Tom's Life Bits

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By BYRON WOODS, Correspondent

The first recorded "danse macabre" -- dance of death -- was painted on the walls of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris in 1424. In some 30 panels, the grinning, skeletal figure of Death danced with kings and commoners, sinners and saints, people from all walks of life.

The panels, immortalized in the woodcuts of Guyot Marchand and the drawings of Hans Holbein, carried a message with major social, political and religious implications. We may say much the same for "A Selection," a new dance work by Pilobolus Dance Theater, which premiered Thursday night at the American Dance Festival.

Once, dance aficionados would have expected whimsical, lighter results from a collaboration between the traditionally kinetic, colorful troupe and Maurice Sendak and Arthur Yorinks, the award-winning children's book illustrator and author. But Pilobolus has been getting in touch with its dark side in recent years, first in the elegiac "Gnomen," a moving memorial for dancer Jim Blanc, and then the relational metaphor "The Hand That Mocked, The Heart That Fed," which debuted last year at ADF.

"A Selection" takes us into even darker territory: the Holocaust. The title refers to "Selekcja," the process by which inmates in the concentration camps were routinely weeded out when they were determined unfit to live.
     On Sendak's painted set, which depicts a city where a fire is constantly spreading, a troupe of characters misses the last train to safety. Some of them wear on their garments a yellow star -- the symbol the Third Reich used to publicly brand Jews.

Their number is infiltrated by an enigmatic, misshapen figure in a black overcoat (Otis Cook) who decloaks to reveal the sinuous form of a man in a uniform worn by concentration camp prisoners. This trickster figure, though, is robust, hale, hearty -- and apparently double-jointed. He sidles, insinuates and clings to individual troupe members, one at a time, meeting, facilitating and ultimately judging.

The relationships between troupe members is never fully clarified, and this ambiguity does not always serve the work. But ultimately, Matt Kent's figure takes on Hitlerian aspects as a leader others hide from (like Josie Coyoc) or cannot tear themselves away from (Rebecca Anderson).

Death dances with each, with all -- the lovers, the jaded, even the one who mistakenly considers himself death's employer. He selects, at the last, and when he selects he takes all. A dark end concludes this disturbing and sometimes unclear work, whose subject matter and presence of male and female nudity make it anything but a children's story.

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