Pas de Deux: Dance and Story

Veteran choreographer Roland Petit is laughing on the phone from Marseilles. “You know, ballets with stories were not fashionable years ago,” he says. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Ah, you must do abstract ballets; all the ones with stories are old-fashioned.’ And now everybody’s doing them again.”

At 73, Petit, who has created more narrative ballets than anyone else in this century--100 by his count--watches with amusement the recent resurgence of interest in an ancient and much abused form. It’s all part of a cycle, he says: “Ballets with stories are back because choreographers don’t know what else to do. And when they have done them, and it does not go so well, they will try to do without stories again, saying that stories are old-fashioned.”

Petit’s Ballet National de Marseille will perform his 1991 tribute to the films and persona of Charlie Chaplin, “Charlot Danse Avec Nous,” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center next June, part of what virtually amounts to a yearlong international festival of major narrative work coming to various Southland venues.

Matthew Bourne’s radically conceived modern dance “Swan Lake” might be considered the prologue to this year of unusual stories, running successfully from late April to mid-June of this year at the Ahmanson Theatre and generating the kind of public debate about its plot and characters usually reserved for a provocative new play or film.

More recently, Dennis Nahat’s “Blue Suede Shoes” used Elvis Presley recordings to launch a splashy generational panorama (its last performance takes place today at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion) and Ben Stevenson’s balleticized “Dracula” is due to open at the Pavilion on Tuesday. (See accompanying story.)

Trend-spotters can find additional examples later this month during the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series (beginning Friday at Cal State L.A.), the July 30 to Aug. 3 engagement by American Ballet Theatre and a host of companies dancing in early- to mid-1998 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Meanwhile, dance’s crossover hits--”Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” “Riverdance,” “Tap Dogs” and “Lord of the Dance”--are all on their way here for premieres, repeat runs or video replays. They also tell stories, unusual ones focused on group solidarity and collective achievement.

Obviously, some narrative works tell their stories badly and others exist simply because company directors believe that story ballets attract audiences, especially people afraid that they won’t understand abstract choreography. But many of them also unlock powerful emotions in both performers and spectators, lingering in the imagination--and in the repertory--as antidotes to our increasingly mechanized and impersonal lifestyles.

“In our society today, people feel that they’re becoming just a number instead of a human being,” comments Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of San Francisco Ballet. “Maybe that’s why they need to be swept away emotionally when they come to the theater and why they identify more with characters like Romeo and Juliet than with something abstract.”

“A story gives you characters and their feelings,” says Graciela Daniele, who created the musical staging for “Ragtime,” currently at the Shubert Theatre. “In other kinds of dancing, we may get excited intellectually and visually, but not emotionally. I think we only look at it. Even when I was a ballet dancer [in Argentina], I wanted to perform a character as opposed to just ballet blanc.”

Of course, a handful of 19th century story ballets have always been the most popular of dance attractions in America. In the last two decades, however, the increasing dominance of choreographic abstraction and, in particular, music visualization often drained the story values and character interest from many of these classics. The stories they told withered into mere pretexts: hooks to hold showpiece choreography in antique style.

“We lost the umbilical cord connecting us to the authentic presentation of those [classic] ballets,” says Nahat, artistic director of Cleveland San Jose Ballet and a former principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre. “Companies cut them, removing the pantomime and a lot of the narrative in order to abstract them and dance more. Also, a lot of things looked abstract because the dancers hadn’t put themselves in the choreography and were just dancing the steps with a classroom attitude. The performing was coached with an abstract meaning.”

No longer. As choreographers return to narrative, they are requiring a level of emotional projection from their dancers that develops them more fully as artists and, in the process, helps renew the repertory classics.

“Certainly performers develop their unique personae on the stage with story ballets much more readily than with abstractions,” says Kevin McKenzie, artistic director of American Ballet Theatre. “I grew up under [company co-founder] Lucia Chase when there were a lot of dramatic ballets being done, and I have a personal drive to see that happen again here. I think it’s the ultimate challenge.”

To that end, ABT recently premiered a full-evening ballet based on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” with choreography by Lar Lubovitch and music by Elliot Goldenthal. It brought the company mixed reviews but also “a younger audience and a more ethnic audience,” McKenzie says, outselling some of the more familiar story ballets in the same season. A co-production with San Francisco Ballet and Lubovitch’s own company, “Othello” has not yet been scheduled for a Southland premiere.

“People were ripe for it,” McKenzie continues. “There’s a new generation of creators and audience members out there looking at classic stories in the light of the time in which they live. And that was a driving force for us: doing a narrative piece from scratch and showing how a contemporary choreographer, composer and designer would retell this tale. Hey, if we don’t do new work of this kind, this art form isn’t going anywhere.”

Beyond familiar stories like “Othello” lies the uncharted territory of new stories and new forms, a subject investigated in late May at the annual three-day Dance Critics Assn. national conference, held this year in Seattle and devoted completely to narrative dance. Some of the most heated discussions centered on artists who challenge our traditional expectations of what a dance narrative should be.

“We’ve been raised in a certain tradition of storytelling,” explains Cathryn Harding, president of the association and a correspondent for Dance Magazine. “For us, dance stories are usually linear, in Gothic form, folk-tale form or fairy-tale form. But the stories some people are telling in dance right now don’t necessarily follow the rules of these forms.”

A devotional rite or ceremony is one kind of story form we don’t often encounter in Western theater dance. However, in February, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan will return to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in Lin Hwai-min’s “Songs of the Wanderers,” inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel “Siddhartha,” with ritual elements borrowed from a number of Asian religions.

“It tells the story of a searching for peace,” says Lin. “It’s very meditative. Nowadays we don’t tell stories like [19th century] classical ballet or Peking Opera. Instead, we try to grasp the essence of a story, and what’s most important is how the whole piece evolves to convey a feeling so strong that it affects people.”

An odyssey across time or space is another story form that choreographers are exploring. On April 8, “Riverdance” returns to the Pantages Theatre, tracing the history of the Irish people from the mythic past though their diaspora.

A different dance journey takes place at the Orange County Performing Arts Center the same week, when the Balletto de Toscana of Florence presents Mauro Bigonzetti’s “Mediterranea,” which the choreographer describes as “a voyage by one’s eyes, ears and sentiment to the coastal areas of the Mediterranean, starting from Greece, through Turkey, to the North of Africa, passing through Spain and ending in Italy.”

Unifying the vignettes: two men who reappear in each section as members of that particular culture. “You can tell a story in many different ways,” Bigonzetti emphasizes, “taking small images and emotions and developing them without telling any kind of fable.”

New narrative forms have also invigorated the Southland dance community recently, with even some lifelong abstractionists unexpectedly swept up in the trend. Modern dance pioneer Bella Lewitzky, for example, turned to narrative for the first time only a year ago at age 80 in “Four Women in Time,” the last work she choreographed for her recently disbanded 31-year-old modern dance ensemble.

Her uncharacteristic, self-imposed task: evoking in movement four sets of characters and situations drawn from Judy Chicago’s massive and complex feminist museum installation, “The Dinner Party.”

“I had never done anything like it before,” Lewitzky says. “In previous works, when I used individuals, I took a metaphoric approach, thematic rather than storytelling. But I got totally caught up in the doing of “Four Women in Time,” and the piece told me what it was going to be. Other forms were not appropriate: It could not be done as an abstraction.” The result won a 1997 Lester Horton Dance Award for choreography.

Inevitably, dance storytelling has become enlisted in the struggle to diversify the American arts establishment. “A lot of stories that have not previously been told--not thought important to be told--are now on our stages,” explains choreographer David Rousseve, whose “Whisper of Angels” will receive its local premiere Saturday at Cal State L.A. on the Dance Kaleidoscope series. Created two years ago, it depicts the reminiscences of a black gay man dying of AIDS.

“I think there really is a movement for artists who’ve been excluded to say, ‘My story is important too. Look at the beauty in my story. Look at what’s universal in me,’ ” he continues.

“I’m an African American and I’m proud of that. But I’m also gay, so a lot of my stories are not only black stories, they’re also gay stories, and that treads a line that some people have not wanted to cross. But a strong benefit of narrative, whether autobiographical, familial or fictional, is that it really involves the public in the plight of your characters.

“And if audiences can get involved in your story humanly, they can cross all those boundaries.”