LUBOVITCH DANCERS WILL VISIT UCLA

When Lar Lubovitch finds a dream dancer for his company--someone who meets his exacting technical and expressive standards--the result sounds more like a honeymoon than a collaboration.

“I look for dancers who have a lot of movement imagination and who are consummate technicians,” said Lubovitch, whose company will perform Friday through Sunday in Royce Hall, UCLA.

The program includes the West Coast premieres of “Concerto Six Twenty-Two,” set to Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, K.622, and “A Brahms Symphony,” set to Brahms’ Third Symphony, along with the 1983 “Big Shoulders,” a dance about Chicago, set to a tape of street and construction noises.

Lubovitch, who has had his company for 18 years now, was himself a very energetic dancer (at 43, he no longer performs) and he studied with a number of modern dance and ballet teachers at a time when mixing genres wasn’t fashionable. He then danced with an impressive list of companies from both camps, frequently cast in the role of the outcast--rapist, lunatic, drunk.

He admitted that, despite his love for his dancers, he’s not the easiest person in a work situation. “It’s a very intense, emotional experience for me when I’m choreographing,” he said. “I feel very vulnerable and that’s not easy.”

Lubovitch spoke of his movement as a kind of road map for his dancers. As the dancers follow that map, “they either fill it in with valleys and mountains and oceans, or they make it a flat plain.”

“My dancers have to be very capable technically to be free to express what’s in the work,” he said. It is very late at night and he is returning in a car from a concert in a community college in Brooklyn. “Dancers recognize my work as movement that is beautiful to experience. It graces them.”

“With a new dancer, it can be wonderful. This new charismatic presence will trigger me, will make me want to discover him as a dancer. I’ll want to create for him right away. To invest in him and to see what will come of it.”

One such dancer who has inspired Lubovitch this way is his newest company member--Sylvain Lafortune, a former soloist from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.

Lafortune joined up last year and had been in the company only one week when Lubovitch began to choreograph for him. Los Angeles audiences will witness the result in the adagio section of “Concerto Six Twenty-Two”--a tender and emotional duet.

“There are certain dancers whom I enjoy seeing in motion so much that my desire to see them dance causes me to imagine movement for them,” Lubovitch said. “That was the case with Sylvain.”

Lubovitch created his “personal, custom-fit” duet for Lafortune and Ed Hillyer, a guest artist from Le Grands Ballets Canadiens, who also will be dancing in Los Angeles this week.

“They grew up together and they’re very close and loving friends,” Lubovitch said. “That’s what the dance is about.” He paused for emphasis. “The duet is not about homosexual love.”

Lubovitch also mentioned another, less lyrical, reason for creating the duet: “I wanted to choreograph it because of the AIDS crisis. Because many dancers have been stricken with AIDS, many have died of AIDS. So I wanted to make a dance in reaction to that.

“First I created a dance that was very anguished and mournful. But then I threw it away. Because that wasn’t the mood I wanted to convey.

“I wanted to show the honor and dignity of men who love each other on a deep level of friendship, not on a homoerotic level. Because this bond does exist between men. It’s just that it’s often skirted. People deal with it in such an embarrassed way.”