Preserving a Colorful Past

Don’t talk to Anthony Shay about dry cleaning bills. As artistic director and founder of Avaz International Dance Theatre, now celebrating its 20-year anniversary, Shay boasts a Middle Eastern costume collection so splendidly ornate, ragingly colorful and velvet and silk-rich, it could easily rival the frocks Princess Diana recently had auctioned off at Christie’s.

And though Di’s dresses may have waltzed with the like of John Travolta, Shay’s garments--some of which were smuggled into the United States--have adorned the hundreds of dancers he has directed in a 40-year career devoted mostly to bringing Silk Road culture--especially the dance and music of what was once called Persia and is now known as Iran--to his hometown, Los Angeles.

“I suppose you could call it an obsession,” says Shay at an Avaz rehearsal in a church in Silver Lake, where the 20-dancer company was preparing for its performance at Dance Kaleidoscope this week.

“I first encountered new types of music and dance at college. It was the moth and the butterfly. I was the moth and fell in love with the detail, the stylized movement, its storytelling and its form. Besides,” he continues, “in Iran now, traditional dance and music is outlawed, and I’m positioned in such a way that I am [able] to promote [this] extraordinary aesthetic. I see it as a mission to keep it alive here.”

When you meet Shay, he hardly seems like a man on a mission. The lissome 60-year-old choreographer sports a silvery mustache and bushy eyebrows, is soft-spoken and laughs easily. Indeed, his polo shirt and twill trousers ooze laid-back SoCal style. His blue-gray eyes miss nothing, however.

Interrupting himself in mid-sentence during the rehearsal, he motions to one of his dancers, who is working on a difficult suite from the Baluchistan region of southeastern Iran. He corrects her wrist position by displaying the proper degree of filigreed bend himself, nods his approval, then resumes his conversation.

Shay started down the Silk Road as an international relations major at UCLA in the late ‘50s, but it was not so much his studies as his friends that led him on. “I went to Greek picnics, I danced in a Hungarian group; a Persian woman asked me if I would dance with her. It was wonderful.”

Shay then taught himself Persian and headed for the University of Tehran, where he got a degree in Persian literature in 1960. Also self-taught on the flute, he landed a position with the Tehran Symphony.

With every intention of becoming a professional musician, Shay returned to the United States but practicality intervened. He added yet another degree to his list, a master’s in library science, and went to work at the Los Angeles Public Library, where he would stay for the next 30 years (he retired in 1993 as a senior librarian).

But that was just his day job. In order to indulge his ever-growing passion for world cultures, including a rising fascination with folk dance, Shay co-founded the Aman Folk Ensemble, with Leona Wood, in 1963. Aman, which became the first local dance company to perform at the Music Center, in 1970, had a United Nations’ dance card--its repertory included Native American, Indian, European, Iranian and Arabic dances. Shay, working from research and observation, specialized in Eastern European and Mideastern works.

But in the late ‘70s, Shay split with Aman. He continued staging Eastern European works, which are among some of his best-known dances, but he turned more and more toward his first love, the Mideast, especially after the Iranian revolution in 1979 swelled the Persian audience in L.A.

“The reason I left Aman was that I did not have a comfortable environment for creating Iranian dance,” Shay says now. “So I founded Avaz in 1977 as a vehicle for presenting dances of that area.

“Audiences are much more sophisticated and demanding than they were 25 years ago,” he notes, “and world dance and music, because of the media, has had a huge explosion in popularity. I realized that if I was going to truly achieve artistry, I had to zero in.”

Along the way, Shay had once again gone back to school, earning master’s degrees in anthropology (from Cal State L.A.) and folklore and myth (from UCLA); both degrees explored dance traditions, with the latter focusing on Iran.

“When you do traditional work, particularly if you’re not born into [it],” Shay says, “thorough research becomes a must. In pursuit of that goal, I undertook all of those degrees. The discipline allowed me to carry out the studies that were necessary for the underpinnings of the company.”

And for Shay, the research never stops. Last month, he earned the first doctorate awarded by UC Riverside in its new graduate department of dance history and theory. His dissertation explored the relationship of Iranian dance to other Iranian art forms.

Another way Avaz has “zeroed in” on the Iranian tradition is the addition of associate artistic director, Jamal, in 1990. Iranian-born, from a family steeped in traditional dance, Jamal is a costumer, musician and set designer with a master of fine arts degree from Cal State L.A. He pumps up the staging and movement technique for the company.

Shay, who has choreographed some 200 works over his career in folk dance, says that he and Jamal now work together, starting with music and creating original sequences that remain faithful to the traditions and regions represented. Translating those traditions from village to stage, says Shay, involves making choices about theatricality and authenticity, but it isn’t a straight trade-off.

“There is already a theatricality,” he says. “People rarely dance in closets--they dance in places where they are seen by other people. Even in village folk dances people dress for the occasion because they know they’re going to be watched.”

Creativity and flexibility are also built into Iranian dance. “In its raw form,” Shay says, “it’s highly improvised and very abstract, which means that each artist can develop within the stylistic parameters a nuanced and original composition.”

Those parameters include such intricacies as kneeling backbends, rippling arms and intricate flicks and flutters of the hands. Some of the moves, says Shay, may resemble ballet but unlike that art form, Iranian dance requires an immense amount of musculature and force and yet looks as “soft as imaginable.”

During rehearsal, Jamal glides gracefully among an octet of Avaz women, demonstrating that softness with fluttery hands, tilted head and tiny steps. The sequence of turns they are working on will become part of “Caspian Sea Harvest Dance” from Iran’s Gilan region.

Brandy Maya Healy, an Avaz dancer for eight years, one of the Caspian Sea dancers, studied modern dance before joining the company. That tradition, she says, reflected “somebody’s individual way of thinking or interpreting what dance is, [but] the feeling and technique behind the dances Avaz does [has] a meaning.”

From Shay’s perspective, in concrete and abstract terms, Iranian dance has as much to say as the tradition of ballet; the only problem is revealing its depth to a larger audience. Though Avaz has a strong presence in Los Angeles, where there are close to a half million Iranians, and is gaining a statewide reputation (upcoming concerts include Fresno, Sacramento and San Diego), Shay wants to see his obsession move further into the mainstream.

“Persian miniatures were historically never seen, except for a few royal eyes,” he points out. “Now when they’re shown in museums, they speak to a whole world of people, beyond their own specificity. Iranian dance offers movement that is geometrically informed [with] enormous potential for development.”

The pecking order for dance funding, says Shay, doesn’t help.

“You look at the NEA--ballet companies get millions, modern [dance] gets hundreds of thousands and traditional dance gets tens of thousands. The sequence,” he states bluntly, “is tutu, leotard and all the expensive clothing we have to support.”

Ah, yes, those dry cleaning bills.

*

AVAZ / DANCE KALEIDOSCOPE, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $12-$18. Phone: (213) 658-4077.