NEWS "Dancing the Mystery": A Cornucopia By Elizabeth Gand The harvest feast of Bay Area dance that was “Dancing the Mystery” (produced by ABD Productions at Dance Mission Theater November 19-21) offered a stunning variety of cultural flavors. The evening opened with Unity Nguyen taking us “From Vietnam to America/To Africa and Back” via the sounds of her Vietnamese zither, Ghanaian Ewe drum, and African harp. Anne Bluethenthal Dancers’ “Global Heart” invited us to contemplate the entire earth as a vast feeling and thinking body, one possessed of history, memory, voice, suffering, and desire. An alternate cosmic presence infused the classical North Indian Kathak dance of Antonia Minnecola’s “The Sound of Movement.” Sara Shelton Man served up an aesthetic dish (“Lotus 695”) bursting with pungent ideas, fresh textures, and a riveting intensity. To complete the array of pleasures, the Aguas de Bahia Dance Company’s “Puxade De Rede” confected a sweet mix of Bahian myth, theater, singing, and dancing. After their finale, the children in the audience joined the dancers on stage, and the evening ended—as all good parties should—with a spontaneous overflow of free-form, joyous movement. What united this exciting diversity of works was storytelling: What’s a winter’s feast without a story to beguile the mind, just as physical pleasures satisfy the senses? Minnecola and Aguas de Bahia used a traditional narrative to structure their dances. Anne Bluethenthal and Sarah Shelton Mann worked to challenge, re-imagine, and complicate the very idea of dance “telling” a story. Bluethenthal’s “Global Heart” opened with dancers huddled together, words flying from their mouths in chant, praise, lament, and song. Phrases seemed to coalesce into an account of origins and loss—almost an eco-feminist counter-tale to Genesis (a Gynesis)—then shifted and complicated their meaning. The choreography blended joyous physicality with intimations of fear and rage. Dancers rolled on the floor, pushing their flexed feet through space with the urgency of Greek Furies. Word and movement catalyzed and complicated each other. In the second section, Bluethenthal replaced verbal language with haunting gestures. Performing a quietly intense solo, she used her hands in a kinetic version of speech, pointing to her body, hiding her face, and shaping the air into a small globe that she carried carefully before her, as if it might fall and shatter—an emblem of all delicate worlds in need of protection. A similarly rich and ambiguous re-conception of storytelling defined Sarah Shelton Mann’s “Lotus 695.” Mann began by marking out a space at the audience’s feet with a black mat, on which she proceeded to perform a weirdly vivid kinetic ritual involving an egg and a spinning metal prop. The trance-inducing simplicity of her actions recalled the private worlds children create as they dig absorbedly in the mud. Having completed her strange magic act, Mann departed, giving the stage to Leslie Seiters, who risked eye-popping extremes of physical daring with the austere calm of a Zen monk. Mark Stuvers joined her in a duet; together they sliced the air, dove onto each other’s bodies, and plunged into gravity. Every movement, glance, and touch had the specificity of a story demanding to be told. Finally, Mann returned, unrolling her black mat on the ground and chalking flowing marks across it, transforming it into a giant blackboard that she covered with unreadable writing. Her piece seemed to tell us that dance—like life—always communicates, but what it says is more than we can grasp.