Choreographer Stirs Up Special ‘Gumbo’ : Dance: UC Irvine’s Donald McKayle unveils a new work commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and performed by San Francisco Ballet.

Moments before dress rehearsal for his newest creation, Donald McKayle presided over the backstage frenzy with calm reserve.

He was preparing for tonight, when the distinguished San Francisco Ballet, the country’s oldest ballet troupe, will give the first performance of his “Gumbo Ya-Ya.” A 30-minute work for 18 dancers that deals with human reaction to catastrophe, it was commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

McKayle--a professor of dance at UC Irvine who, at 63, has been a choreographer for more than four decades--was as unfazed by the significance of the occasion as he was by the last-minute activity around him. Navigating a sea of legs--legs encased in shiny tights, legs hoisted onto a barre, legs flexing in plie--he checked costumes and answered questions that couldn’t wait.

“Yes, yes, yes ,” he murmured, beaming with satisfaction over the way a headdress transformed dancer Yuri Zhukov into a formidable shaman. “I have to go to the bathroom,” said a wide-eyed waif. “Do I have time?”

The job description doesn’t include “mother hen skills mandatory.” But choreographers--the dance world’s equivalent of a playwright and a director--know that mothering can go right along with creating a work’s concept and steps, coming up with the appropriate music, helping to design sets and costumes, and showing dancers the previously untried moves.

As McKayle told the waif with a smile, “Everyone has a crisis.”

McKayle is a Laguna Beach resident whose credits include “Sophisticated Ladies,” the Broadway musical for which he won one of his five Tony nominations, and such American modern-dance classics as “Games,” his 1951 depiction of inner-city strife.

The “Gumbo” project has meant time away from his dance classes and rehearsals at UCI, where he is creating another new piece, this one with 22 students. But the opportunity wasn’t to be sniffed at.

The offer had come via San Francisco Ballet’s artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, who had been asked to take part in the Kennedy Center Ballet Commissioning Project, a farsighted effort to spawn new choreography. Six regional American ballet companies had been chosen to produce a dance apiece, and each would have its world premiere at the center.

(A musicians strike last fall postponed “Gumbo Ya-Ya’s” premiere at the center until May; thus, tonight’s performance is being billed as a “preview.” The San Francisco Ballet, which last appeared in Southern California at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in 1991, has no plans to present the work locally.)

Tomasson, who first worked with McKayle in the late 1960s, said he invited him aboard because he knew McKayle would come up with something good, something different, something that would challenge the San Francisco company.

“It’s very necessary for us to go forward and search for new works that, maybe years from now, will become classics,” Tomasson said.

As McKayle explains it, Gumbo ya-ya means “everybody talk at once” in Gullah, an African American dialect of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and the new ballet deals with how an unspecified catastrophic disaster thrusts together diverse groups of people. In the panic, McKayle said, “everybody is expressing something. Nothing is held back.”

The work had its genesis in a visit McKayle made to Malaysia about 40 years ago while he was touring with the Martha Graham Dance Company. “It was such a verdant, lush country,” he recalled, “and suddenly, I came upon a place that was absolutely stripped of all of its greenery. It was like someone dropped a bomb or something. But it was caused by open strip mining, for tin.”

Horrified by “mankind’s ability to destroy,” McKayle filed the Malaysian memories away. They began surfacing about a year ago, as headlines about environmental destruction were appearing more frequently. Tomasson had just called about the Kennedy Center commission when McKayle heard some work by UCI music professor and jazz flutist James Newton, and “as I heard the music, I began to see a dance.”

McKayle approached Newton. “I said to him, I’ve just been asked to do a ballet. Would you like to do a score for me?” Newton agreed and the collaboration began. They enlisted A. Christina Giannini, a designer from New York, to create sets and costumes, McKayle came up with a plot using musical sketches from Newton, and the creation of a 30-minute dance for 18 men and women to a propulsive, synthesized score was underway.

To create actual steps and string them together, McKayle said he follows a “complete” mental image of what he wants to see on stage.

In this case, the image included three diverse groups of people, all of whom live close to the earth, distinguished by their movement style: “Air people” are fleet and fast moving, “reed people” bend like willow branches, and “earth people” stay close to the ground. The image also included three main characters, a pair of lovers and a shaman who is looked to for a solution to the catastrophe.

During rehearsals, the movements evolved as dancers contributed their own ideas, with McKayle’s blessing.

Eric Hoisington, who plays the male lover, said before the dress rehearsal that he has worked with about 60 choreographers and prefers those like McKayle, who allow him to “improvise a bit. You make it your own. It’s a creative process for all involved.”

“Donald said we could do whatever we wanted to extend the character,” added Zhukov, a former member of Russia’s renowned Maryinsky Ballet (previously called the Kirov Ballet). “He gave us freedom to develop our own individual expression.”

McKayle said his approach actually has differed somewhat with each dance he has choreographed, but one unifying theme--whether the work concerns itself with street gangs or social oppression--has been his primary focus on human behavior and interaction, rather than events or polemics.

While “Gumbo Ya-Ya” is a clarion call against environmental destruction, McKayle thinks the human reaction to catastrophe is more central to his ballet. He thinks this “humanizing” inclination, as he calls it, developed in childhood when he was “taught to say thank you and listen to people, really hear what they were saying.” It engendered a “connection to human beings.”

Selecting choreography as a career had a lot to do with his penchant for people-watching. “I grew up in New York City and would always take subways and buses, and I was always watching people, what they were doing, little scenes that were going on. I remember I once watched a little old lady taking an apple and a knife out of her pocketbook and slowly peeling the apple, taking a slice, folding her handkerchief. . . . It was a beautiful little moment.”

Further reminiscing about his early days “when there was not a penny coming from anyone” to support his choreographic efforts, McKayle (who has just written his autobiography, “I Will Dance With You,” due for publication at the end of the year) said he is concerned about today’s severe cutbacks in arts funding. He suggested that artists must be creative in finding financial backing.

“The final mark that’s going to be left after civilization goes is going to be these elements of culture,” he said. “So this is not something that can just be sloughed off.”