Guided by the Brontes’ voices

As a college dropout in New York in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Rosanna Gamson toyed with the idea of pursuing poetry as a career. She studied with such poets as Stanley Kunitz, Louise Gluck and Charles Simic and vicariously shared the experiences of friends enrolled in writing programs.

Eventually she decided to return to academia -- this time to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance. But her flirtation with poetry may help explain her current direction in the “only slightly more practical” vocation of choreographer. “I really like the work I’m doing now,” she says, “where there’s always a written, textual component.”

In fact, Gamson, 48, who relocated from New York to L.A. in 1996, has long sought inspiration from literary sources. Her work has taken cues from “The Arabian Nights,” Greek mythology and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” More recently, the evening-length “Aura,” which she made in collaboration with Mexican choreographer Cecilia Appleton and first performed in 2004, took its title and inspiration from a novella by Carlos Fuentes.

But with her latest work, “Ravish,” premiering this week at the New LATC, Gamson has embarked on what might be her most ambitious effort at page-to-stage transformation. Based on the lives of the Bronte sisters, the hourlong multimedia piece blends movement, text, video and an interactive floor linked to computer software that generates images by tracking the motions of the dancers. If all goes according to her plan, “Ravish” should “engage the audience in the way you are engaged when reading a book,” Gamson says. “With some dances, you can just watch them and let the movement wash over you. In this case, there’s the added complication of technology, text and image. The audience is going to have to do some decoding.”

In other words, do not expect a story ballet, the dance equivalent of a biopic or the kind of movement piece that might feature extensive monologues adapted directly from “Jane Eyre” or “Wuthering Heights.” Rather, if a recent rehearsal was any indication, Gamson has chosen a more abstract and allusive approach to the Brontes, their prodigious literary output and their tragic deaths. (All of them died from tuberculosis before the age of 40.)

In one section, Gamson’s cast of four women and one man mutter barely audible, often unintelligible sentence fragments as they perform rigorous movements that alternate between frenzied and labored, ecstatic and foreboding. Often, they dance apart from one another, spinning in circles and looking like children who lose themselves in games involving imaginary worlds. Sometimes, they wrestle and play variations on Follow the Leader. Frequently, they crash to the floor and at certain moments scream in horror.

To this, add video projections of young girls at bedtime, poetic texts written by Gamson and the interactive floor designed by Flavia Sparacino, which creates the effect of letters forming words that appear to follow the dancers as they move across the stage.

“I wanted to capture this moment in adolescence before you become socially inhibited but when romantic love is in the picture -- the time when girls feel like they can do anything, when they form these intimate, passionate friendships and play elaborate games,” says Gamson. “The Brontes and their stories happened to fit what I wanted to communicate.”

Dance’s literary tradition

Gamson is certainly not the first choreographer to mine the literary canon for her own purposes. Ballet’s distinguished Antony Tudor and modern dance icon Martha Graham loved making dances from Greek myths. Jose Limon’s 1967 “Psalm,” one of his signature works, was inspired by the novel “The Last of the Just” by Andre Schwarz-Bart.

In 1990, French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj drew international attention for his “Romeo and Juliet,” which re-imagined the characters in a modern police state, and the dances of Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert have drawn from authors including Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. And locally, there’s Gamson’s colleague Heidi Duckler, who’s showing her latest rendition of the Beowulf legend this weekend at Cal State L.A.’s State Playhouse.

But although classical dance has a long and rich tradition of story ballets based on Shakespeare, fairy tales and myriad other written sources, melding the literary with the kinetic can be a trickier business for contemporary choreographers intent on avoiding literal storytelling, clunky allusions and other pitfalls that lurk in the challenge of adapting something from one artistic medium into another. Even the most accomplished choreographers have met with critical derision for working with narrative. Twyla Tharp’s 1995 “How Near Heaven,” for example, which drew from Emily Dickinson’s poems, was pronounced “almost totally opaque” by New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce.

With “Ravish,” Gamson doesn’t think she’s going to fail. “But this is a hard piece for me to put up,” she acknowledges. “It’s as if I’m dancing in my living room and I’ve invited people to watch. In many ways, this piece is really about me and my childhood.”

At her Echo Park home, Gamson alternates between pure conversation with a visitor at her dining room table and using her home office computer to show off some of the text and imagery that will be part of “Ravish.” She’s a tall, lanky and highly articulate woman who frequently cracks jokes and claims to always be “changing my hair.” (This day, it’s short and two-toned, white on top and black on the bottom.) She can be disarmingly self-deprecating yet at the same time projects seriousness and confidence about her art.

“I would love it if people just saw my work as theater,” she says of her long-standing zest for creating multimedia performances. “I wish we could all just get past putting each other into boxes, and I don’t really like the term ‘multidisciplinary’ -- something about it sounds evil. So if you’re going to use a catchall phrase to describe me, then I guess it’s ‘choreographer.’ ”

Opening up her world

Daughter of a dancer mother and a musician father, Gamson grew up in New York and Italy. As a child, she “was schlepped around” to dance lessons and later studied with such well-known teachers as Hanya Holm and Bessie Schonberg. “It was the family business,” she says of the performing arts. “I know what it means to belong to a family where creativity is prized above all else.”

Gamson’s ideas for “Ravish” also came from watching her own daughters, now 10 and 12.

“They would play all these elaborate games, the dressing up, the setting of rules. . . . It was all so super-theatrical,” she says. “It got me thinking about the Brontes, about femininity and creativity and how, to me, there’s nothing silly or weak about that passionate, emotional feminine voice of the Romantic period. I think it’s a heroic voice.”

In addition to reading the six books by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Gamson read several biographies, did a bit of Internet surfing and familiarized herself with such subjects as Victorian mourning rituals. She also gave her performers assignments to help them develop “hybrid Bronte characters” and a sense of intimacy with one another. “I made them wrestle a lot,” she says. “I wanted my dancers to communicate not so much the Brontes’ words but more their isolation from the world, their physical condition and their ability to communicate.”

Marissa Labog, one of Gamson’s dancers, had the task of researching Charlotte Bronte and says she loved the “homework” Gamson gave the troupe. “She really got us to understand who we are within the work and where the movement is coming from,” she says. “Rosanna’s always coming from a very intellectual place, where it’s never movement just for movement’s sake.”

Sparacino, who heads a Santa Monica-based interactive technology and digital art firm called Sensing Places, similarly observes that Gamson was unlike the many people who ask her to “just do something cool” for them. “Rosanna had a well-defined vision,” she says. “She was very clear that she didn’t want the technology to dominate the dancing, and she knew what she wanted to express.”

Gamson concedes that the various elements of her production, viewed separately, do have an “Oh, cool” factor. “I guess part of me comes from the ‘God forbid you should bore the audience’ school of choreography,” she says. “But I also just love big theater. The little, sensitive productions that people do in lofts never moved me.”

Ultimately, Gamson wants things her way but wants the audience to like them too.

Above all, she hopes she has effectively communicated “an imaginative world, where the people in it never move into growing up. That period right before I was 13, that’s when I felt most myself. And I still have this vivid imaginative life. That’s why I made this piece. I don’t want to be alone with it. I want everyone to come visit me.”

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‘Ravish’

Where: The New LATC, 514 S. Spring St., downtown L.A., Theater 3

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $28

Contact: (323) 461-3673 or www.thenewlatc.com