DANCE : Definitely Not Still Life

Choreographer Edouard Lock, dressed in chic black on black, sits on a couch in his beige-on-beige West Hollywood hotel room, patiently answering a reporter’s questions. He has pale skin and deep, dark eyes set in a chiseled face straight out of a German Expressionist painting.

Lock is energetic, but he’s also got an almost preternatural calm about him, especially for a guy in the midst of a hectic international touring schedule. As interviewees go, he’s the proverbial lightning in a bottle. But then you could say the same of his dramatic, super-athletic choreography--sans the bottle.

Lock’s Montreal-based La La La Human Steps has not performed here since the 1987 Los Angeles Festival. After the company’s current tour of Europe, it will return to L.A. with their “Infante-C’est Destroy” on Oct. 28 and 29 at the Wiltern.

Through recent years when the performing arts have been straining under a tough economy and other constraints, Lock hasn’t wavered from his brash course. He’s done some gigs outside the company--such as directing David Bowie’s 1990 Sound and Vision tour--but La La La’s hyper aesthetic remains uncompromised.

For a man of the ‘90s, Lock has some clear affinities with ‘60s provocateurs.

“Destructuring perception and expectations is what a lot of people in the ‘60s were trying to do,” he says. “I’m making things move in order to start looking at the flux. Also, I’m doing it because somebody already thought of just sitting on a chair and looking at an audience and there’s no point in doing what they did.”

La La La’s style has been described as “visual white noise.” The Washington Post called it “part rock concert, part ultra high-voltage aerobics, and part metaphysically oriented orgy.” Certainly it’s abstract, with frequent motifs of conflict--androgynously sexual and otherwise.

Yet the madness has a method to it. “People are always saying, ‘Why are you moving so fast and jumping?’ ” says Lock. “It’s hard for someone to measure. But we’re always measuring: Beautiful-not beautiful, tall-short, fat-skinny. We go through this list as soon as we lay eyes on someone.”

His goal is to arrest this process. “If the dancers are moving fast, you’re not going to be able to measure,” he says. “Well, this inability to measure is interesting to me. So the dancers are moving all the time. If the audience wants to know what Louise Lecavalier looks like they have to buy a picture, because she’s almost never at rest.”

The motion is a tool Lock uses to disrupt complacency. “When you’re about to fall, all your senses snap awake and you become this effective thinking machine,” he explains. “When (the dance) comes at you, ideally your perceptual stability goes away.”

The point isn’t just to shock. “Something about the performance makes you think differently,” says Lock. “Certain basics that you took for granted are contradicted in real time, real space. You’re in the same room as a performer and you can’t say the camera angle did it. Whatever you see you’ve got to believe in.”

Lock is out to break our auto-pilot attachment to language. “When you go into an apartment for the first time, you’re actually looking because you don’t want to hit anything,” he explains. “When you go in for the 10th time, you know the Chesterfield is here and the table is there. The word covers the thing. The thing doesn’t even exist anymore.”

This, says Lock, is especially a problem when it comes to self-awareness. “What do you think happens to our bodies after we’ve lived in them for 30 years?” he asks. “They’re just a word. You don’t even see yourself anymore. But if you see something that contradicts something the body should be able to do, you’re jolted. Because the first thing you want to do when you see something you like is to imitate it.”

Dance, in other words, becomes a way to get us to re-apprehend this thing called the human being. “The first thing a choreographer should realize is that we’re sexually strange,” says Lock. “We are able to be sexually attracted to this entity with fuzzy filament on a bony structure, suspended by a tensile core to something that has tentacular growth on all sides. But then we unify and go, ‘Oh, it’s a person.’ As a choreographer, you got to feel a strangeness for the human form if you’re going to deal with it.”

The Morocco-born and Canada-raised Lock founded La La La in 1980. His “Oranges” (1982) garnered Canada’s top choreography prize, the Jean A. Chalmers award, and “Businessman in the Process of Becoming an Angel” (1983) won a Bessie award for La La La principal dancer Lecavalier, making her the first Canadian to receive the New York prize. And Lock himself won a Bessie for “Human Sex” (1985).

The year 1987 also saw La La La branch out into other forums. The company appeared at the Los Angeles Festival and on a bill with the Bolshoi Ballet in Canada. In 1988, Lock created the ballet “Bread Dances” for the National Ballet of Holland and choreographed a performance based on Bowie’s “Look Back in Anger” for Lecavalier and Bowie.

In 1990, Lock co-conceived and directed Bowie’s Sound and Vision world tour, with Lecavalier and dancer Donald Weikert appearing with Bowie in New York and Los Angeles. La La La’s other excursions from the world of concert dance have included a 1992 collaboration with Frank Zappa and the Ensemble Moderne Orchestra in a series of televised concerts called “The Yellow Shark.”

“Infante-C’est Destroy” has been seen in 30 cities since it premiered at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in April, 1991. The production includes onstage musicians (guitarist Sylvain Provost and percussionist Jackie Gallant) as well as a sound environment featuring the likes of David van Tieghem and Skinny Puppy. Film also plays a significant role in the production.

Throughout this body of work, Lock has shown interest not just in the individual, but also in the social games people play. Like a number of his fellow avant-garde choreographers during the past decade, he’s constantly dissecting the moves of human relationships.

Movement, in Lock’s view, is as important a communicator as language. “Any physical activity we do is 10% functional and 90% style and communication,” he says. “You lift a cup to your mouth and it has a lot to do with who’s at the table with you and how you’re being observed. There is no neutral way to act.

“In point of fact, there is no difference between the person and the body. Normally we think of the person as being a thinking person--thought is complex and of a higher order, then you’ve got physical manifestation, which is mechanical. In fact, thought is mechanization. Once you want to express a thought, you mechanize it into movement.”

This is more than a mere ‘70s-style interest in “body language.” Movement, in Lock’s view, is a key to generational identity. “The problem with spoken language is that there’s a certain significance associated with each word,” he says. “So for a generation to make a language of their own, they have to find a way to make a word mean something other than it normally means. You can also do that with a gesture and not have to explain yourself.”

Dance isn’t usually thought of as a political medium and Lock’s choreographies certainly aren’t doctrinaire. Yet if political science is the study of power relationships in groups, Lock’s clashing protagonists and alienated scenarios are very much concerned with the human as political animal.

In this way, his dance is an exploration of tribal rituals and group identity. “Making yourself different from everybody else is one of the primary goals of any group, and movement sets off difference,” he says. “Part of it is nationality-based and part of it is class-based, because movement has to do with power. Each class has a way of telling itself how powerful they are. Some classes exert power by being extremely reduced in the scope of their movement. In other classes, you exude power by moving in very large ways.”

And for Lock personally, the message society puts out there isn’t necessarily the best one. “Everything society tells us has to do with lack of effort,” he says. “You start out, you move a lot, you make a lot of money and you move less. At some point, you’re making so much money that you don’t move at all because other people are moving for you. And you die. Well, I like the beginning part. A sense of effort freely given is interesting. There is effort to the dance that I’m presenting.”