MUSIC & DANCE : Young Turk : High-risk formalism and full-out physicality mark the work of Istanbul native Mehmet Memo Sander. The choreographer’s ‘Board Stiff’ can be seen at the Dance Kaleidoscope festival starting this week.

With his severe military-style haircut, the silver rings piercing his ears and right eyebrow, plus a T-shirt declaring “Dead Bigots Don’t Bash Homos,” Mehmet Memo Sander creates confrontational performance art just by entering a room.

At 25, Sander describes himself bluntly in his publicity kit as “HIV+ and a Queer choreographer from Istanbul.” Moreover, he takes his activism literally to the streets by joining a Long Beach citizens patrol after weekend rehearsals to help protect a gay and lesbian neighborhood.

“I’d feel uneasy if I didn’t do something,” he explains, just as he confesses being “very uncomfortable” whenever he’s wearing a T-shirt with nothing printed on it. This is the ‘90s, he reminds you--”and I think everybody who’s queer should be ‘out,’ mandatory.”

He has lived with HIV for five years and accepts the inevitability of his own death more readily than the prospect of any miracle cure. “When there is a cure,” he says with a bitter smile, “this country’s health-care system won’t be able to afford it.”

As a result, Sander doesn’t plan much further into the future than the five-year lease he’s just taken on a performing space in Long Beach. Instead, he focuses on the present--including performances next Sunday and July 24 in the annual Dance Kaleidoscope festival at Cal State L.A. (See schedule, Page 54.)

Like his public lifestyle, Sander’s choreography qualifies as radical--but for radically different reasons. Sexual politics takes a back seat here to the high-risk formalism that makes Sander the first major discovery of the ‘90s on the local scene.

Where other activist choreographers in the area create either text-dominated works describing oppression, or else dance-dramas featuring characters who pretend to be oppressed, Sander constructs relentlessly oppressive physical processes that test his dancers’ survival skills. It’s not playacting, it’s not autobiography, it’s dance: brutal, yes, but much too intricately structured to be called raw.

“What I’m doing is abstract,” he says, “but I really don’t buy it when I hear that ‘abstract dance is inhuman.’ The minute you’re in the space, if you’re an honest human being, then I get the message what kind of person you are. So don’t tell me another layer of emotion is needed.

“Works that depict people’s life stories, personal problems and emotions by use of dance seem really self-indulgent to me,” he says. “All my dances right now are inspired by architecture and mathematics.”

Sander sees choreography as a crusade to find new movement “by any means necessary, even if you have to get 30 feet above the ground to do it.” He begins by “questioning everything,” he says, especially the assumption that dancing involves a flat floor with dancers standing or moving on their feet.

At Dance Kaleidoscope, he’ll present “Board Stiff,” the virtuoso company showpiece in which the manipulation of a portable 6-by-8-foot wooden platform becomes a metaphor for the hazards of contemporary life.

Sander believes the work shifts the normal architectural context of watching dance in a proscenium theater to something less predictable. “It’s about a modular wall; it’s self-defining,” he says. “During the piece the (platform) is our reference point. We stand on it and it’s our floor. We drop it on us and it’s our ceiling. And we use it as a ramp too. It becomes our reality.”

In other pieces, a Sander dancer might be found hanging inside a wooden box or squeezed inside a transparent plastic cube. In his solo “18,” he tapes a cross on the floor and then hurls his naked body, over and over, against its contours--the movement at each instant rigorous in both its geometry and sense of pain.

“What I want to do with movement has always been very physical,” Sander says. “No transitions, no story, no music. The kind of movement vocabulary I’m using is very fast because I don’t want the audience to analyze the piece. Ideally, I want the audience to be with me until it’s over, and one of my solutions is the use of speed as a force.”

The rigid patterning of his pieces, however, keeps them looking like choreography rather than contact improvisation. And it also reveals links to the traditional Turkish culture that helped shape him as an artist.

“I was raised in a very old part of Istanbul,” Sander says, “and my subconscious aesthetic sense developed from the very pure, basic and symmetrical Turkish folk design.” Call it a birthright.

Sander was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, of Turkish parents who moved back to Istanbul when he was 1 year old. “When I was 5, I knew I was a queer,” he says. “And I was always ‘out’ in school.”

He recalls being “beaten up and shoved around by police,” starting when he was 15. By the time he was 18, however, he’d won a scholarship from the London Contemporary Dance School. He also went briefly to Germany to take more classes, and when he turned 21 in 1987, the influence of Merce Cunningham’s work and philosophy of movement drew him to America.

By relying on chance (something Cunningham uses to make decisions when choreographing), Sander ended up in Southern California, beginning a rebellious and productive period as a student at Cal State Long Beach. He formed his company two years later.

Today, like so many others, he carefully monitors his health and makes cruel, necessary choices: “Learning I was HIV-positive was a stimulant to make my life more concentrated. I knew long before I got this possibly terminal virus that my mission is certainly my work. Now 99% of my life has to be committed to it. Everything else is being eliminated.

“I have the perfect personality for this virus,” he says with a grim laugh. “I always take any situation to an extreme. I always push the limits of a moment’s reality, and I’m always going to do that, whatever my capacity is.”