DANCE : The Passion of ‘Cruel World’ : Choreographer and ABT Wrestle With Some Difficult Subjects

James Kudelka doesn’t fool around with small subjects. The choreographer from Canada came to international prominence in 1983 with “In Paradisum,” a powerful work inspired by his mother’s death from cancer. A current project is based on Frank Wedekind’s “The Awakening of Spring,” a play about the suffering of youth inflicted by adults’ narrow-mindedness.

And “Cruel World,” his first work for American Ballet Theatre--to be danced by the company tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa--has been described as “a surrealistic tale of passion and sexual repression.”

“None of my pieces is undramatic,” Kudelka, 39, acknowledged during a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto.

Does the title “Cruel World” represent his view of life?

“You could say that,” he replied. “I won’t say that. I’m not terribly interested in describing my work. I’m not chatty about what I do.”

Still, he did reveal that “Cruel World,” which is for 18 dancers and is set to Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” originally was going to be set to Roy Harris’ Violin Concerto.

“I thought for a big American company, it would be good to use a big American score,” Kudelka said. “But I didn’t feel I would get on top of it in time.” He happened to hear the Tchaikovsky music on the radio, and “once that bug got into my ear, I decided this is what I wanted to do.

“I worked very fast on the ballet. I didn’t stop to correct myself on the way. That’s reflected in the work. It has a rawness to it--just riding the first decision and pushing through it all the time.”

Because he hates the process of auditioning dancers, he asked ABT to “just send me people. ‘But we want you to look at everybody,’ they said. I didn’t know who anybody was. I paired a principal dancer with a corps dancer. They tried to steer me through (things like) that. I was nervous. It took a week for it to shake down. Mostly, we got round pegs and round holes together, square pegs and square holes together.”

Not that he sees anything wrong with going against the built-in hierarchy of dancers in a ballet company. On the contrary, “that’s a very important part of the learning process. It makes a better company in the end. It seeps into the ‘Swan Lakes’ and ‘Sleeping Beauties.’

“If the egos get dropped, you find a generosity in the group. That became one of the tasks I was trying to deal with there--not to demoralize a group of people, but to get them all together, to show the amount of talent within an organization. That was not previously the way the company had seen itself. It was not the usual pecking order.”

The company generally responded well although, he said, some dancers resisted his ideas. “I said, ‘I don’t think I like that person.’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘she doesn’t like you either.’ I won a lot but lost of few. It wasn’t a great situation.”

He describes “Cruel World” as “pretty dark” but adds that “one tends to deal with dark images in order to make a better world. Dance allows us to see things and talk about certain subjects that are very difficult . . . difficult subjects of family abuse, partner abuse, child abuse, all those things. I guess ‘Cruel World’ is talking about dysfunction, or this difficulty of sharing the same space. Partnering is sharing the same weight.”

Kudelka joined the National Ballet of Canada in 1962 at age 16 after training at the troupe’s school in Toronto. He became the troupe’s resident choreographer in 1980 and left a year later to join Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens where he was resident choreographer from 1984 until 1990.

His career as a principal dancer essentially ended after a series of back injuries that began in 1986, although he still dances such character roles as Dr. Coppelius or Friar Laurence. He returned to the National Ballet in 1992 as artist in residence.

He has choreographed about 50 works for various companies including the San Francisco and Houston ballets. Orange County saw his work as early as 1983 when “Passage,” set to Thomas Tallis’ soaring motet “Spem in Alium,” was danced by the Joffrey and sung by the Master Chorale, and as recently as 1991 when the National Ballet of Canada danced “Musings,” a showpiece he created for Karen Kain, the troupe’s senior ballerina.

Although his early admission to the dance world might sound ideal to some people, he says it left him bitter and angry. “I spent a lot of time in the last three or four years in therapy trying to figure out things about where boundaries are--where I stop and where the world starts.

“Ballet school is a pretty interesting situation for a 10-year-old. It was a very disciplined atmosphere, long hours. I lived in a residence. I had never been away from home. Life became completely involved in dance. I didn’t get to go through a lot of the rebellion which is sort of healthy for teen-agers to do. But I don’t think you get to skip it.

“People thought these were my choices,” he added. “I was told so. They weren’t. I kept going along with them. There must have been certain dysfunctional aspects. I think a 10-year-old probably also said, ‘I want to be a fireman.’ But they didn’t go with that.”

But he feels he has reached some accommodation with his past. “I was talking with one of the dancers who was afraid of going into therapy and figuring things out. He thought it would take away part of his cachet as a performer. I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly my discoveries have allowed me to go even deeper into things and even better. The journey through life is to become wise--to become one of those old people with fabulous wise eyes.”

* The American Ballet Theatre will dance James Kudelka’s “Cruel World” and works by Twyla Tharp and Natalia Makarova (after Petipa) today and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain: 8 p.m. $18 to $55. ABT will dance Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” at the center Friday through Sunday. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster) or (714) 556-2787.