Vampire in 3 Dimensions : Stage Music, Movement Will Accompany Film ‘Nosferatu’ at UCI

Exterior. Day. A ship’s deck, covered by a tarp. Magically, the tarp folds back to reveal a door to the ship’s hold. Again, magically, the door opens.

A moment passes and, one by one, rats crawl out of the hold and onto the deck. Just as it seems that the ship contains nothing but rats, a starkly white figure in a black cape, with a beady, ratlike face, emerges from the hold. His fingers aren’t fingers at all, but claws.

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film of German Expressionist horror, “Nosferatu,” contains many such moments, all of them defined in two essential words: motion picture.

Although it still is for many the essential Dracula movie--the title refers to the Nosferatu family line of Transylvanian vampires--it also suggests the play of cinematic movement in ways that are decades before its time. Using such tricks as stop-motion, ultra-slow filming (to speed up the images during projection) and superimposition long before they had a chance to become cliches, Murnau’s film was the essence of movement.

And though it seemed destined to spawn an inevitable brood of other cinema vampires, it also somehow seemed destined to become what director-choreographer Annie Loui is turning it into at UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Concert Hall.

Retaining Murnau’s original title--”Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror”--Loui, with composer Caleb Sampson, is creating a stage production to play in tandem with this constantly moving picture. It opens tonight.

It may be as difficult to pull off as it sounds, and Loui doesn’t discourage that impression. Her one disappointment is that a projected video copy of the movie will be shown on the 28-foot-wide screen rather than the celluloid print Loui hoped for but couldn’t obtain.

More than once in conversation between rehearsals, this 39-year-old veteran of experimental movement theater calls her project “three-dimensional chess.”

At the same time, Loui says it with a wistful tone, a flick of the head and a quick, flashing smile. She combines the most serious of resumes--studies with UCI’s favorite world theater eccentric, Jerzy Grotowski, and corporeal mime master Etienne Decroux and productions across Europe and such venues as the American Repertory Theatre--with a mischievous playfulness that comes through every gesture accenting her conversation.

Loui, in fact, never seems to stop moving. In the department’s vast costume room, she strokes and examines the production’s thick rack of clothes.

On the concert-hall stage, she is taking some of her student cast through the carefully choreographed steps, all timed to the action on the large screen just above their heads. She directs by doing, swirling around on a pivot foot as she demonstrates a fluid way to walk backward.

And walking between the theater and her office, her eyes dart about, catching everything around her, from a stage assistant carrying two large candelabra props for the show to a small, elderly man filling a bag with recyclable items.

“It isn’t easy keeping up with Annie,” said Sampson, 40, “but I try as best as I can.”

Appropriately enough, it was through film that Loui and Sampson met in 1991.

“Derek Lamb, the former head of the National Film Board of Canada, introduced us,” said Loui. “Caleb had scored music for his animation. Derek’s best-known work in the U.S. is for the title sequence on the PBS ‘Mystery!’ (series), which sort of sets up a horror-film connection right away. While Caleb was writing film and TV music, he was also performing live accompaniment to silent classics like Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis.’

“We knew that we wanted to do something together, and even though this doesn’t make any sense, after we went to see (Disney’s) ‘Aladdin,’ we chatted over a couple of beers about project ideas. One of us mentioned ‘Nosferatu.’

“Well,” said Loui, “life is a series of non sequiturs.”

Considering the proclivities of both the Boston-based Sampson and Loui--who took over last year as head of UCI drama department’s movement-studies program --a movement and live music performance with “Nosferatu” isn’t a non sequitur at all.

“I had long wanted to do a work based on vampires,” Loui said. Ideas for an opera based on Anne Rice’s alluring vampire novels were tossed about, and in the meantime, Loui was developing interactive performance works in Boston with animator Karen Aqua.

Also in Boston, Sampson had been performing along with sold-out screenings at the Coolidge Corner Theatre of “Metropolis,” “The Wind” with Lillian Gish and such camp obscurities as “Aelita, Queen of Mars” (“It’s a Soviet science-fiction silent about a Communist revolt on Mars”).

The temptation offered by Murnau’s dark tale of vampires, evil property owners, plagues and death ships was as great for the composer as the movement artist.

For both, the performance of this “Symphony of Horror” goes beyond the kind of organ-accompaniment show such as the one served up for a “Nosferatu” screening last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Sampson describes his new score, which he will perform on an array of synthesizers, with percussion support, as “combining contemporary minimalism in the tradition of Philip Glass with a classic film sound that recalls Nino Rota.

“The remarkable thing about ‘Nosferatu’ is that it looks like it was made in 1730,” notes Sampson. “And it has what I absolutely require from a silent film, which is a powerful story.”

“I was raised in a Catholic home,” said Loui, “and to this day, I do believe in good and evil, and recognize as well the allure of evil, which is what Nosferatu bases much of his power on.

“People have always felt the potential for something coming in the middle of the night,” she said, “taking something from you, and changing you forever. In that way, vampires go far beyond the sexual. Our onstage Nosferatu is a debonair figure, which contrasts and comments upon the monstrous vampire played by Max Schreck in the movie. At times, the staging will approximate the screen action and, at times, it will act as a subtext.”

Loui eyes dart around the room, and she grins.

“But I just can’t tell you everything about it, because the surprises--especially for an audience that may have seen the film before--are half of it. And for the campus students who’ve never seen it before . . . that’s the group this is really for.”

* “Nosferatu” opens tonight at 8 p.m. at UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Concert Hall, UC Irvine. Also Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. $6-$14. (714) 856-6616 or 856-5000.