A Matter of Life and Dance : Diverse Selections Make Personal Statements in Riverside Concert to Benefit the Inland AIDS Project

It’s back to plain speech in the title this year for the annual Riverside dance concert to benefit the Inland AIDS Project: “Dancers for Life 5.”

Last year, the organizers tried to put a little Hollywood spin in the title: “Dancers for Life III . . . The Journey Continues.”

But the spin is off. The organizers are facing up to a long, lingering reality.

“When I started doing this,” concert organizer Jo Dierdorff said in a recent phone interview, “it was one of those things I just decided, ‘I’ve got to do something; let’s do this,’ with no long-term thought of continuing it or what would happen. It has just literally taken on a life of its own. Of course, we wish we didn’t have to do it.”

The concert tonight at the Landis Auditorium at Riverside Community College is counted as the fifth because Dierdorff and Los Angeles tapper Fred Strickler put on an informal fourth program in October to benefit an AIDS Walk project.

The dance concert last year raised $8,000; the year before that, $7,000. “Each year it’s gone up,” Dierdorff said. “We hope it will go up again this time.”

Such money is only a drop in the bucket, given the IAP’s annual budget of about $1.5 million, but the effort is appreciated nonetheless.

“This is just a wonderful thing that Jo and the Riverside Community College (have) taken on for us,” said executive director John Salley, who has headed the IAP since it was founded 10 years ago.

“I remember when there were 50 clients,” he said. “From ’87 to ‘93, we went from 50 to 1,000 clients, and the budget has gone from about $12,000 when I first came, to where it is now, about $1.5 million. We’re projecting a budget of about $2 million for ’94.”

About 80% of the money comes from federal, state and county governments. The remaining 20% comes “from activities like this. There are a lot of donations,” he added. “The key challenge is, ‘Can you keep the budget and services growing as fast as the client base? Can you provide both existing services and new services for a quickly growing population?’ ”

There are 12 pieces on tonight’s program, including works by internationally known choreographer Donald McKayle, who teaches at UC Irvine; Frances Zapella, who teaches in Costa Mesa, and modern dancer Valerie Bettis, as reconstructed by Mary Corey, a dance professor at UCI.

Other choreographers or dancers will include Strickler, Stephanie Gilliland, Gail Abrams, Rose Polsky, Wade Madsen and Paralelo 32 from Mexico.

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There is no theme, much less a specific AIDS theme to the program.

“When I ask people, they chose the pieces they want to do,” Dierdorff said. “It’s a real variety. There’s no one piece that specifically deals with AIDS. I think there are some very poignant, moving pieces. The ‘Desperate Heart’ piece by Bettis can be seen in that light, although it wasn’t choreographed with that in mind. It deals with loss.”

Bettis created “The Desperate Heart” as a solo for herself in 1943, when she was 23. The piece is based on a poem by John Malcolm Brinin and uses lines from the poem as well as music by Bernard Segall as accompaniment. It received high praise at the time, but like most of Bettis’ work, the dance has faded from the active repertory. To re-create it, Corey had to draw on several sources.

“I had the Labanotation score,” she said recently. (Labanotation is a form of choreographic notation invented by Rudolph von Laban.) “I had a film of Bettis doing it, as a young dancer, doing it full-out . . . I also had a film of Bettis coaching a dancer learning it and correcting her, and that was very helpful.

“Then there was another film of another dancer doing it. The challenge was coming up with a version I hoped she would be happy with, incorporating the best of all of it.”

The poem, she said, is “very much evocative of great emotion, and the work itself, the motion of the dancing, really stirs up a lot of feelings. It’s very much an inside-out kind of work, showing on the outside what’s going on in the inside. I think it’s completely appropriate for this concert. There are wonderfully evocative movements throughout the piece, which is appropriate for the AIDS crisis for me.”

Corey is donating her services, as is Laura Lhotsky, who is dancing the solo, and all the other dancers, choreographers, organizers and supporters.

“I just can’t describe the amazing feeling that has happened every year, with everyone, putting this concert on,” Dierdorff said. “It’s a joy to work with everyone.

“Everyone feels that it’s something--this sounds so trite--something bigger than all of us. There’s that feeling of being able to do something with this group of people that you couldn’t necessarily do by yourself. That’s really important for everybody. It’s so much more than just a dance concert.”

* “Dancers for Life 5,” a concert to benefit the Inland AIDS Project , will be tonight at 8 in Landis Auditorium, Riverside Community College, 4800 Magnolia Ave., Riverside. $10 and $20. (909) 684-3240, Ext. 2720.