If You Were a Dance, What Dance Would You Be? : DANCERS & THE DANCE Stories <i> by Summer Brenner (Coffee House Press: $9.95, paper; 160 pp.; 0-918273-75-7) </i>

The wisdom of the body is Summer Brenner’s terrain. She is the author as choreographer, a moving force with a pen. In “Dancers & the Dance,” her recent collection of short stories, she tries to elucidate the interior rhythm of characters, their dreams, their private dance. Twelve distinct portraits emerge from the poetic hunt.

Brenner writes from experience. She studied flamenco and modern dance at length, and has taught and performed both disciplines. She is not a household name in dance, yet her savvy is apparent in the realistic descriptions she gives of dance idioms, of ballet studios and their inimitable smell of sweat. Brenner lives in Berkeley and is recognized as a poet and fiction writer on the small-press circuit. Her last novella was “The Soft Room.”

An extensive or even cursory knowledge of dance is not a prerequisite for picking up “Dancers & the Dance.” In Brenner’s imagination, everyone is a dancer. We all apply. She reduces the reader to the common denominator, sometimes to her disadvantage.

She does likewise with her characters, presuming a blank slate. They begin as one-dimensional. They are simple people faced with a single problem. Putting her ear to their skins, as it were, Brenner works backwards into their emotional life. She listens for the beat, the beat of what incites them to make concrete choices: the rock ‘n’ roll dancer named Alto who throws his guitar over the edge of a bluff; the flamenco dancer who walks into the San Francisco Bay after giving the performance of her life; the prepossessing teen who at the prom assumes her divorced mother’s mistrust of men.

Each has a particular dance that Brenner labels “rock ‘n’ roll” or “flamenco” or “ballroom,” but what she’s really after is the metaphor of that dance for their life. How she accomplishes the tough task is admirable, if sometimes callow.

“That was rock ‘n’ roll. Alto clutched the steering wheel like an arm of a girl. He moved it around the dance floor in his mind as if they’d been dancing together for years,” she writes of the rock ‘n’ roller.

But Brenner’s ultimate aim is to remove the persona from the body altogether and send that persona out into an abstract jungle of language. Her memorable characters leave the realm of prose for poetry.

In one of the stronger stories, “The Belly Dancer,” she describes the dancers thus: “Their sight was blurred by a unified vision of matter passing into light, their bodies passing into an uncommon state, an unusual suspension, more fluid than solid.”

Or again, in an exciting passage that accurately captures the feeling of what it is like to perform, she says of the flamenco dancer: “Simultaneously absent and present, the music had driven her out of her body and all those devouring eyes, those strange and unknown faces, had filled her empty tenement.”.

Brenner is asking that old question: “Can you separate the dancer from the dance?” If you cannot tell the two apart, that is a good sign. The performance is beyond average, extraordinary.

The same rule might apply to Brenner in “Dancers & the Dance,” whose stories can be succinctly divided between the majestic and the infantile, the seamless and the cliche-ridden. In fact, it’s hard to believe the same person could have written such widely divergent portrayals as Sonny in “The African Dancer” and Anne in “The Converted Dancer.”

Sonny is a white woman who has a mulatto child. She takes on the cause of black people and moves to Oakland, where the Black Panthers lived. She wants to be black. By dancing, she is removed from her color. “Sister, you sho don’t dance white,” says a stranger of Sonny. An involving story on its own, “The African Dancer” is further bolstered by a rhythmic device. Brenner breaks her paragraphs apart with the “whap, wha, wha, wha, whap” sound of the drums in Sonny’s dance class. The aural representation serves to make the story read with the pronounced impulses of African motion. We can better imagine what it must be like to be Sonny. In the alert and credible stories, Brenner makes this attempt to incorporate the rhythm of the dance form about which she is writing. “The Flamenco Dancer” alternates performing scenes from the stage with restaurant scenes from daily life. The timing of cuts is like the underlying beat of the Flamenco dancers’ clapping hands.

But in “The Converted Dancer,” “The Ballet Dancer” and “The Modern Dancer,” Brenner’s writing is loose and immature. High on simplistic similes strung together at close proximity, Brenner reveals that she is not as confident when writing about young women and particularly men. What she seems to understand is the mature, sensual, earthy woman.

To her credit, a keen twist of plot in the final paragraph usually salvages the most undeveloped of her stories. She knows how to craft a work. And, like a vibrant dancer, she knows how to make us believe that the closing image is the one we’ll remember. It almost works.