For Choreographer, It’s a Control Issue

Sarma Rosenberg didn’t set out to spotlight the racial, political and economic complexities driving Rwanda’s decades-old civil strife.

Rather, she hoped to strike a universal note with her new ballet about that nation’s warring Hutus and Tutsis. The desire of one people to dominate another that has pitted these ethnic groups against one another is a worldwide phenomenon, the choreographer said recently, “and it causes tragedy wherever it exists, whether that’s in Bosnia or South-Central L.A. Maybe it’s something we have got to eradicate from our own souls.”

That’s the message behind “Rwanda Remembered,” which Rosenberg has crafted for Coast Ballet Theatre, the San Clemente-based troupe she codirects with Lawrence Rosenberg, her husband. The troupe will premiere the work, which blends classical ballet and African dance, Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“I’m trying to make a statement about the absurdity of [some] human actions,” Rosenberg said.

The Irvine performance will also feature Rosenberg’s 1990 “Beauty and the Beast” (based on Jean Cocteau’s film version of the classic fable) and “Reveries” (a 1985 neoclassic pas de deux created by both Rosenbergs). Each piece is done en pointe.

A core of 16 paid dancers, most from Southern California, make up Coast Ballet, founded as Ballet Repertory in 1985 and later combined with two other local troupes.

The Rosenbergs met as students at the late Eugene Loring’s American School of Dance in Hollywood and moved to Orange County to start a family and open a ballet academy.

While training with Loring (who went on to head UC Irvine’s dance department), Sarma Rosenberg studied African dance forms. She got the inspiration for her new piece from reading about researcher Dian Fossey, whose book about endangered gorillas in Rwanda’s rain forests brought about the 1988 film “Gorillas in the Mist.”

“I somehow got hooked on all of that,” Rosenberg said from her San Clemente home, “and I just got more and more interested in that country.”

Rwandan Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 1994 during intertribal warfare over political and economic power.

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Rosenberg’s ballet will incorporate scenic slides of Rwanda as well as live drumming by Francis Awe, raised in Nigeria and now living in Los Angeles. The piece begins by introducing these peoples and others who have jockeyed for power throughout history within the tiny country: forest-dwelling Twa tribesmen, Belgian and German colonists, missionaries and scientists such as Fossey.

“In a sense, they all worked together” at one time or another, Rosenberg said, “although in ways advantageous to each. It was advantageous for the colonists to work closely with the Tutsis, who were the aristocrats and cattle owners, because they were at one time superior to the Hutus.”

One section, “Cataclysmic Caste,” is meant to dramatize the one-upmanship the ballet is all about, Rosenberg said. The ballet ends with a scene of aggression and chaos brought on by human competitiveness and lust for power. The victims are children and other innocents.

“They are the ones that are not protected,” she said. “My attitude is: ‘We don’t have to do this, folks.’ ”

Though “Rwanda Remembered” incorporates traditional African dance, it’s still fundamentally a ballet, Rosenberg said. “I don’t see any reason why [the classical ballet idiom] can’t express any topic. The vocabulary is so unlimited, it doesn’t have to mutate into modern dance” to bespeak contemporary themes.

Rosenberg does most of the choreography for Coast Ballet, which travels to Laughlin, Nev., about three weeks a year and performs two local concert seasons plus “The Nutcracker,” usually at IBT or Saddleback College in Mission Viejo.

Audience response has been good, Rosenberg said, but the troupe still fights a limiting perception that Orange County cannot “produce quality product.”

“We’d like to see our audience open up to the possibility that, yes, Orange County can have its own professional ballet company instead of constantly importing.”

* Coast Ballet Theatre will dance Wednesday at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. 7:30 p.m. $8-$10. (714) 854-4646.