After a Long Drought, Wieland Provides the Shock of the New

In the sterile white box that Diane von Furstenberg makes available to dancers, Johannes Wieland riveted a huge crowd with four works—three dry and remote, and one very wet. A German choreographer with a ballet background, Wieland's been creating a buzz here since his days as an M.F.A. student at Tisch, from which he graduated in 2002. His Parietal Region, which opened the program, scattered six dancers in DVF's subtly tailored burgundy shirts and dark pants across the floor and all over a structure that resembled a large loft bed, from which they hung and chinned and leaped; sometimes they just huddled in its corners. They slid across the floor. Totally engaged with being disengaged, they were impossible to ignore, or to forget. His more recent One, for himself, Gus Solomons jr, and Keith Sabado, set men of three generations in an arid psychic landscape. And the evening's premiere, Corrosion, saw three couples exploring the dangers and pleasures of human contact. Tomorrow, from 2000, was perhaps the strangest, with dancers plunging their heads into large aquariums and flinging their wet hair to music by Richard Strauss.