Life on Tour Daunting for Dancer : Artistry: Loneliness goes with the territory, says Betzi Roe, who will give solo performances in San Diego.

Dancer and choreographer Betzi Roe can tell you the down side of being a touring soloist. It’s lonely, and the work is hard.

The up side is that ideas and encouragement can come from respected professionals from all over.

Tonight and Saturday at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, Roe will perform six modern dance solos, including her own choreography and that of dance notables Donald McKayle and Gloria Newman, in a program presented by the Gaslamp Quarter Theater Company.

“I’m into my fifth year now as a solo artist. Many dancers try it but don’t continue on. I’m not getting younger, but I seem to be getting better.”

Roe, 44, is best known locally as a co-founder of Three’s Company & Dancers (the group is now known as Isaacs, McCaleb & Dancers). When she left the company in 1987 and began working on her own, she said, she gained a broader perspective of herself as an artist “and a strong sense of who I am and that I have something to offer in the world.

“But it’s lonely as a soloist. That’s the one drawback. You have to be really self-motivated. It’s hard to wake up in the morning and get motivated to go in alone , make yourself do the work alone , with nobody telling you what’s good or not. You just have to depend on yourself wholly.”

For this concert, which Roe is calling the “Solo Dance Collection,” she has found ways to get feedback. “People have been very gracious, especially the two choreographers I’ve just worked with, who are great pioneers in the field.

“(Donald) McKayle is in his late 50s, and Gloria Newman is around 70. They are our history, and to work with them and have them be curious about the rest of my repertory and give me feedback has been great.”

For many years, McKayle was director of the Los Angeles-based Inner City Repertory Dance Theater. He teaches at UC Irvine, where Roe has worked occasionally as a guest choreographer and has come to know him and his work.

One of McKayle’s solos, “Angelitos Negros,” which is in the repertory of major African-American dance companies, including Alvin Ailey and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, attracted Roe for its beauty and refined construction.

Roe said she learned the solo from videotape but hesitated to do it because she is not black. But that issue didn’t occur to McKayle, who is black, and he helped her polish the dance.

“The dance is about skin color, but the major issue is the human spirit,” Roe explained. “It has a strong inherent message that crosses cultural boundaries. Inside and underneath (our skin) is what we are really all about. It’s a good piece of work. I hope I can do it justice.”

Making a dance with Gloria Newman for the program was an entirely different experience, Roe said. One of hard work and inspiration.

Newman has her own company in Orange County and is on the faculty at Cal State Long Beach. “I think she’s a quiet genius,” Roe said. “She’s a taskmaster, has tremendous capacity for movement invention, especially for a woman her age who doesn’t dance anymore. There’s an intuitiveness about her work. She cuts through to a larger, universal perspective.”

When Roe approached Newman about doing a work together, Newman asked Roe to write a series of essays about Roe’s grandmothers. The two choreographers juxtaposed taped recordings of the essays with an old going-to-California blues song and incorporated movement. The result, “Fragmented Flashback Blues,” is a soothing, mature “docu-dance,” Roe said.

“I’ve stood by a hard line of being a repertory artist. I travel a lot and perform for young people and feel a strong obligation to let them see a different picture of where modern dance is going. But ‘Flashback Blues’ is one dance in all my repertory that says something strong about who I am.”

Roe will also dance fellow San Diego choreographer Jean Isaac’s “Petals in the Flesh,” a work Isaac set on Roe after the two studied the curvilinear forms in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers.

She’ll also perform excerpts from a long dance-theater piece “Landscape in Our Eyes,” which she created with actor-director Marvin Katz, through a grant from San Diego County’s Public Arts Advisory Council. The piece incorporates recitations of personal essays on the lives of teen-agers written by Torrey Pines High School students, to which Roe has choreographed dance movements.

“I’ve created new pieces for this concert that I’ve worked extraordinarily, agonizingly , hard on , Roe emphasized. She is wary of falling into her own movement cliches, so she has pushed herself to experiment and explore other dance forms.

During a recent interview, Roe stood and demonstrated high-speed and hip-hop steps she’s using in the program’s closing piece. “This is killer movement at age 44,” she said, laughing. “It has all this pretzel movement. I never thought I could pull this off in a millions years.

“I called it ‘Possession’ initially. It’s about being possessed by a relationship or issue that’s eating you. You thought you were in control, but it was controlling you. Then you release it and find your own angels to follow, but that thing just creeps in and echoes a little bit.

“I sent a videotape of it to Gloria Newman, and she called me and said, ‘You don’t look possessed.’ So I decided to change the title, but I don’t know what to call it,” Roe laughed.

“It’s about boundaries, really. About being upset, uptight, caught, and then you finally let go.”

Roe called after the interview to say she’d decided to call the dance “Beyond the Boundary,” referring to the impulse behind the dance, and to her own strivings as a soloist.

“As a soloist, you just have to keep testing your range. We all have to work hard, fight so many obstacles to get the delivery, to get your art so strong that you get the message across. It’s such a humbling art form.”

* “The Solo Dance Collection” by Betzi Roe at Hahn Cosmopolitan Theater, 444 4th Ave. Tickets $10 and $8 at the door or by calling the Hahn Box Office, 234-9583.