Borrowed Light Dance Review

When the performers of the Tero Saarinen Dance Company and the Boston Camerata concluded "Borrowed Light" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, of course they went backstage and changed into regular clothes and engaged in the usual range of 21st-century activities, including, no doubt, schmoozing at the 25th Next Wave gala after the show.

But after just 70 minutes spent peering into Mr. Saarinen's strange, captivating choreographic mind, I couldn't imagine this transition. Instead, I saw these people throwing open the theater's doors onto a stark, wintry world, their severe but exultant rituals continuing in a landscape punctuated by bare trees and small, plain houses. The work, built on Shaker hymns and dances, felt entirely of another time, the equivalent of a loosely historical novel.

Certainly the simple, beautiful music of the Shakers, a nearly extinct celibate sect (at last count there were three left, residing in Maine), had much to do with this illusion. And such rendering - Boston Camerata, where have you been all my life? But credit must go to Mr. Saarinen, who, starting from the original Shaker dances, has forged a wonderfully earthy movement language, full of lurching, rhythmically stamping processionals, arched backs, outflung arms and shoulders that look as if they could bear up under a greater burden than Atlas's. Mr. Saarinen and his seven dancers disappeared into this language, leaving the audience to squint through Mikki Kunttu's thick, murky lighting design. (Could anybody in the back of the opera house see anything?)

Shaker hymns stress simplicity and the peace that comes through religious duties. The refrain of one of their most stirring songs, "Simple Gifts," runs:

When true simplicity is gained,

To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed.

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

The dancers were a people in search of such clarity, but struggling in that search. They and the eight singers sometimes moved as one in Mr. Kunttu's set, a monumental meeting room shaped as much by beams of light as by stairs and panels. But the singers had traveled much closer to this ideal of simplicity, down to their dark costumes, plain against the dancers' sweeping coat dresses and structured skirts (designed by Erika Turunen).

In one of the most rousing passages, members of the Boston Camerata huddled in the middle of the stage, turning slowly as one while singing "The Great Wheel." The dancers flew around them in a wider circle, their bodies bucking and staggering as they strove for release.

To my mind, that release never came. But as with much in life, the heart of the matter was in the striving.

"Borrowed Light" runs through tomorrow at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100; bam.org.