Dance: Joke in the Midst of Prayer

Approximately 20 minutes before curtain time, men and women in blue jeans and work shirts began walking slowly, slowly onto the curtainless stage of Paris' Theatre National Populaire. There they stood or sat, meditatively waiting. At 8:30, Indian Musician Nageswara Rao appeared, carrying his vina — a long, gourd-based stringed instrument, much like the sitar popularized by Ravi Shankar and Beatle George Harrison. For a quarter of an hour, the vina mewed and whinnied while no one moved. Then things began to come to life.

During the two unbroken hours of action that followed, Actor Yan Brian recited a passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra while climbing a ladder, male dancers struggled for balls of rolled-up newspapers, a black-clad hag buzzed around on a scooter and recited folk poems. Men and women frugged wildly to rock-'n'-roll music, imitated coitus to electronic pings and a soft-voiced reading of the Song of Songs, staged a mock war between classical and modern ballet, and ended looking up expectantly while the noise of jet engines screamed overhead. Then, during ten minutes of bravos from the audience, they all slowly, slowly walked offstage into the wings.

Mass for the Present Time is the latest production—and most spectacular success so far—of France's far-out choreographer Maurice Bejart, 40 (TIME, Nov. 6, 1964). Bejart admits that Mass may not be quite the mot juste for the work. "Part of it, though, is a sort of liturgy," he says. "Another part is something more frivolous and more fun—a joke in the middle of a prayer. If you can joke about something very important, you have achieved freedom." Free or not, Paris audiences enjoyed the joke, and so did the critics. "There is a little of everything in this choreographic ceremony," said Le Figaro reverently. "Pure plasticity, provocation, tenderness, violence. But there is above all the imagination of Béjart, more effervescent than ever."