Mary Jane Eisenberg’s New Direction

Mary Jane Eisenberg is crossing a professional Rubicon this year. The days are over when this locally based choreographer wielded text, narrative, characterization, pedestrian gesture and formal choreographic values in a given work.

Instead, Eisenberg now wants to be known as a “part-conceptual, part-ballet-inspired, modern dance choreographer.” And she says the change in her creative orientation both terrifies and excites her.

Eisenberg will go public with her new career Saturday at the Japan America Theatre with the premiere of her most recent works, “Dance in Four Directions” and “In Accord.” (“Group Portrait: Satoh,” which premiered last year, will complete the program.)

“This gig is absolutely pivotal and scary for me because I am leaving behind a whole period of life,” Eisenberg confesses.

She’s referring to a career that’s included post-punk, feminist performance-art pieces in the early ‘80s as well as her more recent gesture-based works that examined social ritual.

“With this departure to pure dance expression, I almost feel as if I’m throwing myself to the wolves--audiences who preferred my earlier work,” she says.

As a veteran Louis Falco and Jennifer Mueller dancer, Eisenberg acknowledges that her decision to incorporate “ballet idioms” in her choreography marks “a real departure” from the ‘70s modern-dance aesthetic in New York from which she developed.

“That ballet-(versus)-modern positioning used to concern me a lot more than it does now,” Eisenberg adds with a smile.

Eisenberg sees her most recent pieces--her solo, “A Gestural Way of Looking,” and her beach piece, “Boundary Waters”--as “transitional works.”

“I relied on gesture and pedestrian movement to paint pictures,” she declares. “I don’t need those pictures anymore. I want to project and charge emotion a new way--by watching the body move at its optimum strength and ability. Still, I hope to keep performing the old works.”

But rushing between rehearsals in Hollywood and consultations in Silver Lake with visual artist and collaborator Glenda Hydler, the 37-year-old artist admits that her career changes have brought a psychological backlash.

“Perhaps the best word for it is culture shock,” she confides. “The company piece (“Dance in Four Directions”) is so athletic and demanding that I threw up my hands recently and said to my dancers, ‘OK, let’s do it, let’s wear ballet slippers.’

“The point is, we were tearing up our shoes and feet during rehearsal. I wanted turns in this piece, and I wanted them to be fast and precise.”

She laughs. “OK, go ahead, call me Mary Jane the neo-classicist. Sticks and stones . . . as they say.”

Eisenberg has even recently changed the name of her company from Shale to Mary Jane Eisenberg Dance Company. Eisenberg used the old name in the early ‘80s to signify her emphasis on the archeological layering of history, performance and dance in her work.

Asked if audiences might feel betrayed by her rejection of more radical and politically informed work, she bristles.

“Deep down, I’m still interested in the same issues as before,” she maintains. “I’m taking the ideas I used to deal with in satiric or theatrical ways and funneling them through a new medium.”

“ ‘In Accord’ is a duet between Frank Adams and me that could be seen as a social and political work,” Eisenberg explains. “The issues are about qualities of agreement, union and disunion, war and peace.”

“Frank is strong and soft--qualities I feel I share with him. And through balances, rests, releases--and the layering and relayering of these elements in highly formal ways--I feel that I make a statement about a very specific kind of relationship.”

Eisenberg says that her “Dance in Four Directions” may seem less “content-rich” to people because “it moves so damn fast and relies on form to telescope its ideas.”

But she insists she is learning to trust dance more than “any other form available to me right now” to delve into “problems, conflicts, rituals, the human body and the human heart.”

Nevertheless, can’t Eisenberg’s abandonment of the raw dance-theater style that she called “hyper-realism” be interpreted as a move towards a more conservative aesthetic?

“I don’t think it’s conservative at all,” she argues. “I have nothing against the rock ‘n’ roll athleticism of La La Human Steps, who were here for the Los Angeles Festival. But I do believe that you don’t have to reinvent a completely new dance idiom in order to make new work that matters.”

In fact, as Eisenberg watches post-modern artists such as Karole Armitage and Mark Morris turning more and more to ballet, she finds “little value in these distinctions between ‘the cutting edge’ and the non-cutting edge, modern and post-modern.”

“Rather than shock an audience, I’d prefer exhausting them,” she remarks. “Which is what I hope ‘Dance in Four Directions’ does. I never want to condescend to my audience. But to make them whirl from the kaleidoscope of bodies just as I whirl with creative energy as I set the formal structures.”

“You can’t tell me that audiences aren’t looking for something real, something from the heart. And even if they’re not, I am. And I have to trust my own instincts.”