NEW YORK, NY.- If you know that Gisèle Vienne’s “Crowd” is about a rave, you might expect to see a crowd moving to techno music, searching for euphoria. You might not expect most of the 90-minute work to transpire in slow motion.

But this French Austrian choreographer’s aim in “Crowd,” which had its United States premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is not just to open a window onto an all-night party and the people there. She wants to open the doors of perception and let us inside a different experience of time.

The show manages both parts — the sociological and the perceptual — with skill. The stage is covered in a layer of dirt and detritus: water bottles, clothing. Patrick Riou lights this scene coldly, like a moonscape or a stadium after the game. Music fades in, and people arrive with drinks and cigarettes, very slowly.

The reduced speed gives us time to look. There are 15 participants, dressed and moving not like professional dancers but like young people at a rave. Each is a distinct individual, a character to follow. Since their wordless interactions are drawn out — friends or strangers locking eyes across a crowded room and, minutes later, embracing or not — your eye can wander, searching for a story, or stories.

Sometimes, all but one or two dancers freeze, and we seem to enter a personal trip or hallucination for a few moments, the techno beats fading into a more ambient sonic haze. Or the whole clump of bodies is aswirl and all freeze or spasm every four or eight counts, connected by the music.

Once “Crowd” has introduced these modes, though, it stalls, reverting to slow-mo again and again with diminishing returns. The first burst of normal speed is frightening, but after that well-earned shock, the production has to resort to cheaper surprises: sudden increases of volume, a shaken-up bottle of soda, the sound of a gunshot.




It’s a little perverse that there’s so little dancing in “Crowd.” The soundtrack, selected by electronic dance music luminary Peter Rehberg, who died last year, samples classics from 1990s Detroit, including a lot of Underground Resistance. But rarely does Vienne treat this dance music as dance music, allowing the cast to catch up to its rhythms, even with the footwork-less noodling of ravers. The show’s most exciting moment, for me, is an encounter between two men (Jonathan Schatz and Philip Berlin), when what threatens to be a fight turns into an all-too-brief dance-off.

What seems to excite Vienne, though, is violence. There are hints from the start, moments when a woman falls to the ground and a man nudges her head with his boot or grabs her by the hair. One woman (Katia Petrowick) arrives already covered in blood. The cut seems to come later, delivered by a blissed-out party girl in gold (Marine Chesnais) who, up to that point, has been the most appealing character.

Petrowick’s disturbed character takes the general social anxiety to the greatest extreme, and you might be happy for her when she finally kisses another woman. But while everyone makes it out alive and the woman who passes out is helped home, “Crowd” ultimately feels more interested in death than in life, or at least in magnifying darkness for the sake of intensity. The decelerated dancers sometimes seem like zombies, and rather than letting them dance, Vienne, a puppeteer with a sadistic streak, wants to roll them in the dirt.

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‘Crowd’

Through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.