COVER STORY : Dance to the Edge : A controversial L.A. modern dance trend that some are calling Hyperdance emphasizes athleticism, endurance and risk, serving as a timely metaphor for survival in an age of disaster

In an era of fires, floods, earthquakes, riots, recession and AIDS, L.A.-area modern dance suddenly teems with metaphors for survival.

Throughout the Southland, a major trend in local work is defined by hyper-athletic, risk-oriented dancing in which contending with physical objects and with changing architectural conditions reflects feelings about trying to exist in a confined, threatening or out-of-control environment.

This isn’t protest art; it’s movement for movement’s sake. But the physical conditions and structure of the work undeniably address how human beings cope with overwhelming events.

Tests of gravity, stamina and spatial ingenuity are central to this kind of dancing: How many times can you roll steeply uphill in military formation? How many different ways can you move a pile of 50-pound wooden blocks? How much dance can you cram on a tabletop? Inside a plexiglass cube? Onto a single concrete block?

Jacques Heim, Stephanie Gilliland, Joel Christensen, Frank Guevara, Mehmet Sander and Lori DuPeron come from different dance backgrounds, but all have worked locally in this controversial new style or school or offshoot of postmodernism.

Some people are calling their work Hyperdance, partly because its advocates inevitably praise its hyper-physical, hyper-kinetic intensity, while its detractors say it’s mostly hype. Either way, it’s different from the hyper-physical work coming out of other U.S. cities or touring here from Europe, Canada and Japan. Rather than portray social themes or dramatize human relationships, the trend in L.A. emphasizes objects, architecture and extending the physical limits of dancing.

Obviously, all dance involves a quest for personal bests, with such idioms as ballet, modern and jazz dance particularly intent on technical expansion: faster footwork, more turns, higher jumps, longer stretches. But those forms--and even the postmodernism that made task- oriented motion commonplace on our stages--typically denied effort. Dancers tried to make it look easy, to always seem in control.

No longer. Watching people swallowed up by strenuous, uncontrollable processes has become increasingly familiar on L.A. stages. And showing effort has become a sign of honesty, if not a badge of honor.

Work like this isn’t appearing in other U.S. communities in any concentrated fashion, says Sali Ann Kriegsman, director of the dance program at the National Endowment for the Arts.

“I can’t say I’m seeing more of it (on a national level),” she comments, explaining that narrative and autobiography still dominate contemporary dance elsewhere, and what’s happening in Southern California could well be a rejection of the emphasis on expressive content.

Kriegsman considers Hyperdance to be “part of dancers’ normal appetite for new challenges, new horizons” and finds it a melding of techniques from the martial arts, the sports world and the physical fitness craze, along with a deep creative response to “the explorations of the moon and space: overcoming the terror of loss of gravity, the potential for movement that isn’t grounded in the usual way.”

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At Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, seven members of Jacques Heim’s Diavolo Dance Theatre swarm up a ramp to the top of a seven-foot-high metal jungle gym and then dive off--some landing on a platform halfway down, others on the floor below. Three take the plunge face down. Then they do it again.

Throughout Heim’s “Tete au Carre,” the 10-by-10-by-7-foot jungle gym functions as a city infrastructure, confining the dancers, conditioning their movement options and continually changing around them with the addition of the ramps and platforms, as well as curtains and projection screens. Heim says the theme is “the relationship between people and architecture, specific environments. And it was very hard to deal with this kind of (dance) space.

“I got that (idea) by living in L.A.,” he says. “I feel really trapped here, going from point to point in my car, so I wanted to do a piece that is confined, and in the last section I have eight people--some of them are 6-foot-4--inside the jungle gym.

“How will all of them move in this environment?” Heim asks. “How will they relate to one another? I know the way I relate to people here is very different than the way I related to people in Paris or New York. It’s affecting us and affected most of the movement (in this piece).”

The 29-year-old Heim, solidly built with deep-set eyes and a nervous, watchful manner, comes to Hyperdance from a background in European dance theater. He created and performed street theater in his native Paris, then studied dance both in England and at CalArts. He currently teaches contact improvisation at UCLA and the Orange County School of the Arts and says that, as a choreographer, he goes back and forth between theater and experimenting with movement.

“My goal is to mix those,” he says. “What I try to do is based on relationships--how we relate to another man, how we relate to a woman, how two women would relate. But when I talk to the dancers, I say I’m not interested in doing a piece particularly about something, but more to see how far we can go physically with a theme. Especially how far we can go into stamina.

“I’m very interested in working with non-dancers, people with sports backgrounds, people who are interested in moving, who are quite physical, who are not afraid of risk, who are not afraid of people jumping into them or of falling.”

Heim is one of the choreographers set to appear in a sampler program of Hyperdance at Cal State L.A. on March 26 and 27--the first event of its kind.

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If such films as “The Red Shoes,” “The Turning Point” and “Flashdance” defined the dancing image and aspirations of previous generations, Hyperdancers seem to emulate a strikingly different movie role model: the infinitely malleable, well-nigh indestructible quicksilver ninja of “Terminator 2.”

The high-velocity women’s attack squadron in Stephanie Gilliland’s “Coriolanus” certainly comes close, fusing a gritty, streetwise attitude with intimidating physical force.

“We’re literally inventing a new body in dance,” Gilliland, 41, exclaims. “You can’t do the work we’re doing without having a different body. And it might mean bigger thighs or more developed arm muscles, whatever’s needed.

“My aesthetic happens to be people flinging their bodies in space with abandon,” she says. “I love strength and power--I find it incredibly beautiful. But I also do very quiet solo work.”

Her suite of “Furniture Pieces” has a little of both: high-flying tabletop gymnastics for three women and a solo full of intricate, improvised gymnastic balances located on a carpet-covered cat-scratcher.

Why dance on furniture if you’re not Fred Astaire? Because working with objects and unlikely spatial formats generates new movement possibilities, Gilliland says. Instead of accepting the stage floor as the dancer’s God-given habitat, “you alter the place where activity occurs,” she says, “and make it higher or smaller--like a table--or even use a cat-scratcher where it’s abnormally low but not quite on the ground. You can’t do on a stage what you can do with these different surfaces and levels.”

Gilliland started studying modern dance in college. At UC Riverside, where she now teaches, she received support as a young choreography student and began making dances in 1977. “My first work had a comical leaning and I worked much more in conventional movement language,” she recalls, “but I always felt a kind of interest too in rock ‘n’ roll energies in my work.”

At one point in the ‘80s, Gilliland explored what she calls “crash-and-burn physicality,” then gave it up for “a more fluid, gentle, sensual kind of movement. That’s when I first appeared in Los Angeles.”

Simultaneously tomboyish and feline as a dancer, she explains her conversion to Hyperdance as partly a matter of “inventing myself as an artist and a woman . . . (and) confronting the notion of what a woman is capable of at a certain age.” But some of the lure is what she calls “responding to the environment we live in”:

“I think people who are doing this kind of work are somehow predisposed to it and are reacting to the place and the time. Even when I had concerns that maybe I was doing something potentially dangerous to my body or to the other dancers. I wasn’t able to not do it. I would go into the studio and try to make more gentle work, and it just wouldn’t come out.”

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Joel Christensen, 24, a blond, wiry dancer who puts a surprisingly whimsical spin on task-based work, says Hyperdance takes the performer into “a different state of being: I see things very differently when my heart is going at a certain pace and my blood is surging and my muscles are getting tired and I have to keep talking to my body and reminding myself of what’s ahead.”

“One major thing that I’m interested in,” he says, “is demonstrating labor and the human need to work. I think that’s where I find a large part of the common denominator with my audience. Because I think we all understand its importance and satisfaction as well as how it provides a structure to our day.”

An emerging artist, Christensen is one of two Hyperdance choreographers who have made solos using auto tires as both dancing partners and trampolines. His “Tired” involves stacking 20 tires in various formations and then destroying each arrangement--but not before throwing them, jumping into piles of them and bouncing off them in many different ways.

He trained in karate as a child and then Golden Gloves boxing in his early teens before coming to Los Angeles and signing up for football and ballet at Beverly Hills High. “But (visual) art was really my main focus ever since I was little,” he says. “So physicality and art combined for me in dance. It was the perfect answer.”

He went to New York University but cut classes to spend more time choreographing and so never graduated. When he came back to L.A., he joined the Mehmet Sander company for eight months, then left to perform his own program of what he called “industrial dance.”

Ambitious and resourceful, he runs a choreography workshop and is producing the Cal State L.A. Hyperdance showcase at the end of the month.

He finds a number of connections between Hyperdance and the L.A. environment: “We keep hearing about how violent it is here and how hard you have to work. Also L.A. is a city about the hard body, being strong and beautiful, and this work brings that to the front. But it’s also a reaction against Hollywood: no acting, no stories, no glamour.”

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To meet extreme and sometimes unprecedented demands for speed, stamina and sheer brute force, many of these dancers are now working out and bulking up as never before, challenging the standard image of a slender or sinewy “dancer’s body.” Four years ago, Frank Guevara weighed 145 pounds. Now he’s a hunky 175.

Bulking up has been a conscious program on his part to, in his words, “get a more physical, more masculine look as a dancer. And more strength. For the physical pieces you need to work out with weights because you need to be stronger. My characters are very macho , so that (bigger) body does help a lot. If I was still thin in the upper body, I think it would look funny.”

Guevara, 28, has made just two Hyperdance pieces to date--one of them not yet seen publicly. He says he was “inspired by Mehmet Sander to test my body, to find out how much it can take, but obviously in a different way than he does.”

He uses Hyperdance techniques to depict character, he says, and especially to address Latino community issues. In “Cursum Perficio,” for instance, he interacts with an auto tire, portraying a street guy he describes as “very stubborn, challenge-oriented. Maybe not much education but intelligent.”

And the tire? “I think it symbolizes the cycle of life,” Guevara says, “but it’s basically an object he’s familiar with. He finds different ways to connect with the tire: He holds it, brings it through his body, jumps from it, rolls it, dives into it.”

Guevara began dancing at 5, doing folklorico for about six or seven years, and then began training locally at Plaza de la Raza and high school in modern and jazz dance, along with ballet.

He did his first TV show at 17 and worked as a commercial dancer--movies, music videos, commercials, industrial shows, exercise videos--while studying at Cal State L.A. In 1989, he formed the East L.A. Choreographers’ Showcase as a venue for local work, and toward the end of 1992 started his own company, Dance Theatre of East L.A. He will be appearing at Highways on July 14-17.

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In the past, oppressive processes were dramatized--with some dancers cast as oppressors and some as the oppressed. But in Hyperdance, choreographers create oppressive structures or physical conditions and then plot strategies for survival. The subject of the dance is executing the dance. But meanings do arise directly from the motion.

For instance, in Mehmet Sander’s “18” (the number of the chapter in Leviticus condemning both nudity and homosexuality), he hurled his naked body over and over against a huge cross marked with tape on the stage floor. Resistance to an oppressive religious tradition became symbolized by the act of Sander trying every possible way to accommodate his body to that shape on the floor. Geometry became protest.

Sander, 27, has been working in hyper-physical expression for more than a decade and now aims for a stark, content-free, futuristic form of movement art that pushes against human limits. His pieces about homosexuality have been replaced in his repertory by these works and severe spatial experiments.

“To me, performance is a sacrifice,” he declares. “When I go onstage, there is the expectation that it shouldn’t be a comfortable experience. If you don’t occupy the most dangerous and unusual spaces, then it’s not an interesting dance to me.

“I’m not really happy with what the body can do,” he says. “I want it to be manipulated by outside forces and try to compete with them. So I really need the help of objects that move faster than human movement. Cars and bullets, for example.”

Sander’s “Ricochet” involves shooting rubber bullets through a hole in the transparent wall of an empty bulletproof room and tracing the exact rebound pattern. Next, dancers go into the space and “try to move as fast as the bullets and hit exactly the same spots,” he says. Another piece requires the dancers to try to outrun their own reflections.

Impossible, of course. “But even if it seems that way,” he argues, “by proving ourselves wrong, it’s going to bring a new (movement) vocabulary or system into being.”

An outdoor piece scheduled for next year will consist of what Sander calls “duets for four dancers and four cars. It was originally four duets for eight dancers, and I changed four of the dancers with the cars so that the integrity of the duet is the same but the dancers are challenged more.

“The cars are going 30 to 35 miles per hour, moving back and forward in laps, so you’re occupying pretty much the same space as they do. When they come toward you, you have to jump high enough so that, by the time the car comes, you land on the hood and don’t roll off. It’s just like having your body thrown to another dancer: You jump from one car moving 30 miles to another moving 30 miles. So the space changes more drastically and faster.” The Salzburg Festival is negotiating for the premiere, Sander says.

Some members of his company declined to become cast in the car piece and Sander says he respects their decision.

“Maybe they’re not ready mentally,” he says. “It’s definitely a mind-over-body piece. Some of my dancers need a warm-up class. I never do a warm-up. I can march to the stage right now and do any of my works.

“If I threw you in the middle of a freeway, would you say, ‘Well, I’m not warmed up to run?’ he asks with a sneer. “If you have the idea in your head 24 hours a day that you can do whatever you want at any moment, you can . I want the car piece to take that (idea) as a core, for the dancers to have great urgency to execute the piece and survive.”

Sander was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and studied dance in London, at Harvard, at the American Dance Festival and at Cal State Long Beach. His work has been seen at nearly all of the local modern-dance venues, and he appeared in seven European festivals last year alone. He choreographed Rachel Rosenthal’s “Zone” earlier this season, and UCLA recently added an additional Sander company performance at Schoenberg Hall on May 6 when those on May 7 and 8 nearly sold out.

Alone among these choreographers, Sander says that the Los Angeles environment has had no direct effect upon his work: “I would be doing the same kind of work in Chicago or anywhere else,” he says, though he acknowledges that “the response and interaction with the city would be different.”

Fiercely protective of his individuality, he objects to being linked in any trend with emerging artists who combine his priorities with more traditional ways of working. Such conflicts confirm that Hyperdance exists not as a unified movement but a constellation of artists with vastly different creative goals and levels of experience.

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To Lori DuPeron, however, there’s a connection, “an underlying purpose. It may be just about doing the motions,” she says, “and doing them as hard as you can, and it’s very much about geometry and the laws of gravity and different kinds of locomotion. But in the best pieces there’s something to be perceived beyond that. Memo (Mehmet Sander) says nothing else is going on. But I don’t believe him. It’s about the human condition usually.”

Once a fixture on the local dance-based performance art scene, DuPeron ended her stage career by retraining herself for Hyperdance by lifting weights and going back to ballet. Then she set the local community on its ear with “ties that bind . . . , “ a 10-minute solo in which she emerged out of billowing fog with 4 1/2-foot ropes attached to the ends of her limbs--lashing the ropes and her body with feral intensity.

DuPeron, now 31 and bi-coastal, wants to be a dance producer, and she retains a special interest in an approach to movement that she calls “one of the most shocking and sophisticated tools that we have for communication right now.”

To DuPeron, Hyperdance “walks a fine line between circus, spectacle and art,” and she worries that its fans will think it is self-generated, invented in Southern California out of whole cloth.

In fact, each Hyperdance choreographer can cite a long list of terpsichorean ancestors. Nearly a quarter-century ago, for example, Trisha Brown suspended dancers from the tops of rooms and even buildings on harnesses and had them dance up the walls, claiming a whole new spatial dimension for choreography. Her innovations represent one of the starting points for Hyperdance.

Other creative precedents include Pilobolus’ early experiments with bringing unorthodox movement vocabularies into the theater, Kei Takei’s grueling rituals, plus Molissa Fenley’s controversial training techniques for achieving expanded stamina onstage.

More recently, Bebe Miller has manipulated velocity, weight and openly acknowledged effort to heroic effect, and Elizabeth Streb has taken dancers far from the conventional stage picture frame into dynamic new performing realms.

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Although few Hyperdance choreographers readily acknowledge it, MTV has also had its effect--principally through its illusion (achieved by film editing) that dancers can work full-out indefinitely. Living up to this Hollywood fantasy can be hell on the body: DuPeron compares the physical demands of Hyperdance to “taking a beating or walking on hot coals.”

Gilliland concedes that Hyperdance gets a bad rap for not being body-friendly, “the notion that somehow we’re compromising our physical well-being for our work.” In fact, all dancers suffer from injuries and the bulked-up Hyper crowd also gets its share.

Frank Guevara, for instance, sprained his ankle jumping off his tire. Mehmet Sander recently suspended rehearsals of his car piece when a company member dislocated a shoulder. Joel Christensen has had two dance-related knee surgeries that definitely make his seven-minute hopping solo “Boing” full of personal risk.

But the most exposed Hyperdance injury to date belongs to Rebecca Butala, a member of Jacques Heim’s Diavolo Dance Theatre. On the opening night of a sold-out engagement at Highways in January, one of the pipes in the company’s jungle gym came loose when four women jumped on it. A corner of the pipe hit Butala’s head, knocked her down and cut her.

“In rehearsals, more drastic things had happened,” Heim says, “so she continued to dance. But then she saw blood was pouring out of her head, so she stopped and crawled out. We ended the performance.”

Butala received six stitches and was back dancing the next night, “still very dizzy,” Heim recalls, “and we all the time paid attention to her and knew what to do if she wanted to stop.” He also changed the piece slightly so that male members of the company braced the jungle gym while the women performed.

With contact improvisation, dance is literally a process of touch-and-go--so it’s comforting to learn that Heim’s company is covered by medical insurance. “We try things,” he says with a shrug. “Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes we get hurt.”

This element of danger makes some Hyperdance audiences behave as if they’re at the circus. But it isn’t present merely for mindless daredevil thrills. It exists as part of a commitment to making good on the broken promises of postmodernism: stripping away every literary, pictorial and theatrical embellishment to discover what dance uniquely is or might be.

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When Mehmet Sander speaks of using speed and risk to defeat audience analysis--in other words, trying to force viewers to experience a dance as a physical act before they can interpret it intellectually--he’s reminding us that dance isn’t important for what it means but what it does .

This may sound anti-intellectual, but dance, after all, is not about ideas: It’s about movement in space. Whatever ideas condition it, emanate from it or are imposed on it, it’s only the movement you see. And movement can inspire or devastate you directly, kinetically, bypassing your centers of understanding for a much deeper impact.

Hyperdance wants you to perceive the movement first and foremost, before laying any trip on it. To that end, it may make connections with familiar work activities, everyday objects, fears we all have of falling, of confinement, of being overwhelmed by cataclysmic events. Of trying to survive in the City of the Angels.

Or, at its purest, it may focus (in Mehmet Sander’s phrase) simply on putting a human body in a space where it’s never been before.