KUNST-STOFF mixes film, speech, dance

Saturday, May 15, 2004

Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle You never know where the postmodern dance adventures of Kunst-Stoff might take you. Thursday night at ODC Theater, the brave trail was blazed down Shotwell Street and up a staircase to a rehearsal studio. There the company's co-founder, Yannis Adoniou, improvised in front of his own projected likeness. The piece, titled "Image/Word.Not_A_Pipe=," is a collaboration with filmmaker (and company dancer) Evann Siebens, who has put a 21st century twist on Rene Magritte. In the projections and in the flesh, Adoniou wears the painter's iconic bowler hat, and sometimes an apple in his mouth; scenes of him at the ocean or on Market Street, where the fast-forwarded real world bustles by, are spliced with computer language hypertext. Siebens' clever gloss on questions of representation versus reality makes them fresh for a technological age, and although the installation was more impressive when shown in an augmented form several months ago, it loses none of its playful charm in this pared-down version. But bold explorations are not limited to unexpected spaces during this opening home season program, which runs through Sunday. Since its founding in 1998, Kunst-Stoff has never shied from multimedia experimentation. "In-Sight," premiered back in the theater proper, where Kunst-Stoff is in residence, takes the company's integration of image and movement to mesmerizing new levels. In choreography and in concept, it is one of Adoniou's strongest works. The photos are by Cara Judea Alhadeff, homey yet vaguely disturbing images of nude bodies arranged in slightly soft-focus landscapes of vivid reds and blues and greens. Sometimes the photos themselves dance across the back wall, and sometimes the performer's shadows dance upon them. At stage right hangs a kind of sheath from which a naked Nol Simonse emerges before joining the six-member cast in a unisex costume of turtlenecks and trunks. The movement is punchy, then crawling, and finally expansive, as Jethro DeHart's absorbing score grinds between heavy breathing, grim industrial noise and nostalgic guitar strumming. Initially the dancer's hands are tied with gossamer mittens, all too evocative of bondage and torture, given current world affairs; later their faces wear shrouds. Birth, lost innocence, oppression -- the big themes are there, never hammering the viewer into obvious interpretations. Kunst-Stoff has always appeared highly influenced by William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt, which explains the group's continuing association with Ballet Frankfurt dancer Amy Raymond. Here she contributes the accomplished premiere "Self-Seeking-Self." Raymond teaches workshops on Forsythe's heady method of discovering highly articulated movement, wherein the electricity of the body finds mind- blowing new conduits through muscles you didn't even know existed. She's used his techniques to striking effect in this dance for five women, with particularly intriguing partnering. At one point Kara Davis cradles another dancer's neck with her outstretched foot before pushing her onward. At the dance's end, Juliann Rhodes shouts words like "frustrated!" and "isolated!" while Raymond's recorded voice speaks of "a memory falling away." It's a shame Raymond felt compelled to break the conventions of theater for the sake of avant-gardism, because Rhode's frenzied whiplash limbs communicate louder than any self-conscious outburst. Experimentation has its inconveniences. Between shuttling upstairs and down again, intermission threatened to stretch longer than the performance. But travel time won't be an issue next weekend, when Kunst-Stoff presents co- director Tomi Paasonen's full-length "Super Vision." And with such a provocative opening, who wouldn't be willing to follow these choreographers almost anywhere?