Anne-Marie Mulgrew's "SALT'

Salt gets a bad rap in Western medical circles. Doctors blame high salt levels for everything from asthma and osteoporosis to high blood pressure and cancer. But if you lived far from a seacoast in medieval times, you'd have trouble living without it. Throughout history, salt has been praised and vilified in equal measure: to take with a grain of salt contrasts with rubbing salt in a wound. In religion, salt cleanses, while in warfare, it scorches the earth.

To explore the mineral's uses and impacts on human culture, choreographer Anne-Marie Mulgrew created her SALT, based on Mark Kurlansky's 2003 book, Salt: A World History. There's nothing new about a choreographer building a dance from a literary work; Rebecca Davis constructed her Darfur last year from Brian Steidle's autobiographical account of his experiences in war-ravaged Sudan. But unlike Davis's piece, Mulgrew disavails her work of dramatic narrative, plot or consistent characterization. Instead she uses the idea of salt to represent religious rituals and social customs in a ten-segment movement structure broken up by five video segments.

The result— ill-effected and poorly realized— hardly represents a choreographic equivalent of "the salt of the earth."

A Sumo ritual

Initially, Mulgrew blended the ceremonial with the rituals of daily life. While Joseph Cicala plunged his hands into a bucket of salt, in "Awakening," Elrey Belmonti poured handfuls around the border of the stage, creating a sacred space for the rest of the work (a ritual still performed today by Sumo wrestlers before a meet). Moments later, evoking a feeling of Palm Sunday's subdued grandeur, a processional of dancers carried Rebecca Patek aloft, symbolizing a fertility festival.

Dressed in white-on-white tank tops and pants (and later in flowing mid-shin skirts), the dancers licked fingers dragged across their faces, opened their arms to heaven, and rubbed the ground and then their legs in a circular pattern. Belmonti and Cicala fought over the placement of a bucket of salt while dancers raced across the back of the stage. Mulgrew later used this bucket to wash herself—unerotically, unsensually—with handfuls of the powdery mineral.

But despite its competent grounding in a dance theater staging, SALT quickly became uninteresting and obvious, a problem exacerbated by Peter J. Jakubowski's poorly illuminated lighting design.

In "Pillars of Salt Rumination," the dancers transitioned in and out of positions— some balletic, yoga, others tai chi— that resembled the hieroglyphs lining a pyramid's hidden tomb (the Egyptians buried their dead with vials of salt). But by the time Mulgrew constructed this first lengthy, intense and visually evocative dance segment, Part One ended. (But not before we were shown a trio of blindfolded, giggling girls tasting various types of salt— a scene that ultimately degenerated into a condiment fight.)

Videos, too

In a trio of religiously grounded, mystical movements forming the core of Part Two, Mulgrew fashions a unity that could have carried the entire work. She explores the duality of salt— it corrodes as it preserves— in dancers rushing toward and repelled by a rope stretched across the stage. Their forceful motions eventually break through the divide, and they fall to arise into a choreography that achieves the luminous quality of a dream. Here, the music attains a consistency as well, segueing from Bizet into a lengthy piece by Vangelis (that by itself centers Part Two). Here Jakubowski's lighting finally textures the movements.

The supple, flowing motions of Section Nine (untitled— another example of poor realization) and "Of the Earth" attain a coherent sense of choreography as well; these visually entrancing scenes convey emotions of fervor, exultation and reverence. Unfortunately, Mulgrew breaks the coherence of Part Two with the insertion of a pair of videos, only one of which ("Links") maintains the conceptual unity by showing Belmonti trapped under a grate as other dancers pour salt over him, reflecting the notion that cleansing involves an element of suffering.

Even the work's best numbers were marred by severe technical imprecision. Dancers nearly fell out of their shakily-held arabesques, and poor synchronicity of motion marked all the ensemble movements that Mulgrew didn't intentionally stagger. Aside from Mulgrew and the two men, none of the dancers displayed facial expressions consistent with the emotional hue of the dances; some wore chorus girl half-smiles while others looked stoned (to be sure, in some religious rituals, the latter would make sense). Finally, the videos suffered formatting problems for the backdrop at the Painted Bride: Every shot made the dancers look compressed and bizarre.

Grasping a slippery theme

You can't help but admire the breadth of Mulgrew's ambition. Nearly every movement in SALT explored a different style of dance and exuded a different sensibility of feeling. The musical selections— ranging from chanting, stylized techno, even an opera aria— articulated a mood for each segment, evoking moods ranging from Egypt and later sub-Saharan Africa to the Far East, South America, and Greece.

But instead of dramatizing the impact of salt on human culture and history, Mulgrew's insertion of quotes, the bizarre video segments— including a bathing ritual that appeared (unintentionally?) horrific— and the work's lack of conceptual unity made the evening read like a scatterbrained doctoral thesis: "Salt: used by everyone, everywhere, for everything!" In the end, Mulgrew's SALT failed to do what her subject matter does every day: raise people's blood pressure.