‘Airplanes on the Roof’ Not Out of Place at All

San Diego dance fans may wonder why Philip Glass’ “1,000 Airplanes on the Roof”--the multimedia tour de force that Time magazine described as a “science-fiction music drama that is part Freud, part Kafka and part Steven Spielberg”--was among the events sponsored by the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts.

After all, this haunting, high-tech sojourn through time and space is worlds apart from the kind of fare that put the foundation on the dance map. Or is it?

“It seems a likely connection to me,” said Glass, who composed the chilling score and directed the action. “It’s natural for me to include dance and to draw on dance influences. I’ve been associated with dance for 20 years, and I think the aesthetic use of musical theater is very close to the dance world.

“I toured with Lucinda Childs in 1979, and I did the score for Twyla Tharp’s ‘In the Upper Room.’ There are two big dances in my opera, ‘Einstein on the Beach,’ and I’ve worked with many other dancers over the years. There are dozens of my pieces in the active repertory of contemporary dance troupes.”

No choreographer is credited for “1,000 Airplanes,” but Glass has taken on the trappings of the role in his staging.

“Both of the performers are very good movement people, and, as the director, I staged movement, even though I didn’t create dance steps,” he said. “The work is connected to dance. It was bound to be connected.”

Glass has chalked up a staggering list of successes in the music world. But he is particularly proud of this three-way collaboration with Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) and designer Jerome Sirlin, whose trompe l’oeil holographic projections and cinematic scene changes for this production have been hailed by Time and other critics as nothing short of revolutionary.

“I was interested in doing a theater piece that could travel around the country,” Glass said. “I knew David’s work and I knew Jerry’s, so I just called them and basically pitched my idea--which was to do a science-fiction collaboration based on ‘War of the Worlds.’ When we couldn’t get the rights to it, we decided to try an encounter with aliens--something about memory and forgetting, a trauma so bad you couldn’t talk about it.”

Since the work premiered last summer, Glass has been approached by several people who insist they have had the same experience as M, the focus of his Angst -filled sci-fi music-drama.

“It’s not important whether it really happened,” he said, referring to the unsettling scenario of “1,000 Airplanes.” “The fact is that these encounters have captured our imaginations and become part of the popular mythology.

“People tell me about their sightings all the time,” he said. “And too many people are reporting it. There must be something going on, some phenomenon that’s paranormal. It seems to be conditioned by the time we live, because people described it differently in the ‘60s than they do in the ‘80s. And they used to talk about fairies and ghosts way back when.”

Aside from the Philip Glass Ensemble, the only performer in this music-drama is the character known as M, played in alternate performances by Jodi Long and Patrick O’Connell. As Glass said: “We’ve double-cast it, and people perceive it very differently when they see a woman in the role instead of a man. But credibility doesn’t enter into it. It’s just how they experience it that changes.”

Glass is convinced that his collaboration with Hwang and Sirlin is a major milestone because “collaboration is really the lifeblood of musical theater. The only way this production could have happened was as a collaborative effort. We’re working in a cinematic model really, with a remarkable three-dimensional screen. This is something people really haven’t seen before.”

“1,000 Airplanes” will buzz into Symphony Hall at 8 p.m. Monday, with Long as the ill-fated victim of the extraterrestrials.

California Ballet fans were spooked at Friday night’s opening of “Dracula,” but don’t blame the onstage vampires and other-worldly creatures for the occurrence.

A computer failure at the box office left lines of people stranded outside the East County Performing Arts Center well after curtain time. The performance was held up for 30 minutes while the audience was seated.

What they eventually saw was much like last year’s version of the dance drama--a slow-paced staging of Bram Stoker’s chilling melodrama, using overblown mimed movement and incidental dance to tell the gory tale. Except this year, it was longtime Cal Ballet dancer Patrick Nollet’s turn to sink his fangs into the title role, and he relished every bite.

“This is one of the meatier roles I’ve ever done for the California Ballet,” Nollet said. “I tried to give the illusion of Dracula transforming into different forms.”

The critics, however, were apparently unimpressed with his interpretation, but that didn’t faze Nollet.

“I never read the reviews,” he said.