A Choreographer Steps Into Antiwar Movement

CHICAGO -- The body doesn't lie, said Martha Graham, famously.

Baloney, says Victoria Marks, quietly but no less firm.

"I think we can lie pretty effectively," says the 52-year-old California choreographer, in a collective reference to her own work and the dance scene in general. Marks, a former dancer, now a choreography professor at UCLA, has a big beef with concert dance -- all of it, ballet, modern, jazz -- and its complicity in keeping us dumb and silent. (You didn't realize that was happening to you, dance lover? See how insidious it is?) Entwined with dance since she fell in love with ballet as a child, Marks condemns the art form for what she sees as its prevailing shallowness, its preoccupation with making effort look easy, with masking pain, with seducing and soothing its public into a state of bliss.

"This dance was a series of rescue attempts," she says, barefoot and wearing a loose black top and trousers, making her case to the dozen or so audience members who have lingered in a tiny black-box theater a couple of blocks from Wrigley Field. They've just watched her probing, quarrelsome new piece, "Not About Iraq" -- which comes to D.C.'s Dance Place on Saturday and next Sunday -- and have stayed for a discussion.

On a couple of levels, Marks believes, dance is the ultimate in spin. That phoniness led to her rescue mission for the art form. "I wanted to rescue it from my own contempt," she says.

Of course, some of us happen to like the sweet seduction that dance offers, thank you very much. The youthfulness and vitality it celebrates. What's wrong with a little escapism? Better than thinking about politics or, uh, the war . . .

And that's the point, Marks explains. It's the morning after the show, and we're sitting in the narrow, sunlit office of the townhouse where the choreographer is staying during a week-long residency here. She apologizes for the room's stifling heat, which she can't turn down. But she keeps her warm-up jacket zipped up over her slender frame, and wears thick green snow-boots; like most dancers, who fear nothing so much as chilled muscles, she craves warmth.

We're not thinking enough about the war, she says -- and we're not doing enough about it, either.

"I feel very critical of myself, because I don't know how to act as a citizen," she says. "How do I really know what's going on? What is the truth? If you don't think you understand what's happening, how can you act?" And: "Is it possible to think about citizenship and artmaking at the same time?"

(Talking with Marks becomes something of a Talmudic study session; whether it's the result of her Jewish upbringing or of 13 years in academia, she piles questions on top of questions. Conclusions, frequently, are optional.)

To find out how art and civic duty mix -- and to prove dance can indeed be smart, as well as honest -- Marks did what you won't see the higher-profile dancemakers do, what you won't see at the Kennedy Center, what you won't see embraced by the large-venue presenters. She plunged into the thankless, largely forsaken arena of political art, a realm haunted by preachiness and melodrama, from which an artist rarely emerges victorious. But the marvel of "Not About Iraq" is its ringing clarity. This is a work of quiet but engrossing power, fueled by the way it raises disturbing questions.

Marks made "Not About Iraq" with a light touch; it is pared-down and unsentimental. It's also funny-creepy. It contains some unsettling truths -- at one point, three dancers thrash themselves into a heaving lather in an extended series of flying jumps, exposing sheer physical effort, which Marks loves because it "is not a representation -- it is the thing, a human moment."