored Mechthild Grossmann wore at the end of the evening. In Two Cigarettes, it was more the dancing itself that had fallen into disarray: an interruptive display of workaday routines and enforced anti-intellectualism, set to music and performed by a company of engaging but distracted clowns.

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