The framing was certainly relevant as my daughter and I watched “Sechs Tanze” on Saturday, October 8th, images of horrors in Israel and Palestine funneling into my New York Times feed. While the beautiful bodies cavorted on screen, dressed now in corseted undergarments and powdered wigs, a conflict so historically complex and charged as to render honest discussion among ordinary Americans nearly impossible catapulted to terrifying new extremes.

I watched the women on stage get chased, harassed, groped, and choked around the necks by their own dresses. I noted it was always the men doing the harassing. I laughed a great deal at the inventiveness of the buffoonery, while noting that the balletic style of “Sechs Tanze” is overall much more conventional than Kylian’s later work; there’s plenty of straight sauté arabesque-pas de chat-type passages between the grapplings. There’s plenty of camp, too, particularly when a man behind one of those huge baroque dresses is left in just a fig leaf, his hip thrusts knocking out the carousers. 

Did Kylian invent the norm of the abusive male, the assaulted female? No. Did the dance play differently in the wake of #MeToo? Inconclusive. Again here, the delight of the inventiveness tended to kill stirrings of internal objections; my daughter and I were laughing. Were we relating the humor of this dance to the atrocity unfolding in the Middle East? We were not, even though sadness and concern thrummed beneath the rest of my day. Perhaps the failure to activate the directives in Kylian’s program note lies in me. The viewers in McCall Hall, too, seemed to be laughing without a darker undertone. But then, they were watching “Sechs Tanze” more than two weeks earlier, the night this program opened. The extra applause went to Leta Biasucci at curtain, and she deserved it, so bright and spontaneous, blessed with a face capable of Lucille Ball reactions.