Gloria Newman Troupe Makes Rare Appearance

Gloria Newman is generally known to cognoscenti as Orange County’s preeminent modern dance choreographer. But her 26-year-old touring repertory company may be the best kept secret of the county’s cultural life.

Thursday night at Cal State Fullerton’s Little Theater, the Gloria Newman Dance Theater performed “Eight Twos and One Six” by New York choreographer Remy Charlip. The troupe’s last performance in the county (at Orange Coast College) had been in 1986. Even Los Angeles dates are rare events.

“There are so few facilities to rent,” Newman explained recently. “You need a certain amount of space. Most of my works look better on a proscenium stage than in informal setups.”

Her big hope is to find a financial backer who can help her create a permanent performing space for modern dance in Orange County. “The dancers are here,” she said. “We need a place and a little bit of time.”

The company’s appearance at Spring Dance Theater, Cal State Fullerton’s theater and dance department’s program of student and faculty work which continues through Sunday night, came about because it seemed “a good opportunity,” Newman said. Company associate director Gladys Kares is on the university’s faculty.

Choosing Charlip’s work was the easy part. In a drawing by Charlip, 40 cartoon-like unisex couples, dressed in black and white, lean and balance on each other. In “Eight Twos and One Six,” they come to life. The choreographer--who has mailed drawings for what he calls “Airmail Dances” to soloists and companies throughout the world--is an old friend of Newman from her New York days.

Newman began her career there, studying with the pillars of modern dance--Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Jose Limon. After teaching dance at Cornell University and New York’s High School of the Performing Arts, she moved to California and taught at the studio of Eugene Loring, choreographer of Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” and at the SARK Studios, a multi-arts venture.

Settling in Orange County in 1961, she founded her own company which has performed her choreography as well as work by such modern dance figures as Anna Sokolow, Donald McKayle, Elizabeth Keen and now Charlip.

Charlip, who danced for 11 years in Cunningham’s company, has been a choreographer for nearly 40 years. He also has designed costumes, written a shelf of children’s books and directed off-Broadway plays.

His “Airmail Dances” pose inventive challenges to an artistic director beyond the usual process of setting a fixed series of steps for a group of dancers.

When the drawings arrived, Newman handed them to her eight company members and began figuring how to parcel out the 40 basic poses among them. Finally she decided that the dancers would come across best doing eight duets in constantly shifting patterns. (The last portion of the piece is always done as a sextet.)

Charlip flew out to work with the dancers for a few sessions and came back later to inspect the fruits of his handiwork. “He thought they were really quite elegant,” Newman said.

But after dancing part of the piece for a cable television show (the rest of the taping will take place once an appropriate museum setting is located), company members are still in the process of adapting their movements to the stage. So at CSUF the work is billed as a “preview.”

As the piece unfolds, couples (all possible permutations: man and woman, two women, two men) engage in an anecdotal series of give-and-take attitudes, shifting speed according to the pulse of the accompanying three nocturnes and mazurka by Chopin.

Sometimes the leaning positions, or the airy, upraised arms with quirky, bent wrists, are reminiscent of ballroom dancing. Other couplings look playful, or deliberately awkward. The two women repeatedly kick their legs backward with springy, impatient gestures. One woman balances her body on the back of a man who hobbles a few steps, bent with his burden.

At the end, six dancers arrange and rearrange themselves into various tableaux, like upright Pick-up Sticks. One woman’s flick of the wrist ripples through the stillness as though someone has turned on a fan.

Looking at the drawings again after the piece was over, every pose looked familiar--but impossible to trace within the complex weave of a piece that had lasted the better part of a half-hour.

GLORIA NEWMAN DANCE COMPANY

Today at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2:30 and 5 p.m.

Little Theater, Cal State Fullerton.

Tickets: $5 ($6 Saturday evening).

Information: (714) 773-3371.