SKURA GOES THE EXTRA MILE WITH ‘TRAVELOG’

Choreographer Stephanie Skura could pass for a tour guide of the mind. Sure, in rehearsal she scrambles about her prop-cluttered dance floor with the wild quirkiness that has by now become her trademark in the New York dance-based performance art scene. But Skura admits to having slightly more high-minded plans than displaying what some call her wacky movement style.

“I want audiences to travel during my pieces,” she says earnestly, “to get someplace new in their own lives.”

Skura’s “Travelog,” to be performed Friday and Saturday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), is a work that explores just how many of these travels--physical and psychological--are possible in everyday life. It premiered in New York at Dance Theater Workshop last winter and features three dancers (besides Skura) who weave her jagged movement vocabulary into their own bizarre travel yarns.

But it’s the six-foot video screen and video projections by Terry Moyemont that actually knit the dances together with the stories. A blitzkrieg of boats, trains and New York City pedestrian traffic provides a kind of televised coverage of the real-life adventures of Skura and her dancers.

“Travelog” emerged from Skura’s feeling that her odysseys abroad and in the United States had been the high points of her life: “When I was down and sad, simply packing my bags lifted my spirits,” she says.

This conclusion led her to document her journeys with a video camera and to interview fellow wanderers. Cataloguing the video footage, she had an epiphany about travel. Everything from public transportation to dancerly twists in the air were launching pads for a voyage of self-discovery.

“Travel became a way to accelerate change,” she rhapsodizes, “a metaphor for self-awareness.” Ideally, to Skura, this is where the audience comes in: replaying its own travel experiences and thus helping narrow the gap between onlookers and dancers.

“The last thing I want is for an audience member to get marooned in the array of stories and bodies colliding together,” she says. But the three-ring-circus effect of her multimedia work may all but force an audience member to make sense of this panorama in his own way.

In one part of “Travelog,” a tale about a young man (Brian Moran) at work on a pasta plantation merges with a dance where he and another (Benoit LaChambre) perform a fierce tug of war with a towel clenched firmly in their jaws.

Elsewhere, Skura interrupts a frisky dance solo to saunter in back of the video projection screen for a reminiscence about her early childhood. As she disrobes, her back-lit naked figure becomes a silhouette on the white screen.

“I’m both revealing and concealing myself,” Skura explains. “There’s a relationship between my travels and the audience’s, yes, but not an absolutely transparent one.”

To shake audiences out of passivity, Skura has been known to disrupt her dancing and have a word with them. She’s ended a series of rapid knee twists to the floor with a duck-like “Quack!” strident enough to jar anyone out of a comfortable spectator role--and she begins “Travelog” with an impersonation of the pushy New York agent trying to book Skura at LACE.

Skura says she mimics this gum-cracking woman in the hope of showing the audience the realities of how any performing artist must be merchandised these days in order to “get a chance to move around on stage.”

“Sure, it’s funny,” Skura admits, commenting on the parodies of the business end of making art that are now standard fare in her work. “But it’s also disorienting--a movement away from what’s expected--and that’s what ‘Travelog’ is about.”

After Skura’s sneaker-clad feet hit the dance dance floor with a sudden smack, she might perform a quirky arabesque or she might stomp her way into the audience to deliver one of her monologues on the vagaries of artist funding. It’s the movements of everyday people that obsess her as she tries to create a link between performers and audience members through movement experiences and personal histories.

Skura requires her performers to go through an extensive rehearsal process where they act out certain gestures--like brushing the dance floor with the palm of a hand, or catching a falling body in mid-air--without going through with the finale of the motion.

These aborted actions “may look somewhat Harpoesque,” Skura admits. “But it’s great practice for learning how to be less-goal oriented as a dancer and a human being.”

Such Buddhistic resolve seems hardly a way of life for Skura the career girl--a choreographer who often pokes fun at her upward mobility in the performing world, but seems to benefit, all the same, from increases in funding and publicity.

In fact, some critics have attacked her use of video, suggesting that by buying into the MTV culture she is undercutting some of the humanistic and philosophic elements that once typified her work.

Skura disputes this claim, arguing that video operates in “Travelog” as an extension of the mind and of memory, part of the “log” in her journeys through life.

“Travel really begins,” she argues, “with the recording of it, with the possible distortion of it in memory.” She is convinced that people go on trips not necessarily to escape their lives, but rather to have something wonderful to talk about once they return home.

“Haven’t you ever heard people carry on about their honeymoon?” she asks, certain that the special enrichment memories can offer is the most wonderful of all human travels. “It’s the memory of a movement that gives me the rationale to perform another, that helps me to enrich the dance as a whole.”