Stage

Then there was Innocent Heat, a campy staging of a pulp novel with the same title by Seattle's Pulp Vixens. The story followed Doris and Midge from their first sweaty high school lesbian gropings to a stormy relationship in New York after college. It was pure cliche, but that was the point: Jennifer Jasper and Mia Levine clownishly played out the story while Shawn Yates, as a primly curious woman named Catherine, read aloud from the book. Doris became a publishing executive after college; Midge dropped out to become an elevator operator, coming home every night sick to death of "riding up and down that greasy shaft all day." The show was witty, hysterical, over-the-top, and shamefully underattended. It ended with a smarmy lounge song by Catherine, who entered her own pulp novel and went to jail with the characters, coming out (in every sense) transformed.

Wim and Vigor
Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told. Choreographed and performed by Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard (at Third Street), March 25-29. Call 392-4400.

It's steeped in superstition, but Wim Vandekeybus' evening-length dance Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told feels most like a fantastical and terrifying trip through the surreal realm of the subconscious. The Belgian choreographer wove this wildly theatrical work together in seven overlapping sections, based on an Irish rhyme: "One for sorrow, two for joy/ Three for a girl, four for a boy/ Five for silver, six for gold/ Seven for a secret never to be told." It's about the fortune you get based on how many magpies you see; Vandekeybus uses the rhyme to explore how people try to maintain control, over themselves and others, and over things they really can't control.

The magpies are tricksters and ringmasters, enigmas and hit men; they set the action in motion and then watch it spiral into chaos. Tension underscores the most abandoned dancing in the same way that lingering fears pervade otherwise rational thinking. The first bird, danced weightlessly by Carlo de Haro Flores, pecks at a woman lying in a dimly lit clearing. Dancer John Campbell rushes in shouting and clapping his hands to scare the bird away, but succumbs to his own curiosity and begins questioning the wary animal, keeping just enough distance not to frighten it away. This section is "sorrow," and its pace picks up quickly, with dancers creeping onstage back-first as bird, man, and woman go flying across the stage in an intense struggle for power. "Sorrow" bleeds into "joy" after a tense moment when the magpie climbs into a giant wooden box, and, after the roar of what sounds like an incinerator, emerges as two birds. The choreographer's vision of joy is one part seedy French cabaret, another part Beatrix Potter: The birds, armed with a microphone and an entertainer's spiel about making people happy and helping them change, lock one dancer after another in the box to the unnerving hissing of a fire. One dancer re-emerges as a nattily dressed frog, the next as a giant sausage. When Campbell's turn comes, he steps into the box and steps out as ... himself, with no visible changes. It is simultaneously anticlimactic and reassuring.

The visual theatricality for which Vandekeybus is best known links sections together with striking subtlety. The boys' and girls' sections are bridged by a scuffle in which a man is wrestled to the ground and systematically stripped of his clothing, down to his sparkling gold shoes. When the boys meet the girls the dancing becomes more heated and reckless, with heart-stopping headlong dives and listless tangos, and men wrapping supporting arms around the women's shoulders and cradling exposed necks in the crooks of their arms.

When Vandekeybus isn't suspending his dancers over hundreds of real eggs or tangling them up in ropes, he's creating dance with a violent edge. His dancers roll out their own personal carpets across the stage with their feet and take turns jerking themselves around like hapless puppets to Pierre Verloesem's clanging industrial score. Relationships between the sexes are at once essential and cruel: The sound of searing flesh erupts in "gold" every time Campbell touches Lieve Meeussen. The magpie takes a human form at the end, and evokes the secret of the title by swinging a microphone in circles like a whistling whip and smacking people in his path with an amplified thunk. When the curtain falls, we are no closer to knowing the secret than we were when it rose, but like the best children's books, Vandekeybus has shown us whimsy and sorrow and danger in a world that is ultimately no stranger than our own.

-- Heather Wisner

Bigmouth Strikes Again
I'm Still Here ... Damn it! Written and performed by Sandra Bernhard. Musical direction and keyboards by Mitch Kaplan. Percussion by Denise Frazier. At the Alcazar Theater, 650 Geary (at Jones), through April 4. Call (510) 762-2277.