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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Tatiana Baganova

Provincial Dances Theatre
By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
April 23, 2003

In Tatiana Baganova’s “Wings at Tea,” the Devil plays a cello and a pig flies. Both pieces shown by Baganova’s Provincial Dances Theatre at Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Wednesday night explore the human condition with a healthy dose of whimsy.

Baganova is a story teller. Her dances are a series of vignettes that unfold slowly, as though told at a winter tea party where no one is in a particular hurry to walk home in the cold.

Unlike some whose dance theater is as much theater as dance, Baganova’s excellent dancers move. In “Wings at Tea,” they lumber across the stage in a lurching crouch or dance, stiff-limbed, like robots. When crouching, the women’s legs are hidden by the full skirts of their 1950s-style prom dresses, shortening them and making the dancers look like deformed dolls.

“Wings” is a battle-of-the-sexes piece. The women lead the men on, the men respond, manipulative and violent. There’s a whiff of depravity, but the nastiness doesn’t seem personal. Both sexes behave as they are programmed to behave.

A bride’s dress, hung by puppet strings, awaits one of the women. The men line up to grope her and eat the grapes that seem to grow from her shoulders until she’s had enough and stops them.

All this is watched by the Devil, musician Chris Lancaster, whose hair is spiked and gelled into horns, and who sometimes plays on his own, sometimes accompanies taped music of Yma Sumac, J.S. Bach and Metallica. The pig is a winged toy that buzzes happily around in a circle, an insistent, plastic reminder of possibilities.

Baganova, who grew up in the Urals and now works in Ekaterinberg, has been choreographing for more than a decade. There’s an odd, implacable logic to her pieces, the logic of fairytales and dreams.

“Maple Garden” is both beautiful and horrible. The music (by the underground Antwerp group Die anarchistische Abendunterhaltung) sounds sweet and haunting and there’s a delicate, sculpted autumn maple, but not far away, a woman is suspended in midair. A witch on a broomstick? A corpse? She changes position from time to time, but always seems lifeless.

On the ground, men tenderly tie women to the tree by their hair. And then abandon them. A man frees one of the women (she’s wearing a wig and walks off, leaving the wig in bondage) and takes her place.

Baganova’s images shift as smoothly as clouds on a gently windy day. Her vision of life seems to be that it is an illusion over which we have no control, but she’s not hopeless about it. There’s always the chance that pigs will fly.