STAGE : A Really Big Show : Martha Clarke’s avant-garde theater always pushes the limits, but in her new piece, ‘Endangered Species,’ post-modernism meets Barnum & Bailey

“It won’t look that way at all!” Martha Clarke says, letting her laugh rip through the house. “Five days ago I was in such despair we called it the wake. The show wasn’t working so I redid a third of it in 2 1/2 days. At least there is an ending and a beginning. Now, I just have to do the middle.”

Such is the spur-of-the-moment, sui generis world of Clarke, one of the country’s preeminent and more idiosyncratic avant-garde theater artists.

A dancer and choreographer turned theater director, Clarke is the creator of four theatrical works--”The Garden of Earthly Delights,” “Vienna: Lusthaus,” “The Hunger Artist” and “Miracolo d’Amore”--that juxtapose artistic disciplines and vocabularies with puckish impunity and evoke sociopolitical themes from dreamlike images by turns violent and erotic, grotesque and lyrical.

In the 16 years since Clarke first raised eyebrows by sending semi-nude dancers and actors flying on trapezes over the heads of her audience in “Garden,” her 1984 stage exploration of the Heironymous Bosch triptych, the director has divided critics and audiences with her esoteric yet visceral theatrical collages, whose “erotic energy is exquisite in its humane power,” Jack Kroll, theater critic of Newsweek, wrote.

When Clarke’s “Miracolo d’Amore” premiered at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival two years ago, the Italianate stage exploration of sexual violence drove several patrons from the theater because of its onstage male nudity.

Clarke’s latest project, “Endangered Species,” will open the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s annual Next Wave Festival--the premier avant-garde arts forum in the country. With a budget of $800,000, it is Clarke’s most ambitious work to date and has elicited more than the usual amount of attention for its dramaturgy, which owes as much to Barnum & Bailey-style hucksterism as it does to a post-modernist aesthetic. The 90-minute production will feature a cast of dancers, actors and animals--and showcases a 9-year-old African elephant named Flora Baldini. The result is a dance-theater work about domination and extinction.

“I saw a film about elephant poaching a few years ago,” Clarke says during the show’s pre-New York workshop in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. “And I wanted to see if I could try and use animals as characters--not like Tom & Jerry, but to see if you could put animals on stage without exploiting them, (to see) if I could use elements of the circus without making it into a circus.”

For “Endangered Species,” Clarke has deconstructed that ancient popular art form, marrying some of its elements--elephants and horses, bareback riding and high-wire acts--to the director’s usual cast of dancers, actors and singers, who perform a text adapted from Walt Whitman’s 19th-Century epic poem, “Leaves of Grass,” and accompanied by a sound track composed of old opera recordings, jungle noises, gun shots and Hitler’s speeches.

All of this is set in one of Clarke’s typically minimalist but emotionally charged environments. She has converted the stage of BAM’s 900-seat Majestic Theater into a circular expanse covered in gray ash. The stage is backed by a 35-foot wall painted like a glowering sky, in which is set a massive corniced double-door that swings wide to reveal the elephant--or occasionally a horse--bathed in pure, white light. The result is a visual and aural collage that Clarke says “looks like a George Stubbs painting, you know, those English horse portraits with all that sky,” and that explores man’s inhumanity to man and the environment with specific references to the Holocaust and the American Civil War.

“This is a much bigger subject matter than anything I’ve done in the past,” Clarke says. She originally intended to focus more specifically on the Holocaust, a subject she had begun to investigate in “Vienna: Lusthaus,” her 1987 work that examined pre-World War I Vienna with its echoes of anti-Semitism and militarism.

However, the substitution of the Whitman poetry for an earlier original text by Charles Mee, the writer and historian who had collaborated on “Vienna,” as well as the use of Clarke’s typically improvisational work processes, refocused “Endangered Species” so that it is “less European, less intellectual, less abstract” and “more about the continuation of life in general,” Clarke says.

“I always pick subjects that are hard--’Garden’ was about heaven and hell--and I don’t know why,” Clarke says with a slightly rueful laugh. “I am interested in history, but I have visual interest in history.”

Indeed, nearly all theater works by Clarke began as dramatic responses to paintings. “Garden” was inspired by Bosch, the 15th-Century Dutch painter, “Vienna” by Egon Schiele, the Austrian draftsman, and “Miracolo” by 18th-Century Venetian painter Giovanni Tiepolo. “Endangered Species” is something of a departure for Clarke. However, it is the most American of her works, which have “been rather Germanic in their origins,” as she puts it. And the production is also a leap ahead for the director by being the least allusive.

“Martha has always had this incredible painter’s eye,” says Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM’s executive producer. “Her use of imagery comes from her dance background. But in ‘Endangered Species,’ she has become more sophisticated and has created work that is more complex, more integrated and is more about themes than a theatrical response to painted images.”

“I have a visual response to everything,” says Clarke, who studied visual art before entering Juilliard as a dance student in the 1960s and who went on to found the modern dance troupe Pilobolus. “I was married to a sculptor and I have lived with a painter, so I have always been about eyes,” she says, batting her lashes.

A small woman in her mid-40s with loosely pinned dark hair, a dancer’s posture and a frequent laugh, Clarke is sitting in the living room of her rented summer house on a rare day off from rehearsal. She has been at work on “Endangered Species” for nearly two years, or for almost as long as she has known Flora, the centerpiece of Circus Flora, a small, 5-year-old St. Louis-based circus that Clarke first encountered in Charleston, S.C., during the 1988 Spoleto Festival.

That chance encounter, in addition to seeing the film on elephant poaching, provided her initial inspiration. That and “a dream I had of this dancer on the back of a horse,” she says. “That was the night I decided to do this.”

“I remember Martha called me from Charleston and said, ‘I want to do a piece with circus animals,’ ” recalls Lyn Austin, producing director of New York’s Music-Theater Group, which is co-producing “Endangered Species” and is the theater where Clarke has worked for most of the past 15 years. “I’ve known Martha a long time and I know how she works, so I said, ‘This is incredible, let’s do it.’ ”

Clarke says the impetus for this piece is a desire to explore themes of oppression and extinction, but also to seek a more immediate response to animals. “I used to live on a farm and I am fascinated by animal movement,” says Clarke, who owns one of the horses used in the production. “Like when crows settle on a cornfield, I would always wonder, ‘How did they know how to make such beautiful spatial arrangements? Why can’t choreography be that easy?’ ”

As she did with most of her earlier productions, Clarke began to work on “Endangered Species” with small groups of dancers and actors in improvisational exercises. One of these involved an African-American actress and a white dancer, leading to the Civil War and racial oppression themes. “My work is a lot like painting with people,” Clarke says, “creating tension between moving people and stationary people. It’s sort of like controlling the frame of a photograph or a frame of film. Except you don’t get to do close-ups or move the camera, you only have the eye of the audience to manipulate.”

Very early on in the process, Clarke enlisted the aid of her longtime collaborators--set and costume designer Robert Israel, composer Richard Peaslee and lighting designer Paul Gallo--to create what Clarke calls a “post-final Noah’s Ark look, sort of shattered, a few horses, an elephant and a few people dressed like refugees walking through ashes and set against that huge painted sky.”

Israel says, “Because Martha has such a physical response to things, she works best when she has an environment to work in, an actively aggressive space for her to tame and control. Otherwise she is kind of wandering. “

Clarke agrees. “When I do this stuff, I don’t really know what I’m doing and you never get the long view. It’s like painting the Sistine Chapel. My relationship to the whole thing is so myopic--just magnified views of an elbow.”

Typically for the director, the addition of each new element to the collage--in this case, the giant backdrop, Whitman’s poetry, the operatic sound track--involved extensive reworking of a creative process that Clarke describes as “a house of cards. You move one thing, everything moves.” For example, the last-minute substitution of the Whitman work, adapted by writer Robert Coe, bolstered the production’s themes of “love, sex, earth, death, (it) wasn’t dialogue and the actors had to find characters and an edge in all that romanticism,” Clarke says. The opera recordings, including Alma Gluck singing Rimsky-Korsakov, were thrown into the mix, she says, “because like old photographs, I thought they would be evocative of endangered civilizations. Like all that might be left of an elephant one day would be a video, you know: ‘dust to dust.’ Old opera always sounded very dusty to me.”

“It is the juxtaposition and contrast that makes it interesting,” says Peaslee, who assembled the score with composer Stanley Walden. “It’s the effect of hearing opera in the jungle or Hitler in the jungle.” It is also the first time that Clarke and Peaslee have used a prerecorded digital sound track rather than live musicians, and as the composer says, “We’re hoping we can pan the sound around the theater” for even greater spatial effects.

And then there were the animals. If not exactly two by two, they came with a myriad of technical problems that went beyond the demands of training the dancers to work the horses and the elephant. “It’s just been unbelievable,” Clarke says about the summerlong rehearsal process under a tent pitched on Herman Melville’s estate in Stockbridge. “The horse I bought for the show went totally lame, I lost one dancer because of back problems, lost a drummer from Senegal. The budget was supposed to be a third bigger, so I couldn’t use this 17-foot giraffe named Vicky I had planned on. We had cracked ribs, sprained ribs, mosquitoes, storms, mud and flooding and no private life at all. Many times I just thought why am I doing this?”

In addition to wrestling with the technical difficulties, Clarke also had to prune her use of the animals to keep the production from becoming too circuslike. First to go was a goat, a macaw and a Capuchin monkey, because “small animals look too cute on stage,” Clarke says. Then came adjustments in the elephant’s performance. “Flora is a comedian and her rhythms are those of the circus, not the theater,” she says. “She was throwing clothes out of a suitcase and pouring tea. She was very funny but we had to respect the integrity of the Whitman. It was hard to let her be a clown and still give the show some bite.”

About her work process, Clarke adds, “It’s like writing fiction or carving marble. You keep saying this has to go, this has to go. I love economy and a certain degree of minimalism as long as it’s emotionally charged minimalism.”

Clarke traces that minimalism to her years as a dancer with Pilobolus. She began moving into the realm of theater and the use of spoken text in the late 1970s. “I used to get so bored performing, I would cry on stage,” Clarke says. Her first theater work--the 35-minute, two-person “Metamorphosis in Miniature,” based on Kafka’s writings--played at Austin’s Music-Theater Group with the help of actor Linda Hunt. That piece won an Obie award and led Clarke into further hybrid theater pieces.

Today, Clarke’s work is considered distinctive for its improvisational approach, and the use of “found” objects that is similar to the approaches of the Open Theater and Living Theater during the 1960s. Her work also has echoes of the classical modernism practiced by choreographers Antony Tudor and Jose Limon in the ‘70s and bears more than a passing resemblance to the imagistic theater pioneered by director Robert Wilson.

“She is non-imitable,” says Michael Feingold, a theater critic with the Village Voice. “She doesn’t deal in the conventions of performance art, although she is most at ease with the physical vocabulary of dance, she is really about image theater. Her genre is what everyone disagrees about.”

Throughout all the head scratching, however, Clarke has worked slowly but steadily, most often under the aegis of the Music-Theater Group, surviving on a series of grants and awards. She has won a Guggenheim, several National Endowment for the Arts grants, and this year a $285,000 MacArthur grant, largess that Clarke describes as having arrived in the nick of time, “because I think I’ve finally made it onto Jesse’s (Helms’) hit list.”

Clarke says she would like to give her work a rest. “I want to go home, make dinner, read books, see my friends,” she says. “And the MacArthur will make it possible for me to do more traveling. I know Europe very well, but I want to see South America, India, Russia, Africa.”

Next up on the creative docket? Clarke will possibly direct a ballet in Italy, an opera in Canada, or maybe make a film. “I think it’s the seven-year itch,” she says, smiling. “I want to go work where there is more structure and also I think that film is logical development of my discipline. Maybe it won’t be, but I would like to try.”

When asked about overall significance of her compact but ground-breaking artistry, Clarke emits another shriek of laughter, accompanied by a chorus from the songbirds here in her living room. “I’m not intellectual at all. I guess, in a way, my work is really about the realm of dreams. It has been a way to discipline my devils, get one’s snakes out of their lair and make sense of them,” she says.

“I’m not saying my work is therapeutic, but you do reveal yourself to yourself. I’m a kind of nice Jewish girl from Baltimore. I like a clean house, nice furniture, good food. Then I look at this Angst on the stage, this intensity and I say, where does that come from? It’s like the three faces of Eve. Like what is that voice? It’s not the voice that brushes her teeth. It’s the subliminal voice.”