Play it again; Pina Bausch and William Forsythe return to BAM.(Brooklyn Academy of Music; two dance programs)

Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, who turned up with their German-based companies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently, are the two most influential choreographers in Europe today. Actually, Bausch has left a deep print in America, too. In New York's "downtown" dance scene of the late eighties, dancing was largely replaced by a violent sort of drama, in which, very often, someone was dying and the audience was to blame. If I had to name the reasons for that, the first would be AIDS and the second would be the 1984 American debut of Bausch's company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal. On her stage, there were slashings, rapes. The dancers threw each other into walls. When ...