Kama Sutra in Slow Motion

THE DANCE

Six years ago, Brooklyn-born Dancer Barbara Weisberger started a small ballet school in an old studio in Philadelphia. Funds at first were scarce; she and her two teaching colleagues paid themselves $20 a month, and at least once the landlord locked them out for nonpayment of rent. Thanks to some timely help from the Ford Foundation, the school grew into the Pennsylvania Ballet. Judging by its performances at Manhattan's City Center last week, it is one of the most promising of the new U.S. dance companies.

Composed of 33 leggy young women and lithe young men (average age: 22), the Pennsylvania company is not yet long on polish but makes up for it with a springlike exuberance and clear delight in dancing. Since Barbara Weisberger is a former pupil of George Balanchine's, it was no surprise that her company bore a stylistic resemblance to the New York City Ballet; the Pennsylvania's repertory includes six stagings of Balanchine-created ballets.

On opening night, the Pennsylvanians dared a world premiere--and a difficult one it was. Ceremony, by protean choreographer John Butler, a Martha Graham disciple, is cast in the new mold of dehumanized abstraction that Balanchine recently demonstrated in Metastaseis & Pithoprakta (TIME, Jan. 26). The score for Ceremony, by Polish avant-garde Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, is an aggressive compendium of cacophonies--growlings, twitterings, bongs and clashes, punctuated by police whistles and sirens.

As in Metastaseis, leotard-clad dancers writhe, roll and wrestle around a bare stage against a stark background. But where the Balanchine ballet suggested the physics lab, the permutations of Ceremony smacked of the Kama Sutra in slow motion, as the dancers' bodies were juxtaposed in a complex series of stately tableaux. The maneuvers, however, were less sensual than static--and, accompanied as they were by a chilling, unromantic score, seemed as moving as a set of judo diagrams.

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