EISENBERG: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

Mary Jane Eisenberg is in tears, startled and embarrassed to find herself crying through bursts of defensive giggles as she relives the professional traumas of 1985, a year she calls “one of the hardest” in her career as dancer and choreographer.

Eisenberg is normally an irrepressibly, endearingly cocky woman. Weeping definitely isn’t her style--but she’s entitled.

She began 1985 as a torchbearer for Los Angeles-based post-modern dance--an uncompromising yet highly popular feminist dance maker celebrated for her pantomime-based, street-wise and often uproariously funny character portraits set to rock music.

These forays into the high-energy style she named “hyper-realism” anticipated the work of other acclaimed West Coast choreographers (including Seattle-based Mark Morris) and made Eisenberg a major force in the local dance community. In addition, she created innovative works compressing complex time lines and social panoramas into brilliantly layered theater images.

Besides guiding the fortunes of Shale--her dynamic 5-year-old, 10-member company--she had become sought after as a free-lance choreographer (by Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, the Long Beach Opera and the Bette Midler “No Frills” show) and respected as a teacher (at Cal State Long Beach). A $5,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for the year offered her a chance at an ambitious multidisciplinary collaboration. At 33, she had arrived and she was extending her range, if not always her grasp, with consummate daring.

But in the late summer, after the premiere of her controversial grant project, “The Amazon, the Mekong, the Missouri and the Nile,” Shale cracked. Company dissatisfaction with her increasingly abstract and technique-oriented work, along with other resentments and some natural attrition, reportedly caused all but three of her dancers to quit.

Eisenberg still hasn’t had time to fully react to the experience. Taking an hour away from rehearsals for her Jan. 13 program at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (the first appearance by her reconstituted ensemble), she quickly admits to being devastated by the walkout and tries to speak of it as positively as possible. But her face reflects feelings of rage, betrayal and deep hurt not yet resolved.

It seems no coincidence that her newest piece is titled “Passage Rites” and is about group relationships. As Eisenberg says, “If it’s a strong part of my life, it’s going to come out in the work.” And she acknowledges that the Shale conflict forced an important transition in her concept of leadership, an awareness of the inescapable isolation of being an artistic director.

“I guess this started to happen in the spring of ’84 when I began to work on ‘Terminals,’ ” she begins. “I decided somewhere along the line that I wanted my pieces to have more dance in them . I started working on a section of that piece and really looked at the dancers--and I wasn’t pleased with how well they were dancing.”

“And so I was working them very hard and they got confused as to what was going on, because I guess my attitude to them seemed to have changed--because I was changing.

“So they put their anger at that change onto the work--they had a resistance to dealing with it. That’s why I could go over, 5 million times a day, what it was about and how to relate it to themselves and to other people, but somehow it was not getting through.”

Eisenberg accepts her share of responsibility for the “Terminals” impasse--she had taken on too many responsibilities and wasn’t really in the calmest of moods. She sees, too, that her earlier, character-based works suited some company members better than her dancey abstractions later on.

But she insists on her right to grow beyond the angry, declarative theater pieces toward a more conceptual, movement-oriented style--even though the process left her increasingly estranged from the people who had been her friends and surrogate family for nearly five years.

“It became very difficult for me to function as a choreographer with a sense of freedom,” she says of the post-”Terminals” period of high tensions and low morale.

“My whole idea of choreography is getting ideas and pictures in your mind, and trying to take them exactly the way you see them--in their full strength--and put them on people, on the stage. And when you’re feeling judgmental energy, resentment energy, anger energy and frustration energy all around you, it’s hard enough to just pull that stuff out.”

The final confrontation came in August, before Shale’s engagement in Long Beach, Eisenberg recalls: “I sat down and said, ‘OK, you need to re-evaluate why you’re here--whether the experience is valuable for you any more. I need to know what your feelings are and I need to know by the end of the week,’ because we had to start rehearsals again.

“I told them, ‘I’d like you to do the Japan America Theatre performances (in late November) and then you can leave, if you like, though I’d prefer you to stay through January so I can bring in new people and make an easy transition.’ ”

But it didn’t happen that way. Everyone who left did so at the end of November and, soon after, Eisenberg formed her compact, post-apocalypse Shale from the three dancers who remained, plus one old friend, one new recruit--and herself.

Shale veteran Susan Kawashima-Blake stayed but concedes that she, too, sometimes “couldn’t relate” to what she calls Eisenberg’s “cerebral” pieces. However, she believes Eisenberg’s “new stuff is back to the guts of the original, but with more technique. We’re not just a company of bodies.”

Eisenberg estimates that her dancers earned $600 to $1,000 from the company in 1984--and less in ’85. Thus they must seek outside employment to support themselves--in Kawashima-Blake’s case, by teaching a form of exercise. She finds that the pressures of holding a job and raising a 2-year-old son force her to periodically reconsider her commitment to dance. Right now, “It’s one day at a time,” she says.

To Frank Joseph Adams--part-time caterer, longtime Shale member--Eisenberg’s pure-dance works represented “Mary Jane testing her boundariesz; total theater, total dance. I could see where it was going--toward another blend.”

So he stayed, and though he misses both the old work and the old company (“I feel all my buddies have gone away”), he’s loyal to Eisenberg’s creative vision. “She always gives me work to grow with,” he declares.

If one thing helped Eisenberg keep her perspective through the breakup of Shale, it was an probably ironic sense of deja vu : She had gone through a similar experience while dancing in Louis Falco’s company before she came to Los Angeles. With Falco, however, she had been insulated by her colleagues.

“Dance companies work extremely closely together,” she explains. “You come together every day whether you’re happy, sad, tired, sick, well, whatever, and work with these people. So you get real close to them. You support each other. When you’re the boss, it’s lonelier because it’s just you. No one supports you too much . . . as far as that group of people goes.

“And nobody teaches you how to be an artistic director either.” She makes the remark as if telling a rueful joke on herself. “You’re out there alone and you don’t really know what you’re doing other than that you have to choreograph and you have to teach. And then all these other things come along.”

“I think I’ve always said that in the first five years you find out whether you really want your company,” she comments. “The first two years are like a honeymoon: It’s all new and exciting.

“Then, from three to five years, it changes. You’re spending all your life in the studio with these people--and all the money that doesn’t go for food or gas goes into the company. Do you really want to do that? Wouldn’t you rather take the money and buy some clothes and furniture or something?

“I think this experience was the beginning of my second stage of being an artistic director and actually realizing what that meant--where I wanted the company to go, how I wanted it to look, how professional, what were the demands I really wanted to put on myself and on the dancers.

“This last year has been about all that, about recognizing that this is what it is and it’s always going to be like this whether I have a huge budget or no budget, 5 people or 10.

“I’ve now learned exactly what I’m going to have to deal with from now until I stop having a company. It was incredibly difficult, wrenching, stressful--for everybody. But this is what I really want to do and I can’t imagine ever not doing it.”