Park Your Feet : Group to Stage Lo-Tec Dance in Parking Lot

Heidi Duckler and her Collage Dance Theater will give new meaning to the term “lo-tec” when they perform for Three’s Company’s Summer Lo-Tec series this weekend.

“Lo-tec doesn’t get much lower than this,” Duckler acknowledged with a laugh during a phone interview from Maine. “We’ll be performing outdoors in the parking lot with car headlights as our lighting instruments and a boom box for sound support.”

The Los Angeles-based choreographer and her six-member company were in New England for a dance festival last week, but spent their spare time gearing up for their unusual San Diego debut. The pair of performances, slated for 8:30 p.m Saturday and Sunday, will spill out of the studio (after a brief multimedia dance indoors) and into a nearby parking lot for a site-specific new work, slyly titled “Sight Specific.”

The title is a pun that hints at the heart of Duckler’s new dance.

“The piece uses tourists as a metaphor for perception. It’s kind of a fantasy piece, but it was inspired by a trip I took with my family. I was looking at the sights,” she recalled, “and looking at the people looking at the sights. And I wondered, how much of the culture do we really see? It’s all surface. We can be transported anywhere.”

For this non-traditional alfresco performance, Duckler and her dancers will be decked out in tourist duds and seated on chaises longues. Flashbulb cameras will throw more light at the movement and make a satirical statement of their own during the dance. The spoken script for “Sight Specific” will be signed for the hearing impaired during both performances.

“The last line says, ‘only the deaf can see,’ ” Duckler noted, “so it seemed appropriate for us to have someone signing it. (The deaf theme) is an unusual angle, but it’s a way to get people to consider something in a new light. It’s all about how we see things.”

Removing dance from the concert stage was popular among the mavericks of post-modernism back in the 1960s. Rebel dance makers, including Twyla Tharp, danced through the halls of museums, clear across huge football fields and even on the shaky ground of out-of-the-way rock quarries. But, for the most part, contemporary dance makers prefer to show their wares in more conventional spaces.

“I remember people experimenting all the time when I was in high school,” said Duckler.

“People tend to stick to theaters now, but it’s really hard to get traditional theater space--and it’s very expensive--so it makes sense to find different places to perform.

“I’ve done other pieces in non-traditional sites, and it brings the experience into a whole different realm,” she said. “Putting dance in public places can give it a new meaning, because people see what they wouldn’tordinarily see.”

Duckler once created an offbeat dance for a coin laundry that thrust her dancers atop washing machines and dryer drums. It even had them climbing walls to shake up the senses of her audience. She also designed an evening-long dance work (“Ancient Terrain”) for the new Santa Monica Museum of Art.

“I did it for the opening of the museum,” she said. “Although it’s hard to do something out of context, we’ll be dancing an excerpt from that same piece inside the studio as part of the San Diego program.”

Duckler’s last experience with an outdoor venue--when she performed in urban Portland, Ore.--might have discouraged another choreographer, but it didn’t faze this determined iconoclast.

“A transient wandered through our piece, and we just danced right through it,” she said nonchalantly. “The biggest problem with outdoor sites is dancing on cement. It’s so hard on the body.”

Duckler hasn’t worked out the logistics for “Sight Specifics” yet, although she visited the Hillcrest site before leaving for Maine. In any case, be prepared to stand in parking stalls if you want to catch the 12-minute performance.

“We’ll be playing with diagonals (the shape of the parking places), and the audience will all be out front,” she said. “We designed the performance along the lines of a proscenium space, so it’s a little more formal than some site-specific dances. But we’re still not sure where the cars need to be parked so we can have lighting from the front and sides.”

Will Duckler and her dancers be able to overcome the obvious problems and meet the unforeseen challenges of dancing in a Hillcrest parking lot?

“Oh, sure,” said Jean Isaacs, founding director of the Lo-Tec series. “The space is so contained, I don’t think there’s going to be any problems.