O.C. Dance : From ‘Phoenix,’ She Also Rises

Gina Angelique’s plans sound typical for a graduating college senior: a cross-country trip.

That, however, is only the proverbial tip of a big iceberg for Angelique, an atypical, 22-year-old UC Irvine dance major and choreographer who will present her new full-length piece at UCI’s Village Theatre on Thursday and Friday.

Following that premiere, she intends to:

* Finish formulating the new modern-dance technique she’s been developing for years;

* Establish a multidisciplinary arts colony and a troupe to tour the works produced there, and

* Touch people’s lives with her art by changing their perceptions about such issues as violence against women, the subject of her new work, “Phoenix . . . She Rises From the Ash.”

Angelique knows the scope of her aspirations make her sound like Don Quixote. “That’s OK,” she says confidently. Her supporters have faith as well.

“She’s a tremendous student,” says Donald McKayle, UCI dance professor and Angelique’s adviser. “I have great hopes for her career.”

Praise like that, McKayle says, comes because Angelique has not only conceived and choreographed an evening-length dance for 30 women and five men, but she’s also producing the concert. She has signed on a production designer, UCI grad student Christopher Hall, and a composer, UCI grad-school alumnus Tim Melbinger, plus numerous stage technicians.

The San Diego native also hustled up many of the work’s costumes, came up with the cash for this extracurricular effort (funded mostly with her $2,000 UCI Presidential Undergraduate Fellowship) and publicized it, spending hours each day recently distributing flyers.

No undergraduate has ever undertaken all those elements of a production, school officials say, and this is the beeper-clad Angelique’s second time at it--all the while earning her keep by teaching dance at three academies (including the St. Joseph Ballet troupe school in Santa Ana) and choreographing for two television and film outfits.

“She manages to find the space, to raise the funds, to galvanize artistic colleagues in a wonderful way,” McKayle said. “She’s a real theater person.”

*

“Phoenix,” a series of thematically linked vignettes, fundamentally deals with rape, as well as with “societal biases that allow women to be treated as objects without rights or power,” Angelique says.

Those include media images of women with model-perfect bodies (“we’re projecting 20-foot-tall slides of these images”), pornography and such fairy tales as “The Sleeping Beauty.”

Angelique chose her subject to fill a void she perceived in contemporary theater, she said. While much of the material comes from personal experience, she has never been raped.

The piece, however, deals with date rape or “the ambiguities of women who have so little self-worth that they are unable to say no,” she said in a recent interview at UCI. “I think that’s sick, and there was a point in my life where I was in that situation. I did say ‘no,’ the entire time, but a lot of times for a woman, ‘no’ just isn’t enough.”

A ball of energy whose conversational gestures are somewhat of a dance themselves, Angelique described her choreography as influenced most by Jose Limon and McKayle, the latter for his emphasis on “rhythms” and “concerns for humanity.”

“But I use whatever movement makes sense,” she said, “whatever will make a piece real to the audience--what will put that audience into the bodies and spirits of the dancers so that they are experiencing what the dancers are experiencing and they walk away not just viewing something in a proscenium picture, but actually experiencing something that’s unlike their own lives.”

During rehearsals, Angelique asked the women in her cast to write about self-image. “What they wrote is amazing,” she said.

“Not one of these people said anything good about their bodies or the way they looked. Every single one was like, ‘I hate myself’; ‘I should be thin’; ‘I would give anything to be thin’; ‘My boyfriend asked me the other day if I should be eating that,’ and on and on and on.”

Her own struggle with body image has been formidable, said Angelique, who stands 5-feet-9 and was told while growing up that she was “too big” to be a dancer.

“The dancers in this piece, they’re all nervous because they dance in bras and underwear. . . . I am determined to find a way to allow us to have self-worth.” There is no nudity in “Phoenix,” but it is not recommended for children because of its “graphic” choreography, Angelique said. In fact, she added, because of its “emotional intensity,” it took one dancer five rehearsals before she could make it through a section on abortion.

“She would run outside, shaking and sobbing, halfway through the piece. . . . We are taught to mask a lot, but if you take off those masks . . . you see the raw pain.”

The second half of “Phoenix,” as the name suggests, explores the idea of triumph over such obsessions as the struggle to attain the perfect body, “so that women can spend their time doing more productive things,” Angelique said.

Her own productivity began early, at least where dance is concerned. At 3, she started dancing and making up dances. Her parents, in the fishing business, weren’t involved in the arts, but “my mom filled the house with music nonstop,” she said.

After beginning formal lessons at 9, she learned that she had no such natural advantages as perfectly formed arches. “I made up for it with emotion and power on stage. I mean, I was going to do anything to be able to dance, so if (another dancer) could do the extension, that’s fine, but I would make you forget about the extension, because I could move you.”

That sort of thinking will provide the foundation for the new dance technique Angelique is formulating.

“I’m interested in creating (a company of) are able to transcend physical form and dance about emotion,” she said, “and I’m interested in using that troupe of dancers or that part of an arts colony to touch people’s lives all over the world.”

Where does she get all the energy?

“I can’t answer that,” she said, “except to say that I adore moving people. I do get tired. What makes me tired is looking for ways to get money and looking for people to train who will really be committed. But when I see people in the audience crying or laughing--feeling something--there’s nothing like it in the entire world.”

* “Phoenix . . . She Rises From the Ash” will be danced Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. at UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Village Theatre, Bridge and Mesa roads, Irvine. $10. (714) 856-5000.