DANCE : Putting Dance on the Map : Choreographer Nina Wiener’s ‘Harmonic Landscapes’ grew out of her fascination with Australian aboriginal myths

“For me, the work is almost like an emotional diary,” reflects Nina Wiener as she discusses how she approaches making dances. “I finish a piece, look at it and say, ‘That’s interesting; I hadn’t realized I felt that way.’ ”

The tall, lean choreographer, who exudes casual glamour, is sipping tea in her Tribeca loft while the season’s first snowfall blunts the city’s harsher edges. But her mind is on a very different terrain--that of Australia, which inspired her latest dance.

“Harmonic Landscapes,” the full-evening work Wiener’s seven-member company will perform in its West Coast premiere Friday and Saturday at UCLA, initially grew out of her fascination with Bruce Chatwin’s book “Songlines.” Chatwin explores Australian aboriginal myths, in particular the concept of “singing the land,” according to which the world was mapped out by the songs of aboriginal ancestors. Inspired by the book, Wiener spent four weeks in Australia shortly after her 1987 Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave season.

“The concepts in the book were fascinating and beautiful, but I didn’t feel I wanted to make a piece about aboriginal dancing,” Wiener explains. “I liked the travelogue aspect of the book very much; it took you from place to place and placed you in different landscapes. So the dance has the same kind of format. One of the things I specifically tried to do in the piece was to have as many different kinds of movement as possible, and to have the movement be very much about traveling through space, entering on one side and leaving on another. There’s also the idea of finding a personal resolution through experience.

“Originally, when I went to Australia, I just wanted to immerse myself in the aboriginal culture as much as I could. When I got there, I immersed myself in as many things as I could, aboriginal and Western. I sensed the huge dichotomy between the primitive aspect of the land and all the Western, urban aspects of Australian life. I realized that what I wanted to do was bigger than my initial concept, and the dance became about questioning that dichotomy.”

“Harmonic Landscapes” represents an ambitious co-commissioning project between four institutions: DanceAspen, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa (where the work had its premiere in October), the Madison (Wisc.) Civic Center and Het Muziek Theater in Amsterdam.

“It was commissioned by places my company had performed in, institutions that believe in my work and wanted to create some uninterrupted time for me to make a work on this scale--otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Wiener says.

This is Wiener’s first new work to be seen in this country since the 1987 double bill of “Fierce Attachments” and “Transatlantic Light.” In the interim, she has spent part of each year serving as artistic adviser to the Dutch company Dance Reflex, for which she created several works and set up a training program.

Wiener has had a company since 1976, when she left Twyla Tharp’s troupe after three years. Wiener’s earlier dances were notable for their structural rigor and tightly patterned configurations, as well as for her interest in initiating her choreography with arm movements rather than having it originate in the lower body.

“When I begin a new dance, I always start by making port de bras ,” she says. “They can be very emotional, or gesturally specific, or just movement-oriented. They can

have certain rhythms or patterns. It’s easier for me to express all that variety and texture by starting with the arms than trying to do it with my legs. After a whole phrase is finished in the arms, I will translate what I did with the arms into the legs. It gives me a feeling for the scope of movement for the piece.”

As Wiener’s work developed during the 1980s, with such pieces as “Wind Devil” and “Enclosed Time,” they became less overtly rigorous, more open, looser, even lush. Critics used descriptions such as “mythic landscapes” and “deliberate touches of mystery.” Wiener took on ambitious collaborations with noted visual designers and composers--an approach she continues with “Harmonic Landscapes,” which features an original score by Andy Teirstein, sets and costumes by Dutch designer Keso Dekker and lighting by Jennifer Tipton.

“When I started choreographing, I was just looking for a new vocabulary,” Wiener says. “I was problem-solving. I would set up structures and follow them very pedantically. Now, although I still set up the same kinds of structures, I don’t follow them very pedantically any more. If they open up and look like they’re going in a direction, I just let them go. I don’t work intellectually; I work instinctually. In the initial years of my choreography, I kept my emotions very private and what you saw was the intellectual searchings. I’m definitely more willing to expose myself in the work now.

“The emotional continuity in my work is very important to me now--the fact that it brings the audience to a place which is moving. I work more in the realm of context than content; my work is not about storytelling or social issues. It’s more associative. My main interest is for the audience to experience the work and be an active participant in putting together the images and finding its own meaning.”

Wiener has already had audience members who have seen “Harmonic Landscapes” and are familiar with Australia tell her they sensed the Australian element in it, just as many observers saw in her 1983 “Wind Devil” an evocation of the Arizona desert, a terrain Wiener knows well, having grown up in various locations around Arizona and California. In fact, she was struck by the resemblance between sections of northern Australia and the American Southwest.

In selecting her collaborators for “Harmonic Landscapes,” she was drawn to the music of Teirstein (who has composed scores for such choreographers as Randy Warshaw and Marta Renzi) because of its eclecticism and range.

“His music can work as landscapes or as a structural element,” Wiener says. “It has a big range of possibilities, and for a full-evening work, I wanted to work with as many elements as possible. We incorporated some primitive sounds into the score--howling and other vocal sounds.”

The collaboration between choreographer and composer was one of continual “give-and-take,” she notes. “I’m not interested in him handing me a score or my handing him a dance. For me, if you’re going to do a collaboration, it’s about making something bigger than either one of you could do yourself; it’s about the interaction.”

As for the designs by Dekker, who also collaborated with Wiener on “Transatlantic Light” and “On Us,” a 1989 work she created for Dance Reflex, Wiener describes them as having “a pervasive sense of the primitive.”

Several years in the works and especially ambitious in its scale, “Harmonic Landscapes” seems to resonate deeply for Wiener. “I think this piece, more than any of the others, had a real umbrella concept that I followed,” she reflects.

“I’d say that ‘Fierce Attachments’ was the closest I’ve gotten to narrative dance; it was very related to specific incidents. Now I’ve gone back to my more associative work. For me, the work is very ongoing--it’s hard for me to end each piece, because the end is the beginning of the next one. I always have to make a really conscious effort to have a finale--I always feel artificial when I make an ending.”