William Forsythe's new work, "Atmospheric Studies"

Though it contains some nice things, the new piece is a failure. As though he was incapable of making any decisions, Forsythe includes everything, crowding the stage with movement and ideas until it's just a blur. The idea was to dissolve the distinction between a woman suffering because her son has died and artistic depictions of that suffering, using dance, color, dialogue, distorted and very loud sounds, and that old genre somewhere described by Michael Baxandall, the literary description of a painting. The problem is that we remain on the margins, distanced by a range of quasi-Brechtian techniques that remind us again and again that the artist's enterprise is doubtful, visible, too artificial by half. The dancing is a bore, the dialogue devolves into a moment straight out of "Sprockets," and the final scene is a mess. Naturally the applause at Zellerbach on Friday night went on and on. (I spotted Peter Sellars when he arrived and there were marvelously dressed women in the audience.)