Choreographer Goes Over the Barre Essentials : Dance: Hard work and a willingness to learn are the key to really understanding ‘the stepchild of the arts,’ pioneer Bella Lewitzky tells her audience at the Bowers Museum.

Seeking to dispel some of the “mystery about what dance is,” Los Angeles modern-dance pioneer Bella Lewitzky spoke before a large audience Thursday morning at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art.

“There are people in life who think that dance makes you graceful and you should send your daughter to it, whether the poor child wants it or not,” Lewitzky said. “Other people think they don’t know what it is, but, like manure, it’s good for something and you should spread it around, even if you don’t understand it.”

In fact, “to be educated in dance is very, very difficult,” said Lewitzky, whose talk, “The Choreographer’s Role: Challenge, Concept and Creativity,” was sponsored by the Crescendo Chapter of the Guilds of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Few hands, for instance, went up when she asked how many in the large audience were familiar with dance.

“That’s quite usual,” she said, because dance is “the stepchild of the arts--because it’s temporal” and cannot be studied the way a painting can.

A leader in West Coast modern dance since she began working with influential West Coast choreographer Leston Horton in the 1940s, Lewitzky founded her own troupe in 1966. All along she has won numerous awards and honors as a dancer and choreographer. (Her company will dance today and Sunday at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.)

She also has been in the forefront of advocating constitutional rights, from refusing to answer questions by the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era to, most recently, winning the first legal victory against the National Endowment for the Arts’ attempt to impose content restrictions on federal arts grants.

For Lewitzky, it’s all a matter of being true to the idea that “art is deeply communicative.”

“Dance is frightening and it’s wonderful because, like all art, there really are no secure formulas,” she said. “You cannot say, ‘If I do such, such and such, like (in) the recipe books, it’s going to come out a wonderful, tasty dish.’ Sometimes it will be a disaster and sometimes it will be an inspired invention, and who knows which way the luck will fall?”

But whatever way the luck falls, “my message here is that (dance) is a craft. It is learned. It’s learned work. “

Different choreographers work in different ways, she said. One person likes to listen to music by Chopin; another teaches a strict and difficult ballet class.

“I walk. I close the door and I walk around my studio endlessly . . . and it clears other things from my mind so that I can focus on aspects of my craft,” including “motion, energy, time and space . . . ideas and images.”

“Dances and dancers may deal with themes that are literal--storytelling--abstract, pure motion, pure design, and combinations of these and any and everything else.”

To illustrate, she gave a capsule summary of the history and types of modern dance, from its creation--”by a California woman, Isadora Duncan”--to the present.

“Right now,” she said, “we’re in a period of violence: How hard can you move? How dangerous can your movement be, without actually destroying yourself? People are throwing themselves from pillar to post, banging into the floor, getting up, banging into the walls. It’s really violent movement, and reflects where we are today.”

She illustrated some of these ideas with videotaped clips from the Joffrey Ballet reconstruction of Nijinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps,” Pina Bausch’s choreography for the same section of the Stravinsky score (unfortunately, this segment was largely unviewable because of tape tracking problems), and her own “Inscape.”

A question from the audience prompted her to elaborate on her own creative process.

She explained how her 1971 “Pietas” emerged from her reactions to various statues she saw in New York and Italy, as well as to the social discontent of students she taught at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where she founded the dance department in 1969.

In contrast, her recent piece “Turf” originated because four of her male dancers complained “bitterly” that they had not had enough to do lately.

Even this piece, however, reflects her social awareness. She became aware that she was isolating the men and making them “aggressive, combative figures” because “I was upset about the lack of civility that I see in our society.”

Such work may not make her popular, but the challenge in being an artist is “how do you avoid the seductiveness of marketing?” she said. “If you don’t fill a house, you’re considered not successful--and yet what you have done may be the best thing you’ve ever done, but it wasn’t popular.”

Other traps she tries to avoid include following fads, popularity contests and imitating others. Each choreographer, she said, must find time “to dig deeply into yourself to do the things in which you believe, even if they are not fully appreciated.

“I always say that if I feel that two people understood what I did, that’s great. I hope many more will, but that’s still wonderful.”