Reichlin Steering Clear of Straight Lines

Choreographer/producer Louise Reichlin doesn’t act like a woman beset by the artistic equivalent of a split personality. Sitting in a Silver Lake health food dive, she assesses budget plans, grant deadlines and tour dates for her nine-year-old company, Los Angeles Choreographers and Dancers, with the authority of a corporate business woman.

But Reichlin, 46, suddenly grows more speculative when the conversation turns to the art of dance. She rhapsodizes about the modern-dance choreography she’s been teaching her dancers all year--”Cielo e Terra”--and employs new age lingo that pegs her as a driven and romantic creator.

“My work comes from a balance between yin and yang energies,” she says, languidly running her hands through her flowing, black hair.

“In my dances, I’m working on blockages I had in the womb, from the moment of birth. We are the sum total of all that happens to us and you can subliminally chart, through movement exercises, your way back to your first moments to find out how and why you move a way that you do.”

In fact, Reichlin’s new work forms only a part of the company’s concert which will take place Saturday and Sunday at Hollywood’s Coronet Theatre.

Also included on the program are pieces by Young-Ae Park, Elanora Panich, Karyn Klein and tap choreographers Bernie Lenhoff and Alfred Desio (Reichlin’s husband and the company’s associate director).

While Reichlin is intent on promoting the work of colleagues whom she respects, she looks peeved when asked whether her own choreography suffers from the time she must devote to others.

“You know, I’ve been hearing this line from a lot of people recently,” she says. “They find me confusing. ‘Are you an artist or are you a producer?’ People like career trajectories, straight lines.”

Ever since Reichlin founded the company in 1979 as a service organization for local dancers and choreographers, she says she has “steered clear of a single career path.” But she wonders now if her emphasis on “process over product” hasn’t hurt her company.

In fact, Reichlin says that she could “learn a thing or two” from her husband whose electronic tap-dancing--and focus on his own career--has earned him greater recognition.

“We are very different, Alfred and I,” she says. “He doesn’t get so side-tracked, he doesn’t look for gurus and events that blow him away as I do. And I think he’s benefited from that.

“I’m too many things. We do 50 to 60 performance a year, mostly in schools all over the city. And I do everything: the sound tracks, the bookings, the dancing. Yet our budget is so low ($35,000), because I don’t pay Alfred and me salaries.”

Reichlin blames the company’s slow growth not on the choreography, but on marketing. “Perhaps if spent more time making work and got my name out there, that would settle a lot of confusion among the people who fund dance companies, because the work is very good. I’m just a slow creator.”

Why then doesn’t Reichlin, whose background spans work with Merce Cunningham and show dancing (the original production of “Fiddler on the Roof”), persist in running the company if her real dream is to work full time on creating dances?

“You see, I was never meant to do just one thing. If I hadn’t experienced things in life that really hurt me, that stopped me just as the going was getting good, I would have burnt myself out long ago.”

Reichlin is referring to a 1983 lower-back injury that she says changed her life. The doctor predicted that Reichlin would never dance again, but she embarked on a rigorous regime of mind/body work under the guidance of UCLA therapist Bonnie Cohen that was, as Reichlin says, “as much psychological exploration as tissue work.

“It worked. I dance as I always have. But it’s my mental makeup that is really realigned.”

Reichlin says that her life will change in the next year: “I’m going to make much more work of my own,” she says, but adds that she will always remain as practical as she is spiritual.

“I tell my dancers to ‘think vegetable’ during rehearsals. To reach toward the sky while still staying grounded in the Earth. It can make you a bit schizoid. But in this world, if you can’t be a little spacey while also acting like you have your head on your shoulders, you lose your soul.”