New Kid in Town

“When I walk around in life, I’m this energetic, funny person, but when I go into the studio I don’t want to be,” says the 32-year-old choreographer Rose Polsky, whose company performs Thursday at Loyola Marymount College.

“I’m obsessed with themes like disappointment, death, madness--things I feel in my life and see in other people’s lives . . . . My work involves a great sensitivity to those things in life that are simultaneously peculiar and beautiful, or painful and strong.”

As a child in New York, Polsky saw a legless man pushing his way through the subway on a wheeled board: “I remember feeling fear and pity all in one second.”

Years later she used the moment--translated into a painful dragging movement of her body--in a dance.

“It’s good I’m poor and can’t afford therapy,” she jokes, stressing that her work is “not doomy and gloomy at all,” but “filled with beauty and something uplifting.”

Finding dancers in breezy Southern California who can interpret emotionally driven dances has not been easy, however.

When Polsky asked her two company members if they had ever lost something that was very meaningful to them, “They both looked at me and said, ‘No.’ ”

Other aspects of working in Los Angeles strike Polsky--who moved here three years ago--as equally alien.

In New York, young actresses and dancers routinely moonlight as waitresses. “But here, I’d be asked, ‘Where do you see yourself going with this (waitress) job?’ Like a career!”

Still, she feels she has made it through the initiation rites of the L.A. dance world. “It’s like they said, ‘Look, we made some room for you,’ ” Polsky laughs.