Drafting the audience into very active service

Roslyn Sulcas

Audience participation. Is there a more unpleasant conjoining of nouns in the English language?

Yet choreographers persist. Lauri Stallings's 'Halo,' presented by her unpronounceable company, gloATL at the DMAC-Duo Multicultural Arts Center in the East Village, involved a good amount of obligatory audience involvement. The dancers came up close to the single row of chairs along the walls of the theater and stared into our eyes.

They inserted fingers under our knees and lifted our legs. They sat next to us, arms draped around our tense shoulders. They marched a chosen few across the room to sit elsewhere. (I attempted resistance until it became clear that the piece was never going to end unless I moved.)

Finally they selected partners to dance with, first waltzing benignly then leaving the hapless civilians dumbfounded as they broke into wild, bent-legged, lashing-arm, thrashing-torso sequences. The piece ended with the spotlight on one such couple, the female dancer gyrating, the male spectator standing uncertainly.

This idea, and much else in 'Halo,' comes directly from the work of the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. In 'Decadance' and 'Kamuyot' he has performers invite audience members to dance, and in the moving 'Mamootot' they occasionally sit among the audience and, at one point, move slowly round the room, taking hands and gazing into eyes.

The imitation isn't surprising since Stallings's movement style is closely based on Naharin's Gaga method, and it is full of the fascinating odd impulses, explosive balletic extensions, and spasmodic lurches and tics that characterize his work. But Naharin is a dance genius, a rare original in his rigorous ability to use this movement to connect to and evoke the dancer's inner states of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and madness.

'Halo' certainly wants to evoke these states as it moves through sequence after sequence set to very different types of music (not all credited in the program): Bizet's 'Carmen,' Nina Simone singing 'Wild Is the Wind,' Glazunov's ballet music for 'Raymonda,' harsh techno pop, and much, much more. But although the six black-clad women all compel attention through their forceful performances, the out-of-body states they try to convey through staring eyes and gently bobbing heads feel mostly layered over the sharply delineated dancing rather than emerging from it. It's the imitation of inner demons, not the demons themselves.

And similarly, the approaches to the audience are the simulation of connectedness rather than actual involvement. In Naharin's works there is a sense of gentle communion with the spectators that is both empathetic and unaggressive. In 'Halo' the dancers perform the breaching of a taboo - touching strangers, breaking the code of performance - with forceful intent. For some of the audience members it may be provocative. But it's no more than that, and frequently quite a lot less.

 New York Times