MUSIC AND DANCE : Dancers Strive to Stay True to Tudor’s Vision

With torsos arching back in proud Spanish postures, five UC Irvine dancers sweep through intricate serpentine patterns to the relentless beat of music by Padre Antonio Soler.

The women coil into a tight circle, then fan out with explosive, flashy footwork. Then the dance suddenly breaks off.

One woman quickly inspects a movement notation score, two others study a videotape playing on a nearby monitor. Then they begin their rehearsal again.

The dancers are busy learning Antony Tudor’s ballet “Fandango,” one of three Tudor works on a program by the UCI Dance Ensemble on Friday and Saturday. The others are “Sunflowers” (to Janacek’s Quartet No. 1) and “Little Improvisations” (to Schumann’s “Kinderscenen”).

Tudor originally conceived the works as small pieces for young dancers, choreographing them for students at the Juilliard School in New York in the 1950s and ‘60s and reviving them for students at UCI where he taught from 1973 to 1977.

Even though they constitute “minor Tudor,” it would be a mistake to downplay the value of the dances.

“Tudor never did anything that was mediocre,” says Olga Maynard, a dance professor at UCI, senior editor of Dance Magazine and friend of the celebrated choreographer who died last April.

“Here he was deliberately working with students,” Maynard said. “He knew he didn’t have professionals, but the quality of the choreography is pellucid. It has a spiritual quality about it. . . .”

“ ‘Sunflowers,’ for instance, should not be dismissed as a small, slight work. It is very evocative of intensely personal feelings. It has a sweetness that is not sentimentality. I think Tudor would want us to point that out. When danced with fidelity, it has an innocence and freshness that the choreographer intended to be shown.”

Nor are the works easy, Maynard said.

“He expected--he demanded, whether from students or from professionals--a degree of technique that could perform the choreography. But over and above that, as in all Tudor works . . . he expected a sensitivity, not only in ballet terminology, but also in the way a dancer held herself or himself or how he or she walked or ran . . . . “

No one who danced with Tudor is working with the UCI ensemble. The dances are being reconstructed through a combined study of Labanotated scores (Labanotation is a written system for recording dance movement) and early videotapes provided by the Dance Notation Bureau in New York.

Don Bradburn, artistic director of UCI dance concerts, is supervising the project.

“The Notation Bureau sends you a package with a notation score, a videotape, a cassette tape and a music score,” Bradburn said. “It’s a little funny: Here’s your ballet in a UPS package.”

Bradburn never performed under Tudor, but frequently photographed him while he was rehearsing dancers at UCI, and cites that experience, as well as long-term observations of Tudor’s choreography and working with dancer-choreographer Eugene Loring when he was chairman of the UCI dance department, as sufficient background for the project.

“I’d stick around at rehearsals longer than necessary, just to stand and listen,” Bradburn said. “Mr. Tudor would frequently throw out single words to influence the dancers. For ‘Sunflowers,’ he said: ‘Chekhovian.’ ”

A dance for four women and two men, “Sunflowers,” has no story line. “But there is a very definite sense of some emotional undercurrents happening, a subtle sense of competition among them for the two men,” Bradburn said. “But the men are unaware of the reactions they set off among the women.

“The work is very open to interpretation because it’s abstract . . . . You just get hints, a little taste of what’s going on.”

In “Fandango,” too, Tudor put in gestures and “choreographic hints of personality for the five women, and there are elements of competition,” Bradburn said.

“In the (movement) score, Tudor gives each dancer a name and a perfume, but he doesn’t want the names printed in the program,” said Bradburn, declining to reveal the names.

“I don’t want to say. It would give it away. But they helped me cast when I was looking for dancers.”

Least complex of the three is “Little Improvisations,” which Bradburn described as “a pas de deux based on children’s games and improvisations.

“The dancers manipulate a piece of cloth to create fantasy images. It’s charming, light, a short study.”

Ideally, a reconstruction should be a three-part process, involving a movement score, a videotape and a coach, Bradburn said.

Kathy Auten, a UCI graduate dance student, has been turning the movement score back into a dance.

“There were no ambiguities or problems in the score, though there were things that I hadn’t learned yet, things I had to look up and play detective,” Auten said. “That was the only real problem. Most of it was pretty simple. . . . But I’m much, much faster with videotape.”

The UCI Dance Ensemble concert will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday and at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday in the Fine Arts Village Theatre. In addition to the Tudor pieces, the program will include works by Israel (El) Gabriel, James Penrod, Jean Isaacs and Antonia Rojas Kabakov. Tickets are $7 for general admission; $5 for UCI students and $6 for senior citizens and other students. For information, call (714) 856-6616 or (714) 856-5000.