Martha Clarke’s Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited)

Martha Clarke has seldom pursued the linear in her storytelling. Like many of the artists she’s interpreted—Franz Kafka and Hieronymus Bosch, for instance—Clarke has a taste for collaging imagery with such a ravenous appetite that the final product invariably takes on the taste of a three-day acid trip. Vienna Lusthaus (Revisited) is no exception. Capturing the tumult of pre-World War I Vienna requires from Clarke a Herculean effort, not of weaving but juggling. But Clarke pulls it off with the colhelp of some able collaborators—composer Richard Peaslee and playwright Charles Mee. Thirty-two vignettes, including music, dance, poetry, and performance, fly in a seamless flow of recurring symbol and gesture. The intensity of the swirl, a distillation of one of history’s most remarkable bursts of energy, threatens to boil over into chaos, but Clarke manages the operation by enveloping the whole in a dry haze of unmovable estrangement. This is dance for brave—and mature—audiences. Northrop, 84 Church St. S.E., (612) 624-2345, www.northrop.umn.edu