FRINGE FESTIVAL : THE DANCE OF HUMANITY--WITH THE SAME GENDER

“Somebody asked playwright Robert Patrick whether he writes gay plays and he said, ‘What’s a gay play? A play that sleeps with other plays?’ ”

San Francisco-based choreographer Christopher Beck relates the joke with a bemused air. Although his company’s Fringe Festival performance at Barnsdall Park today is part of Purple Stages’ “Celebration of Gay and Lesbian Culture,” the only label he gives his achingly personal work is “Theater of Dreams.”

“One can be too narrowly focused on a narrow subculture at the expense of one’s humanity,” he said recently. “(My work is) about being human. Part of being human is our relationship with people of our own gender (but also) our relation with our families and finding love, facing death and destruction both within ourselves and in the culture at large--circumstances that all human beings share.

“Duo,” one of six works on the program, is about “two men testing one another and finding a way to be soft with one another,” Beck says. “It could be seen as gay. It could be seen as comradely. Who’s to say?”

But Beck says his works have a special resonance for homosexual audiences. In “The Other,” a woman in a slip and dangling earrings who minces about with a mirror in her hand coexists with an angry, confused woman in rags. The only sounds are the click of high heels and the breathing of the dancers.

Underlying his psychologically intense approach to choreography is childhood exposure to the work of the modern dance pioneers, thanks to his mother, a college dance teacher. When he was 10, she whisked him off to Germany for a year so she could study with the aged Mary Wigman.

“She had bad arthritis,” Beck says of the doyenne of German modern dance, “but even sitting in her chair and teaching, she had the kind of power that one rarely experiences. . . .

In the mid-’60s, at loose ends after dropping out of college and abandoning an earlier desire to paint, Beck serendipitously discovered the New Dance Group school in New York, where he found improvisation classes “enormously liberating” and admired the “intelligence” of Merce Cunningham’s style as taught by Judith Dunn.

But although his work draws on a basic modern dance vocabulary, its effect is primarily theatrical.

“I really wish I could cross over into the theater field,” Beck says wistfully. “People who like new theater like my work more than people who like dance. The kind of thing that makes people think they like dance is not the choreography but the athletic (qualities), the beautiful bodies, the pretty music. You have to think about my work when you come to it.

“Hearts of Glass,” a new piece for two men and two women, “seems to be about the paradoxical strength and very brittle fragility of the human heart,” Beck says. “How we struggle with isolation and with relationships.”

All the pieces on the Barnsdall Park program are intensely serious, except for parts of “Questions,” a solo in which Beck is an Everyman trying to come to terms with a big, bad world.

But he bristles at the “strange expectation that (choreographers) should do balanced programs.

“If Matisse could paint wonderful figured interiors year after year . . . why can’t I explore the same theme, only from a slightly different perspective, rather than force myself to produce something that will please or sell?”