A Ballroom Balancing Act : The Stage Is Set for a Place Where Men and Women Can Really Communicate--Even if the Guy Leads and the Woman Follows

Call it chivalry or chauvinism, but in ballroom dance, the man leads and the woman follows, be it cha-cha, waltz or mambo.

But there’s more to it than that--more teamwork--which makes ballroom perfectly apt for the ‘90s, according to Yvonne Marceau, co-founder of American Ballroom Theater, a 14-member troupe from New York that appears tonight and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

“Often we say the man initiates the movement, the woman picks it up, and the man finishes it,” Marceau said. “It’s really a conversation--monologues are generally boring, and anyone who monopolizes is a bore.

“It’s a willingness to compromise without losing one’s individual sense and balance,” she continued during a recent phone conversation. “It’s the balance of closeness to someone else and a perfect sense of our own personal balance and individuality. Both those things can exist side by side, and that connection is the connection we all search for in our lives.

“Some people get to it more easily through sex, some through conversation maybe, but however they get there, it’s what makes people happier than anything in the world.” The give and take of dancing with another person is, she said, “the best thing I know.”

Marceau, 43, created ABrT with Pierre Dulaine, 49, back in 1984. They’d met in the mid-’70s at a ballroom school in Manhattan where she, an aspiring ballet dancer from Chicago, was teaching lessons to pay the rent. He, a Palestine-born ballroom champion, was managing the place.

The couple began winning major ballroom competitions in England where Dulaine had trained. Marceau had little prior ballroom experience, but long had been attracted by its arm-in-arm appeal.

“I grew up in an ethnic neighborhood where everyone did the polka at weddings,” she recalled. “And I was raised watching dance teams on the Ed Sullivan show and films starring dancers like Marge and Gower Champion.”

Despite the success of “Strictly Ballroom,” an Australian film that was a sleeper hit last year, ballroom dance in the United States doesn’t have the mainstream popularity it enjoys in countries such as Great Britain, the home of competitive ballroom, or Germany and Japan.

That partly is due to this country’s size, Marceau said. “In England, if you’re a competitor, you can get in a car and in three hours get to another country for a competition. Here, you have to get on a plane.”

Nonetheless, ABrT has managed for nine years now to draw ticket buyers, even those reared on hip-hop rather than the Lindy Hop.

“Ballroom or social dance,” Marceau noted, “is about dancing with or being held by someone else, and that’s something we all know something about.”

The troupe consists of seven couples, many with ballet or jazz backgrounds. Four are married. Their repertory is based on ballroom standards from the dependable fox trot to the fiery tango, but the approach differs from competition dancing, which is characterized by rigid conformity to mandatory steps and patterns.

ABrT’s choreographers are free to exercise their imagination and “do moves that are much softer,” Marceau said. “We can create more light and shade because we don’t have to be furiously blasting it out every second to attract attention” from judges in the two minutes or so allotted.

Initially, ABrT relied heavily on the late John Roudis, a ballroom master who choreographed the troupe’s debut piece, “Sheer Romance.” But Marceau and Dulaine now try to commission works that go beyond dance for dance’s sake, much as the late champion skater John Curry added an interpretive aspect to the sport.

Take “Silver Screen,” a work from 1992 to be performed in Cerritos. Crafted by ballet choreographer Peter Anastos (who co-created a version of “Cinderella” with Mikhail Baryshnikov), it’s a nostalgic throwback to early movie musicals with action-packed vignettes featuring the Marx Brothers, Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald, a starlet and King Kong.

Marceau and Dulaine haven’t been appearing regularly with the company for three and a half years. During much of that time they could be seen in featured roles they choreographed for Tommy Tune’s musical “Grand Hotel.” They will dance in Cerritos, however, in “For You,” a signature Roudis duet that has won them accolades.

* A BrT performs tonight and Saturday at 8 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. $22-$30. (800) 300-4345.