Corybantic Rites on Broadway

By T. E. Kalem

DANCIN' Directed and Choreographed by Bob Fosse

A musical lives by the book or dies by the book. What Bob Fosse proves in Dancin ' is that regardless of driving energy, exquisite symmetry of motion and flawless execution, a musical bereft of a book is stillborn. Watching Dancin' is like watching the tentacles of an octopus expertly coiling and uncoiling around a nonexistent object.

Quite apart from the absence of any narrative line in the show, the dances lack any internal cohesion of theme. They follow each other like soldiers of fortune, some dashing, some indifferent and some gross. No new score is offered, and the numbers are set to music as diverse as that of J.S. Bach and John Philip Sousa, Johnny Mercer and Neil Diamond, among others. The show's dithyrambic peak, "Benny's Number," is scaled with the percussive aid of Louis Prima's Sing, Sing, Sing.

Justice would not be served if any of the dancers were to be called anything less than marvelous. These are Corybants who might have flocked in the pagan train of Cybele. Nonetheless, apart from Ann Reinking and probably Wayne Cilento, the dancers seem locked into Fosse's drillmaster perfectionism so that they cannot break out to those moments of individuality and felt emotion that might touch an audience's heart in addition to compelling its admiration.

Since Dancin' is Fosse writ large, it is a definitive summation of his style, strengths and weaknesses. Technically, Fosse tends to favor the pelvic thrust, the rapidly undulating behind, the body shimmy, the quick, alternating shoulder dip, the swiveling head and the massed chorus strut complete with very high kicks. Out of the fusion of these movements, Fosse has won his crown as the choreographer-king of sensuality.

One sometimes feels that he might have aided Freud in exploring further subbasements of the id. However, the effects are too explicit to be truly erotic. In sequences of simulated copulation, such as "The Dream Barre" and a pot-induced orgy called "Joint Endeavor," a playgoer may have the distasteful and disconcerting sensation that he has been cast as a practicing voyeur. This, indeed, is the underlying trouble with much of Dancin'. It is as if a parade of fertility rites were un der way, always titillating on the surface but devoid of any celebration of life. A guarded cynicism pervades Fosse's work, as if to immunize everyone against the intermittent pain and occasional ecstasy of naked human feeling.

With regard to nakedness, Willa Kim's costumes may be the next better thing. They seem to seduce the bodies to which they so suggestively cling. Jules Fisher's lighting, like the hand of a master painter, seems to turn those same bod ies into efflorescent still lifes even when they are in dynamic motion.

In a show in which sentiment is in short supply, the number "Recollections of an Old Dancer" is a finely wrought exception. Done to the song Mr. Bojangles, it captures the wrenching effect of advanced age for a dancer, together with the agelessness of the spirit of dance. Another standout is an amusing stunt number called "Fourteen Feet," which might have been titled "Look Ma, No Feet!" Seven dancers implant their feet in nailed-down clogs and proceed to sway, shake and swivel. At one point the lighting trans forms them into electric eels. Electric they are.

The magnetic pivot of the evening is Ann Reinking. She is the incarnation of what used to be called the long-stemmed American beauty. Dance seems to be not only her language but also her manifest and incandescent destiny. Ann Reinking isterpsiglorious.

-- T.E.Kalem

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