KRAUS TEETERING BETWEEN 2 CULTURES : DANCER KRAUS TEETERS BETWEEN TWO CULTURES

With her steel-blue eyes panning slowly across her audience, her head and arms moving in different directions, sliding from side to side in time with the hypnotic tinkling of the Balinese gamelan, choreographer Lisa Kraus might seem to epitomize the post-modern dancer infatuated with the ancient rituals of a strange culture. With movements tight and stiff, expressive in the tiny scale that is so typical of Balinese dance, Kraus seems to have the Balinese baris (warrior dance) down pat.

But then, like an ancient warrior suddenly gone mad, Kraus, a former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company who will be presenting two excerpts from her “The Grand Tour” at LACE, 1804 Industrial St., at 8 tonight and Sunday, begins reciting the daily litany of an airline stewardess--explaining where the emergency exits are, how to use the life jackets, where the oxygen masks will drop from--and is soon launched into the fluid twists and turns that have often characterized her dancing.

If Kraus manages to make both of these styles look natural to her, she also seems to want to keep them separate, somehow pointing out the contradictions between these cultures and perhaps even the contradiction implicit in her own performances of disparate styles.

“The thing I’m most attracted to in Balinese dance is the physical power of it, which comes out of a whole different use of energy,” the 33-year-old Kraus says, explaining a fascination that began over 10 years ago and culminated with a monthlong visit to Bali two years ago.

“You can do just a movement of your head--a very strong movement where your eyes go to the side and your head moves, but the entire rest of your body is still--just that one movement, in combination with the music of the gamelan, can send waves out through the space.”

Kraus’ travels in Australia and Indonesia came at a crucial juncture in her career. Having started dancing at the age of 10--her debut performance took place at Judson Church in 1966--and spent five years dancing with Trisha Brown and nearly three years of making and touring her own work, Kraus felt she was ready, so she says, “to feel my own edges.”

“I was feeling that everything I see here comes out of a tradition that I’m familiar with,” she says.

“Even if it’s a radical move forward, it’s still out of a ground that I know. And I’m a hypocrite in many ways, because from my own culture I demand leaps forward, and from the Balinese I cherish a pure adherence to tradition.”

However, asked if this meant she was in the mood to renounce the post-modernist aesthetic her work is still so strongly influenced by, Kraus rolled back her head and laughed. “No way. That’s the thing. I have all these opinions and then I go ahead and make perfectly presentable avant-garde Western art.”

What her tour of the Far Pacific seems to have led her to is a different means of locating the emotional strengths of her choreography. Balinese dance, she says, “really understands the ground and the air and human beings together. I think because of our premium on investigation we don’t get to come out of a very deep knowledge of anything. We’re so busy getting to the next spot we can’t fully comprehend anything.”

In her more recent work, particularly a solo from “The Grand Tour” titled “Desert Island,” in which she slips and slides on a shaky grass mat beneath her feet, eventually drifting off to sleep, Kraus lets her body run through the entire emotional gamut.

“The ‘Desert Island’ solo can be very scary, scary even for the audience,” she says tremulously. “The basic premise--this person on a carpet in the middle of a space with people watching--is sort of absurd.

“But to pretend that that person is really alone and that they’re going to spend their next while learning how to deal with that--that’s basically what that solo is about: being nowhere and learning how to cope with it. There’s a passage involved, and ‘The Grand Tour’ encompasses that, as well as the idea of going really far away and somehow making a discovery or two in the process.”