Sight Welded to Sound

It was a long way from Swan Lake, and it drew a few boos on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, but George Balanchine's new ballet is added proof of the inventiveness of the nation's No. 1 choreographer.

With a memorably unpronounceable title that sounds rather like the medical diagnosis of an awful disease, Metastaseis & Pithoprakta was named after two works by far-out Greek-born Composer lannis Xenakis, 45. Each member of the orchestra has a totally different part, and the resulting sounds are more like electronic than man-made music--a succession of crepitations, squeaks, creaks and mutterings, punctuated by sudden rifle-like reports.

The ballet, like the compositions, is really two separate works. In Metas-taseis (a coined word meaning dialectic transformation), an enormous disk at the center of a bare stage reveals itself to be 28 male and female dancers in chalk-white garments that look like winter underwear. Slowly they writhe, rise, and begin to surge about the stage, combining and recombining, touching and turning, with arms and legs outstretched like diagrams of molecular linkage or a microscopic view of the proliferation of cells--an impression heightened by bright white crosslighting.

Pithoprakta (meaning actions by probabilities) has twelve dancers skittering, scuttering, rolling across the stage like nodes and waves of electrical energy. A lithe, half-naked Negro in black (Arthur Mitchell) and a tall girl in white (Suzanne Farrell) do a fluid, sex-charged pas de deux that builds to brief contact, then breaks to a tense conclusion, with the girl's body straining alone as the curtain falls.

Whatever the programmatic meaning --perhaps proton meets electron, proton loves electron, proton loses electron--it is an elegant and pleasing combination of sight welded to sound.

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