The High Risk Dancers Live Up to Name : * Performance: San Francisco-based troupe that will be at the Sushi aims to ‘explode’ oppression and exclusion.

Rick Darnell jams. He’s a gotta-go guy, with time for a high-speed hello and no time to mince words. As artistic director of the High Risk Group, a San Francisco-based dance and performance ensemble, he has an agenda.

“A big thing we go for is that all labor is equal. Everyone’s work is important. All work is essential for society to grow. All cultures have a vision.” In his vision, Darnell wants to include people not acknowledged by the “white heterocentric male point of view,” and through dance “explode” oppression and exclusion.

High Risk will perform at Sushi Performance Gallery Thursday through Saturday. To talk about the four-man troupe and its dances, Darnell delivered a stream of promotional patter by phone last week between workshops at Highways, a performance space in Los Angeles.

He mixes a likable Southern friendliness with a graphic urban-chaos intensity. Born Ricky Lynn Darnell, he grew up in North Carolina, Jesse Helms country, but his home now is artistically and politically thousands of miles away.

The name High Risk has multiple references, the most obvious is to AIDS and people at risk of infection. (Darnell has tested positive.) The term also resonates with the dangers of love and loss, of “inhuman urban circumstance,” of expressing controversial opinions in art, of pushing oneself beyond physical limits. High Risk, which often deals with taboo and sexually charged

subjects, strives for an aesthetic that “sees artists as accountable for a meaningful depiction of the world around them,” according to the group’s mission statement. And the depiction Darnell prefers is risky.

“We work in sneakers, use high-energy pedestrian moves, martial arts forms, mountain climbing, skateboarding,” Darnell buzzed. “Our style’s very eclectic, has a lot of partnering, solos, duets, trios, quartets, falling, slamming, some work that comes form Cunningham. But it doesn’t look like modern dance.”

The group formed in 1987 and includes Clyde Smith, also a choreographer, Richard Bord and Myles Downes. “Everyone is a trained dancer,” Darnell said, “we’ve studied in Merce Cunningham technique and Martha Graham technique . . . . I feel ripped off when dancers come on stage and just do technique. It may be great, but technique just enables you to dance. I compare it to a football game. If the guys come out on the field and only do exercises, that’s not football. I want the game.”

The game for High Risk is subject matter. “ ‘My Dad the Inventor’ is about the mechanism men have created to enslave and oppress. It’s about the misuse of power,” Darnell explained. A new work, “Falling,” is a metaphor for the decline of the white, heterocentric power structure, and Smith’s “Home Boys,” reacts to the “holy machismo” of the Gulf War. “Testosterone does not define everything,” Darnell quoted Smith.

“Brides of Frankenstein” is a piece about AIDS, “about being married to death and where that takes you, about reclaiming death and anger. The visual imagery is strong. Clyde, he’s straight, plays a Cassandra character in a prom tutu. It has beautiful sets by John Ralph Yates, who’s known in the punk scene,” Darnell said.

They “look like skateboarders from hell,” wrote David Gere, a Bay Area reviewer, and in their work “galumph and stomp about the stage like a gang of angry adolescents.” This was a positive assessment and an image Darnell likes.

“We all came into dance and got dissatisfied with the models. I admire a fine artist, but they better have something to say.” He cited the “outrageous” work of choreographer-performance artists Joe Goode, Bill T. Jones, Patricia Brown and Tim Miller as those who are making history and helping to change the world--his goals, too.

“Our work is historical. There are no role models. We’re making it up as we go.”

The line between work and life, or studio and street is blurred for High Risk. They live in San Francisco’s Mission district, a “nurturing community,” one that’s open and progressive, with performances happening all the time, Darnell said. Each of the four has a full-time job outside the company, with schedules that Darnell believes would be exhausting if they didn’t lead healthy lifestyles.

The group holds dance workshops to help fund the company. “The NEA won’t touch us,” he said, and he refuses to sign the California Arts Council pledge for a drug-free workplace, a requirement he calls “fascist.”

Rita Felciano, a Bay Area dance writer, said of High Risk: “One has the impression that, having nothing to lose, nothing will stop them. They are fierce in their anger, fierce in their loving. And it all comes out in the dance.”

“Our concerts are real physical” Darnell said, and added, half-kidding, that the full-throttle effort has them throwing up backstage between dances. “But we check in with each other: ‘Are you OK? You all right? You almost dropped me!’ ”

“We were friends before we started dancing together. I feel so loved, so comfortable, so protected by the group. It is totally cool.”

The High Risk Group at Sushi, 852 8th Ave., San Diego. Performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Call 235-8466 for reservations and information.