Man, Beast or Both?

There are love scenes, and then there are love scenes. To watch dancer Ross Hounslow take the object of his affection into his arms in the first minutes of London-based DV8 Physical Theatre’s “Enter Achilles” is to witness a transcendent display of tenderness.

His longing is so exquisite, so astonishingly focused, we can’t help but hold our breath. In the best of love scenes, we believe in their passion.

That his lover happens to be a blow-up doll is one of the details that has compelled presenters in the U.S. to include a warning label--”For mature audiences”--in the publicity for the show, which opens next week at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

The others result from the action that follows--in an English pub on a Friday night--as seven regular blokes, among them Hounslow, swear, strut, sing, joke and dance their way through 75 minutes of the violent contradictions known as the male psyche. Suddenly, the sex doll isn’t so much a perversion as a lone link to one man’s better self, an instrument of an emotional language he can’t otherwise express.

“I wanted to show how men act when there are no women around,” says Lloyd Newson, DV8’s Australian-born choreographer. “I wanted these men to look incredibly attractive but also repugnant.”

It seems to have worked. Audiences from France to Israel have blushed with embarrassment, laughed out loud, cringed and cheered; critics tend to rave.

“As a man,” Newson confides, “I identify with what women see in this piece, that men are frightening. Each of us, even I as a gay man, and from an arts background, have within me a very gross, loud, inappropriate, unpleasant self.

“That’s what they have to get in touch with,” he says of the seven dancers in “Enter Achilles,” including by extension the audiences they fascinate. “Even if it’s only for a night.”

For a man whose obsession is revealing messy, often painful, truths, Newson is a bit of an elusive figure. For one thing, many people don’t know exactly what he looks like. He allows his face to be photographed only in shadow or otherwise obscured; mostly he turns his back--and his shaved head--to the cameras.

“I would hate to be a known face,” he says gravely. “I the observer [would be] observed. I wouldn’t be able to do my job.”

At first glance, Newson’s shaved head makes him look more severe than he actually is. But when he sits down for a glass of chilled wine after a rehearsal and turns his attention to you, he’s all yours. He leans in, looks right in your eyes, smiles a lot. Even his most earnest observations are tempered by a vigilant, self-deprecating sense of irony. He often ends his sentences with question marks, but he doesn’t seem to expect many answers.

“Too often I see in dance movement without meaning. Why do an arabesque? What does an arabesque mean? Dance is about heightening all the cliches of what beauty is. How many dancers are prepared to look ugly onstage?” he says. “Dance is a great form of denial.”

The psychological jargon is no accident; Newson, 40, began dancing as a student at the University of Melbourne but earned his degree in psychology. When the New Zealand Ballet offered him a job, he decided to begin his professional life as a dancer.

He moved to London in 1979, after winning a scholarship at the London Contemporary Dance School, where he studied for two years before joining London’s Extemporary Dance Theatre. Increasingly, he found the work too shallow and the dancing too rote. In 1986, to combat his frustrations, he formed his own company, but it was a couple of years before he got to the root of his discontent.

Part of the answer came to him one afternoon in 1989. “I’d been working for hours by myself making up steps and I was feeling somehow lost and disconnected from the reason,” he breaks off and narrows his liquid blue eyes in concentration. “Why was I really doing this dance?

“I went to the local cafe, which was in a really very run down, very poor area of London. There were people with learning disabilities, older people and street cleaners having a tea. I sat there and I thought, ‘This is the world that I am fascinated by. How can I get dancers to reflect the community that really exists around us?’ ”

Since then, Newson has been preoccupied with exploring what he calls the “psychology of movement”--the why of dance--and applying it to everyday issues, like men behaving badly in “Enter Achilles.”

Instead of demanding perfect, abstract arabesques, he mines the rich--and meaningful--vocabulary of ordinary body language.

“You and I passing one another on an escalator down the Tube--so much information is related by looking at one another’s eyes,” he says. “We have all that sophistication of reading bodies. If I can use that, then other people should understand what I’m saying.

“Every time I’m making a movement, I’m thinking about what it says psychologically, philosophically, politically,” he says. “There’s no gesture that occurs in our pieces that hasn’t been thought about.”

Newson’s works emerge from long sessions of improvisation that focus as much on motive and ideas as on movement. Finding dancers who are able to collaborate on that level is a constant challenge; Newson doesn’t have a permanent company but “casts” according to subject matter, the way a film director would.

“Dancers haven’t been asked to look at psychological motivation and intention,” he says. “They’ve trained to get their leg up behind their ear. I say, ‘Actually I don’t want you to do any high leg kicks,’ and they can go to pieces a little bit because they think, ‘The height of my leg is the reflection of my value as a person.’ ”

To get to the why of dance, Newson pays attention to the differences in the ways each body communicates. “I used to come in and get everybody to copy me, and in the end they would look like poor little Lloyd Newson clones,” he says. “[But] ask 20 dancers to reach out and touch another person, and they’ll all do it differently, because of their psychological backgrounds.

“[Most choreographers] want you to be identical. It gives an inherent power [to] what they do--[like] the Red Army goose-stepping in a parade--but what does it say? It says we’re the same. But are we the same?” he asks. “Because I come from a working-class background, I know that not everyone is born equal, not everybody is the same.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get DV8’s name; just say it aloud. But it has another meaning: dance and video eight. Newson doesn’t allow mirrors in the studio but tapes rehearsals for later review. And although he doesn’t maintain a repertory of works, he has produced several film versions.

Still, the notion of deviance is utterly intentional. While “Enter Achilles” is a definite crowd-pleaser (London’s Daily Telegraph called it “a rare, rich, devastating, triumphant work of art”), Newson’s work also makes people squirm. His recent “Bound to Please” included a naked 67-year-old woman having sex with a much younger man; other pieces have tackled serial killing and “cottaging,” the British term for anonymous gay sex in public toilets.

Newson’s projects usually begin as nagging personal curiosities. He fights for money to fund long research and incubation periods with the dancers and to pay for sets and original scores. It’s all increasingly hard to pull off in a country where arts subsidies have been slashed and where audiences seem to want art that matches their upbeat New Labor mood.

“People want to have a good night, to leave singing and smiling,” Newson says. “We need that sometimes, but that’s the antithesis of the kind of theater we do.”

Not that Newson is immune to commercial pressures. Usually, his work is done with one cast for one season and then shelved. But he decided on a proven quantity for the North American tour. So “Enter Achilles,” which was originally performed in the 1995-96 season, is DV8’s first revival and now includes three new cast members stepping into roles created by other performers.

“For 11 years I said I’m a primary artist, I don’t borrow other people’s ideas, I make work that is about my life and I don’t repeat myself,” Newson says. “Even though I want to be a risk-taker, I realize the climate outside at the moment is not interested in that.”

Newson began thinking about the themes that underlie “Enter Achilles” while he was in Glasgow in 1993 conducting a research project, something he does on a regular basis to generate ideas. He took beer into rehearsal to loosen up a group of dancers, and that gave him the idea of setting a piece in a pub. The dancers--all of whom happened to be straight, “blokey blokes,” as he puts it--told tales of men drinking 20 pints in an evening, of getting bullied in club bathrooms because they could dance.

Newson and the dancers watched films about the relationship between violence and alcohol in Britain. “When men are drunk, they’re allowed to touch, to play, to be ridiculous,” he says, “because it’s in a stupor, and that allows the mask to come down partially. But it also allows for all that pent-up feeling that’s not expressed to express itself.”

They watched soccer players grabbing one another’s crotches in the name of sport and experimented with the limits of how men are allowed to express affection when walking down a Glasgow street. It’s acceptable, says Newson, “if my arm is around the neck of another man, and my fist is slightly clenched, and I give a couple little digs and I don’t look as if I’m too affectionate towards him.” But when the men held hands? “Quite frightening.”

Newson--the “outside eye,” as his dancers call him--came away with lots of physical information and a few conclusions: Men constantly deny who they are in favor of who they think they’re supposed to be: invincible, invulnerable.

Back in London, Newson put the material aside to work on other projects. Then, in the summer of 1994, he injured his Achilles’ tendon, landing in the hospital for five weeks.

Facing his own vulnerabilities gave him a title for “Enter Achilles,” and the recuperation period gave him time for more research. He read 30 books on gender, about everything from the meaning of masculinity to how to get along with your father. “All the nurses thought he was having the worst identity crisis on earth,” says Leonie Gombrich, DV8’s general manager.

Out of the hospital, Newson put together a cast to begin the final process of developing “Enter Achilles.” At first, he went after lads like the Glasgow dancers, who wouldn’t so much act as be the characters. But they turned out to be too one-dimensional: “The problem is if you look for real blokes, you get the values of real blokes. You’ve got to really find very interesting men to play blokes--it’s like, if you’re going to do a piece about schizophrenics, you don’t employ schizophrenics.”

Newson conducts his rehearsals and choreography sessions like a group therapy: behind closed doors. “I demand a very high level of honesty and truth in my performers. Today we started a run-through and halfway through I said, ‘Right, stop. I don’t believe this. What is this about? Stop pretending to be this macho man, you are this, I’ve seen you do this, I’ve heard you say terrible things, be that, find that,’ ” he says. “I think generally they can deal with that provided there’s nobody else watching them.”

The original cast of “Enter Achilles,” a mix of gay and straight dancers, endured field trips to pubs, strip joints and sex shops. Homework involved assignments from Newson’s hospital reading list and writing about their own worst qualities. In class, they led workshops for each other about things like pornography and men in nightclubs. And they improvised for five weeks, six days a week, nine hours a day.

And then they had to spill their guts. “We started every day with a different issue related to our personal experiences about being men,” says Liam Steel, 31, a blond-haired, blue-eyed dancer from northern England whose character provides much of the piece’s comic relief. The dancers have gathered for a coffee in the downstairs cafe at Toynbee Studios.

“We all had to make a decision that nothing that was said in that group would ever be told to anybody else--[not] your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend--that [it] was confidential,” says Steel. “That creates a very strong atmosphere that you’ve got something quite precious.”

But it didn’t make it easy. “To place so much trust instantly in seven other men was quite daunting,” says Australian Robert Tannion, 27, whose dark good looks and sharp features serve him well as the most terrifying of the blokes.

Later, Tannion admitted that his character was informed by a painful part of his life: “I had a pretty tough childhood with quite an abusive stepfather. There are points where I become him,” he says, recreating the blank face of his character before he flies into his most intense rage. “I never show my softness.”

Most of the dancers say that Newson is the most detailed, precise choreographer they have ever worked with. “He never gives up searching for meaning in every single little gesture,” says the soft-spoken, boyishly handsome Hounslow, 31, another Australian.

“A lot of choreographers are interested in overall aesthetics, but he picks out little things and picks and picks and picks and picks and picks. He pushes you to find something else inside yourself, to make the work deeper.”

“He’s very good at installing ideas,” says Tannion. In one sequence, Tannion and Hounslow engage in a slow-motion struggle for the almighty pint. “He would say, ‘Now don’t use your arms here,’ or, ‘How can you look like you’re one person trying to reach for something. . . .’ ”

“Or he’ll say,” Steel interrupts, shielding his mouth in a whisper: “ ‘Remember that story you told me where you wanted that thing from that person, well, I want you to make it like that.’ ”

“And he doesn’t forget a thing,” Tannion adds, shaking his head and smiling. “He has a memory like--”

“An elephant!” Steel says.

“An elephant would be ashamed,” Tannion adds, and they all laugh.

Since “Enter Achilles’s” first London run and its initial tour, there’s been just one major voice of dissent over DV8’s portrayal of men.

“[It] deliberately presents only the damning evidence against men,” wrote a female critic in The Guardian. “What’s really startling is the fact that a group of men could have produced such an unloving and unforgiving portrait of themselves. . . . It was funny and deadly, but it was too bad to be true.”

Newson, who claims her review is the first one he’s read in 10 years, felt he had to respond: “I rang her up and she said, ‘I don’t know any men like this,’ and I said, ‘You should get out of the wine bars in Covent Garden and come to the East End.’ ”

Newson admits that he sometimes takes a seat in the audience--wearing a wig-- “to hear people’s honest reactions,” and occasionally he holds post-performance question-and-answer sessions. People’s opinions can disappoint him, like the assumption that one of the characters in “Enter Achilles,” an outsider who wears bright colors, giggles when the others act macho and dances with flowing limbs--must be gay.

The sex doll, which meets an ugly public demise at the piece’s end, is another hot topic. “I’ve had women screaming at one another about the sex doll being a representation of women,” Newson says. “Actually it’s a representation of many things: of secrets, of fantasy. With [some of the] men, it’s nothing more than a silly inflatable, it has nothing to do with real women. They would have kicked an inflatable whale around. Is it cruelty to whales if they kick the whale around?”

In the end, Newson says, he puts more stock in what happens backstage than in the seats out front. The satisfaction comes from “working on an issue and having the people I’m working with really get involved and really learn something about themselves.”

Getting there has its price. Just ask Tannion and Hounslow.

“We’ve both at certain times left here absolutely crying,” says Tannion in the bar at Le Volcan theater in Le Havre, France, after opening night of the new “Enter Achilles” tour.

“Some nights I’m a mess by the end,” says Hounslow. “One night after the show I was lying on stage bawling. Lloyd came up to me and said: ‘It will get worse.’ ”

But in some ways it has also gotten better.

“I think I’m a much healthier person, actually,” says Hounslow. “I felt I had to sort out my relationship with my best friend Nigel, which had been based on telling sexist jokes, football, going to the pubs. We agreed to start from scratch. The piece had a lot to do with that.”

Newson acknowledges the psychological toll.

“Some people have described my work as a form of psychodrama,” he says, “and that’s fine, as long as it’s good psychodrama, as long as it’s good therapy.”

*

* “Enter Achilles,” DV8 Physical Theatre, Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 p.m. $9 to $25. DV8 film series, James Bridges Theater, UCLA. Tuesday, 7 p.m. (310) 825-2101.