Modern Dance Takes Center Stage at Fete

The local dance scene recently has been dominated by ballet, with weeklong visits at the Orange County Performing Arts Center by the National Ballet of Canada and by the Paris Opera Ballet.

But this week modern dance comes center stage--if not at the Center, at least at Laguna Beach High School--when New York modern dancer-choreographer Sally Hess appears today at 7 p.m. as part of the first Laguna Beach Dance Invitational.

Hess will be dancing her full-length solo “Autobiography No. 72,” a work created in 1986.

“The number 72 came to me in dreams and represents portions of my life,” the lanky Hess said in a recent interview. “72nd Street is a junction of several subways in New York City. The work is a junction of several points in my life.

“Most of us live a lot of lives. Any autobiography has many autobiographies--and biographies.”

The work reflects a decision the choreographer made in 1984 to use stories along with dance.

“I felt I wanted to open up a new type of performing and form a new relationship with the audience,” Hess said. “I had been on all the big stages in Europe and the United States (as a member of the Dan Wagoner and Dancers company) . . . but what did I know about people? Nothing.

“So I decided I would like to break out of the stage mold and isolation, to go out on the road and meet people and have people meet me. . . .”

“My desire was to be totally flexible,” she added. “So there is almost no technical equipment required. That’s one reason for speaking. There would be places where there would be no sound system. I didn’t want to have to say, ‘Sorry, but I can’t dance here.’

“At first, I didn’t even have a costume change. I decided to make it simple, simple, simple.

“Scary? Yes. But it worked out fine.”

While the combination of speech and movement may remind some people of work by performance artists, Hess sees herself exclusively as a dancer.

“Performance artists do a lot of things well,” she said. “The performance artists I have seen are gifted in many areas. . . . But for me, the first thing is the dancing. All my life I wanted to be a dancer. I was trained as a dancer, and I feel myself to be totally, totally a dancer. . . . From movements have come the words. Dance propels the words, brings the need for words.”

Hess was born and reared in New York City. She began her dance studies at the age of 3 and made her professional debut when she was 10 in the role of the Child in Doris Humphrey’s “Day on Earth.”

“But parents begin to worry,” she said. “They tell you that dancing has no future, no money. I had to ask myself, ‘Does it make sense to spend years to acquire a skill that has no currency value?’

“I remember how (Olympic medalist) Mark Spitz got a lot of criticism. People said, ‘He doesn’t know anything except swimming.’ ”

So Hess decided to go to college where she studied philosophy and French literature on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and a Fulbright Grant to southern France.

In school, she said, “there was the possibility of reading, talking, of dealing in the world of ideas. Later I realized that could be the same, no matter where I was. It could be the same in dance.”

She went back to dance and worked with modern dancers Viola Farber, Wagoner and Remy Charlip, with whom she still appears. She began choreographing in 1979, doing commissioned works for student companies and young modern-dance troupes.

Hess said creating/formulating a new dance “may take a year-and-a-half . . . working on it day and night, in dreams, studios, with friends, in talking about it, sitting down to write it.

“There’s no particular order. I might get a whole lot of things happening in one day--movement and words--all garbled up. Then it’s trying to find a shape.

“Or choosing music. I may have choreographed an entire dance and not had music. There is no formula, just a lot of trust and patience.”

One thing she is sure about: her explorations combining speech and movement are not over.

“I’ve been doing that for about two years now,” Hess said. “I don’t feel finished with (the process) yet. . . .

“Audience are not getting Gelsey Kirkland. . . . This is something else. But there is room for all of it.”

Sally Hess will dance today at 7 p.m. as part of the first Laguna Beach Dance Invitational. The weeklong event, directed by Marc Sharon and held under the auspices of the city of Laguna Beach and the Laguna Beach Arts Commission, consists of daily classes and two concerts--one by Hess today and another by students on Friday at Laguna Beach High School, 625 Park Ave. Daily classes are free and open to the public. Information: (714) 494-8505 or (714) 855-6282.