DANCE : Keeping It Personal : Loretta Livingston premieres her first full-length work

Last year proved a milestone one for local dancer/choreographer Loretta Livingston.

For starters, she entered her first dance competition, the Dewars Young Artists Recognition Awards, winning the top prize ($3,000) for her solo “Balances.”

Then she reached 40--no longer a young artist to Dewars, but still the embodiment of willowy lyricism when she dances. She also enlarged her six-year-old modern-dance ensemble to six members and used video in the choreographic process for the first time.

For much of the year, however, Livingston confronted a particularly daunting rite of passage: the creation of her first full-evening work.

Scheduled to premiere Saturday at the Japan America Theatre, this four-part project came into being, she says, because “I was fatigued with the divertissement format and wanted a program that would be cohesive. I wanted to take the time to look at facets of the same idea or the same family of ideas throughout an evening, to see something from many sides.”

Titled “A Window in the Passage,” her new, 90-minute piece grew from the idea of support. Initially, Livingston and her dancers did movement sketches in the studio dealing with physical support but also asking many questions of one another and filling notebooks with personal interpretations of the concept.

“It was free-form, associative, stream-of-consciousness,” Livingston recalls. “One person would say support is sturdy shoes, a dance belt, a pillar. Another would say it’s my family, it’s freedom to be who I am, it’s the earth under my feet.”

Livingston says the work really began to take shape when she started interacting with composer Jeffrey Rona, 33, long a close friend. “I think we’re kindred spirits in a lot of ways,” she says. “I really was working on a feeling level and believed his ideas, tone colors, timbres and shaping of the sound would be right for this project.”

Rona says his score “revolves around timbre, and Loretta has pushed me much further in this direction than I usually go. It’s somber yet rhythmic music and I wanted it to be dreamlike.”

Composed for keyboards, electronic woodwinds, bass, guitar and woman’s voice, it also incorporates recorded childrens voices and fragments of field recordings, Rona says, “from a region called Tuva, between Siberia and Mongolia--an astounding culture. I used parts of a recording of a woman singing a lullaby, and also bits of a Tuva funeral lament.”

The theme of support, however, soon yielded to influences from world events. Livingston acknowledges that the Kuwait crisis “definitely colored the piece as I created it this summer. I thought it was going to go in an entirely different direction but it kept shifting. (War in the Middle East) may not be an overriding image when watching it, but it’s certainly mixed in, an emotional thread.”

Ultimately, “A Window in the Passage” evolved to a quasi-narrative statement, one in which people new to a place arrive and begin to establish responses to the environment and to one another. (This opening section premiered as a work-in-progress at the Los Angeles Theatre Center last June as part of the Generator Eight festival.)

The second section, Livingston says, focuses on “responses to the physics of the place: the electromagnetic pull between bodies, the pull on the earth, the force of wind, fire: the elements. So it’s very physical. But in the third segment, one of the characters in the arriving group discovers a vault of archival figures, and she learns the history of the place.”

References to war give this “Archives” section the most social commentary in the piece, Livingston says. “And the character that receives all this archival history ends up damaged by it, though she’s not crippled or paralyzed.” In the final section, a collage of imagery expresses ideas about memory--and moving on.

A donation to her company made it possible for Livingston to use video as a choreographic tool on this project and she says “it accelerated the whole process. Every single night I would come and look at the rehearsal footage and could instantly tell what worked, what didn’t, what I needed to do. It saved the dancers’ bodies and, most of all, it saved time.”

Rona even believes that technology affected Livingston’s creative vision: “Whereas in most of the rest of her work there’s so much focus on the little motion of the individual dancer, this piece has more sense of the ensemble and use of the space as a whole. I think video has given her the opportunity to look at dance differently.”

Livingston agrees that “A Window in the Passage” represents a departure, but explains it differently: “Starting this time last year, when I added my sixth person and shifted the company personnel around a little bit, I really felt I had a group of dancers that I trusted creatively, and in many, many ways. A lot of this (new work) has evolved from their improvisations.

“Rather than me defining every step, making every phrase and setting it on their bodies, many segments have come out of either me directing their improvisations or from their own movement materials that I reassembled. So I was able to get out of my own way of moving/thinking/being/responding. I feel really happy about that.”

“I wanted to make very personal movement for the company, but they can’t be me, and I can’t give them movement that’s personal on me because it looks ridiculous on them. But I finally found ways to elicit personal material from each of the dancers and it brings freshets of energy to the vocabulary. I’m still shaping it, making it meld. But it’s much more open.”

Livingston says “A Window in the Passage” is now “essentially finished. I have to fix things but the shape of it is very close.” Still, she admits to being dismayed by the start of hostilities in the Gulf crisis and questions her responsibility as an artist when she thinks about the upbeat implications of the work’s final moments.

“I’ve asked myself, ‘Do I want to change the end?’ ” she reveals. “I don’t know yet. I think how I’ve done it is right--showing essential poetic essences surviving while externals are damaged.

“That’s what I believe. That’s what I want to say, and I think that it’s part of my job to contribute that idea.”