3’S COMPANY STEPS OUT ON KPBS-TV

“It’s the realization of a dream,” Patrick Nollet, co-founder of Three’s Company and Dancers, said of the video adaptation of his work “Triad.”

Nollet and other Three’s Company choreographers and dancers will be featured on “Take 3,” a video arts program made in collaboration with Paul Marshall, executive producer of KPBS. The 30-minute performance will premiere on Channel 15 at 10:30 p.m. Friday and air again at 1:30 p.m. Sunday.

But it may go farther than San Diego. The locally made show will be made available to the national public television market.

“Triad” is not just a filmed version of a dance concert, as Marshall pointed out:

“You usually see dance on television, like ‘Great Performances.’ They just shoot it. They don’t try to use the medium. I saw Three’s Company and I thought they were doing interesting work that would lend itself to video. We decided to do a collaborative piece, even though we had never worked together before.

“We wrote a proposal, but we didn’t get funded because I didn’t have a good track record in dance, and they didn’t have a good track record in video. But we said, ‘Let’s do it anyway.’

“We thought it would be a good filler.”

The “filler” expanded to a full 30-minute arts program when it turned out that “Triad” would resist all efforts to pare it down to size.

“We did the full dance, and then tried to rough-cut it. But we hated to cut it, so we decided to bring in two other dances and make it a half-hour program,” said Marshall.

As a result, “Cork,” a quirky duet choreographed by Three’s Company’s co-artistic director Jean Isaacs, and “Daughters of the Revolution,” an offbeat anti-war piece staged by Isaacs, Nancy McCaleb and Kate Harrison, will join “Triad” on “Take 3.”

Unlike the typical dance concert, this three-piece video arts program was 18 months in the making.

“It’s a transformation from one art form to another,” McCaleb said.

“It sort of dawned on us gradually,” Isaacs added. “They didn’t just film our dance and then throw it on television. We were all involved in the creative process. The pieces we picked lend themselves to the medium.

“ ‘Cork’ has a lot of gesture that doesn’t always show up very well in a live performance. But with video, you have much more control over what the audience sees, so this piece actually looks better on the video.”

Isaacs is ecstatic about the opportunity to expand Three’s Company’s reach.

“More people will see us in this television show than would see us for the next 500 years if they were attending our concerts,” she said. “That’s incredible.”

Even audiences who have seen the three pieces that comprise “Take 3” will be in for a surprise when they see them on television.

“It expands our potential immensely,” Nollet said. “I took ‘Triad’ one step further (on video) by adapting some of my ideas. We went out to the sand dunes in Yuma to shoot it, and (the piece) changed a lot. It’s based on dream images and their connections to Carl Jung’s concepts. You really have to make a leap from the real world to a theatrical experience, but (video) gives the fantasy images more reality.”

In “Triad” there’s a constant juxtaposition of Nollet’s exhausting run across the dunes and ephemeral dream images that explore three separate sides of a man’s personality. An eerie, windblown sound track, and a voice-over recitation of a poem by Nollet add to the phantasmagorical ambiance.

In “Cork,” the cacophonous sounds of Miles Anderson’s trombone have their visual counterpart in Isaacs’ choreography. Anderson, who composed the original score, also is thrust into the action with the use of jerky, strobe-like camera techniques.

“Daughters of the Revolution,” a bit of black humor that McCaleb calls “comedy of survival,” starts off with a witty trompe l’oeil image of laundry hanging on the line, and culminates with a darker icon suggesting the Crucifixion.

Everyone involved with “Take 3” is high on the project, but now that it’s ready, is this the end of the road for the collaborative team?

“This isn’t the end,” McCaleb said. “This was just the beginning.”