Citizen Pain

On a blank stage, lit solely by massive overhead industrial lighting, crowd members struggle. They pin one another in wrestling holds, reverse swiftly away from a man having a deconstructed seizure, and then freeze, creating snapshot after snapshot of a people set against itself. The only sounds are bodies thudding onto the floor and the rasp of labored breathing, punctuated with sharp, suspenseful silences. This unaccompanied, but profoundly musical, sequence in William Forsythe's work "Three Atmospheric Studies," now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, does more to illustrate a city torn by war than a brace of Reuters photographs. It communicates perfectly the civilian panic, the way that reaction multiplies immediately into chaos, and the sheer physical stress of living in fear.

With his tri-part, evening-length piece, Mr. Forsythe has taken up the often-muddied banner of political performance. He has called making the work "an act of citizenship," and he plays no coy games about where he levels his criticisms and at whom. As the three "studies" unfold, the attack pinpoints its focus — in the first, we see only the ugliness of police action, in the second, the company (literally) translates the action into Arabic, and by the end, a Texan (Dana Casperson) is making mealymouthed pronouncements about "states of emergency." This last surge of outrage, unfortunately, overwhelms Mr. Forsythe's so far delicate circuitry. But until that overstep, Mr. Forsythe's chillingly pointed critique has managed to tattoo itself beneath the audience's skin.

Mr. Forsythe organizes the evening like a religious triptych, with crowd scenes on each side and a tragic trio in the center. First, a mother (Jone San Martin) strides forward to tell us that "This is Composition One, in which my son was arrested." This cues the peripatetic struggles, set to silence, which seem to make the dozenperson company into a single agonal beast. Even as their limbs function as telescoping, pivoting supports, setting off chain reactions of twisting, folding, collapsing and recovering, the dancers keep in nearly telepathic contact. When they all stop suddenly (a visual pun — the son "arrests" and is arrested), the stage picture's familiarity reminds us of our daily exposure to photographs of violence.

In the second section, the mother and her translator (a marvelously weary Amancio Gonzalez) try to turn her fragmented memories into a coherent statement in Arabic. White strings stretch through the space; they function like a painting teacher's indicative lines, tracing vanishing points and highlighting perspective. David Kern steps over and around them, explaining artistic conventions, and interrupting the increasingly desperate mother and the increasingly irritated translator. It's paying homage to Mr. Forsythe's twin inspirations, a Lucas Cranach "Lamentation Beneath the Cross" and a photograph of a 2005 Middle East bombing, whose overlapping compositional qualities underpin the dance. That the scene also questions using "catastrophe in art" makes it a hinge, swinging the work back away from the mother's individual pain and into the public realm.

With this, Mr. Forsythe, an expert in using the body as fulcrum, has thrown us, unfortunately, into his third act. Where he used silence, he now uses sonic assault. Where he avoided cliché, he now tumbles into it. Suddenly everything is shorthand. The politician must be corrupt — she speaks with a twang. The mother must be a tool — she is manipulated like a puppet. Once the political message becomes nose-thumbing, it loses its elemental power. But while it was an indictment of the silent audience, a collective action bemoaning the lack of larger collective action, it validates Mr. Forsythe's titanic international reputation.

Mr. Forsythe's most famous neoclassical works — pieces like "In the Middle Somewhat Elevated" and "Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude" — appeal as investigations of the body's outermost capabilities. Already extreme positions like pencheés overextend, and then impossibly rotate, and his pointework ignores all realistic notions of balance.

Here, though, casually dressed dancers tease us with actions we might attempt ourselves. They are certainly still the stuff of virtuosity. But Mr. Forsythe hides the effort, so that no move seems inhuman. Instead, his dancers do what we could be doing, if only we had the will.

Until March 3 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).