Horsing around Cavalia at Suffolk Downs, Dance Collective’s ‘Commencement’ BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Don’t let anyone tell you horses can’t dance. The classic art of dressage teaches them the dancerly skills of stepwork, jumping, and precision drill — and something else, the knack of performing. Or as George Balanchine put it, "Dancing is the ability to look well while you are in space." But the Canadian spectacle Cavalia, holding forth through September 25 in a big white tent at Suffolk Downs, is much more than a fancy horse show.

Cavalia was conceived by Normand Latourelle, one of the instigators of Cirque du Soleil, and by designer/director Erick Villeneuve and two French horse trainers, Frédéric Pignon and Magali Delgado. This eclectic collaboration has produced an equestrian circus ballet that challenged my ideas about the dependency between animals and their human custodians, about the meaning of performance versus naturalism. Like its popular predecessor, Cavalia specializes in stunts that read in a huge space — aerial choreography, acrobatics, panoramic mass movements — while preserving the "human" scale of things. In this case, that perspective includes 47 superb large animals.

The show begins with horses walking slowly across the wide performing space all by themselves. We’ve all seen horses unattended out in the fields and hills. But these horses know exactly where to go, they’re not spooked by a couple of thousand people gazing down at them. All through the evening, this image of unsaddled, unsupervised horses keeps recurring, and as the audience leaves, four of them are contentedly standing, looking around, nosing the ground, just passing the time. But of course they’ve been trained to do this, just as they’ve been trained to prance in unison or carry people on their backs.

This illusion of freedom somehow puts the animals on a more equal basis with the human actors. It domesticates them. From there the concept can extend to several duets in which people, usually Frédéric Pignon or Nadia Richer, interact with horses as if they were pets.

In one scene at the beginning, Richer and the gray Lusitano stallion Lyrico meet at a pool of water, splash playfully, and amble about. At one point late in the evening, Pignon plays with three of the beasts at once, talking quietly to them, nuzzling and embracing, watching them do tricks. The horses pretend to disobey him. He smiles at the audience indulgently. Pignon clearly loves these members of the family, as we do our dogs and cats. Horses can be affectionate and bond with their owners, but this was almost supernatural, not just anthropomorphic.

Cavalia’s horses certainly have distinct personalities; some are stars, some are goofballs, some are great ensemble players. All of them are scrupulously trained and rehearsed. A lot of spectators Thursday night seemed to be there for the horsemanship rather than the horses-are-just-like-humans effect. The woman next to me, a racehorse owner from Georgia, had flown into Boston that day for the show. She told me the names of some of the steps, and as one white horse strutted to a drum rhythm, she whispered, "It takes five years for a horse to learn that!"

In a Pas de Deux (The Mirror), Magali Delgado and Estelle Delgado, dressed in quasi-mediæval gowns, rode two white horses through a choreographed routine that included rhythmic prancing, sidestepping patterns, circles face to face. I think this was the number where the horses bowed to the audience at the end, by kneeling down on one leg.

Besides the formal elements, the show featured wonderful daredevil riding, including a cowboy scene. Horses ran across the space at top speed while their riders slung themselves over the side, landed facing backward, leaned out no-handed from the stirrups. Gymnasts do these kinds of things on stationary horses. Then there were thrilling scenes where one person stood on the backs of two horses galloping side by side — you were supposed to imagine Roman chariots, I think, without the chariots.

Festooned around all this brilliant horse and humanflesh were the more conventional theatrics of a team of acrobats, women on bungee trapezes, and trampoliners. And the whole show was decked out in elaborate costumes, atmospheric lighting, projections, lush music, and a small snowstorm.

But what will stick with me is the memory of a man and a horse strolling together in companionable unison, possibly the most sophisticated acting teamwork I’ve ever seen.

Dance Collective, a producer of Boston modern dance for three decades, began its final season last weekend at the new Boston University Dance Theater with a concert of works by artistic director Micki Taylor-Pinney and guest choreographer Sarah Slifer. The Collective will fold after giving several school programs through spring 2006. The last of the original founder directors, Dawn Kramer, relinquished her post in 2003 to Micki Taylor-Pinney, a Dance Collective member since 1985 who’s also the coordinator of the dance program at BU.

In a graceful curtain speech, Kramer praised all her former and current collaborators but left it unclear whether there’ll continue to be a "company" after Dance Collective ceases operations as such. I don’t think Taylor-Pinney has announced whether she’ll be starting a new collaborative group or carrying on her work under a different configuration.

The times are certainly different for dance and the arts from what they were in 1973, at the peak of the Dance Boom. Maybe choreographers want to work independently now rather than pool their resources with several colleagues. Maybe the climate for doing one’s work is a little bit more favorable within a university than out in the marketplace. The concert’s title, "Commencement," proposed an ambiguous message. If another phase is to begin once the group that has evolved over the years completes its work, the spirit if not the substance will be different.

Friday night’s concert had technical problems, despite the nearly new theater facility, a balky video projector being the most obvious. But all six pieces of the evening had the underdeveloped and overconceptualized look of a lot of serious work being done everywhere today. Both Taylor-Pinney and Slifer incorporated gadgety props, costumes, objects, referential music, and lengthy program notes that might have been meant to nudge their dancing to higher levels of entertainment or profundity.

Some of the misfires could have been intentional. I hope I’m not stretching things to infer a connection between some of this dancing and the faux naturalism of Cavalia’s horses. Art now seems disgusted with the veneer of technique and desperate for a more genuine expression, even if that must also be artificial.

In the first of Sarah Slifer’s duets, My Own Personal #2 and #3, the dancers (Slifer and Emily Beattie) did slightly out-of-synch phrases that looked like canons where the leadership shifted every few seconds. They executed all their moves with a studied awkwardness, sometimes inserting finicky gestures, duck-footed bourrées, and other vocabulary they’d ripped from a ballet class. They turned on a boombox and crouched on the floor with their butts to the audience; the music continued playing after the lights went out.

In Duet #3, Kachina Drew-Geaber and Stephany Mendzela worked more harmoniously, with curvier, prettier movement. But their smooth solidarity disintegrated until at the end they were standing at microphones snatching lines they were supposed to sing from a dense, scrolling, partly-out-of-focus script projected on the screen. They might have been imitating American Idol rejectees.

Slifer’s solo, The Must (drive-by) seemed to have been inspired by a Belgian brothel, but the program note’s only real clue to the dance was its remark "Seeking perfection in an adulterated form." I guess this alluded to the obsessive but affectedly diffident way in which Slifer, who had stripped to her underwear, would attack a phrase over and over, faster and faster, until the movement approached flame-out.