Exclamation Pointe

Nearly 200 kids of the Santa Ana-based St. Joseph Ballet company will be dancing with special glee this week in their spring concert at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

In a few months, the troupe, founded by Beth Burns in 1983 as an arts intervention program for at-risk youth, will move from its Fiesta Marketplace studios into a new $3.8-million facility at the corner of Main and 19th Streets in Santa Ana.

To celebrate the move, Burns, a former nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange who left the order a decade ago to develop and promote the company, has created her most ambitious work yet--”Uh-HUH!,” which tests both herself and her young dancers.

It’s a four-part work performed by 42 children and 21 adults, accompanied by a San Francisco jazz group.

Instead of relying on narrative or a story, as she has in the past, Burns has created the piece to work as a purely abstract dance.

“Our recent works have been introspective, self-reflective, poignant--where the young people have this vulnerable but knowing presence,” Burns said recently during lunch in Santa Ana.

“There are words in those dances.

“This time, I was really interested in whether they could do a piece with the same presence, conviction and urgency and get the meaning not from any narrative but from the movement itself.

“That’s a large challenge to offer a young person. And I think they’re meeting it.”

The adults will be there to provide a larger context for the children, she said.

“What it’s really about is that we all belong to this larger activity we call a society.”

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The 24-minute dance will be driven by Oaktown Irawo, an Afro-Cuban funk jazz group from the Bay Area.

“I needed music that had a number of references and unpredictability to it,” Burns said. “This music keeps darting in different directions, with different references, in a bracing way.”

She heard the group one day on the radio.

“It’s hard to find the right music,” she said. “You just have to listen and expose yourself to everything. It’s the veritable needle” in a haystack.

Typically, Burns’ dance will draw on both ballet and modern dance technique, and the adults will add more ordinary street movement.

“One time when I was up in San Francisco, I looked at a busy intersection,” she said. “There were all these different people on the street, and you could tell so much about them just from their posture and their movements. That’s one of the things that I think is true of urbanity.

“So one thing I’ve striven for here choreographically is different rhythms and tempos contemporaneously.”

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She chose a title, she said, that would affirm that movement, the company’s work over all the years, and its exultation of life.

“It really represents the tone of something that I wanted to say--that our range is more than just the same approach,” Burns said.

In addition to the seven musicians, who will do some improvising to the choreography, Burns’ collaborators include scenic designer Kate Edmunds, costume designer Jennifer Langeberg Vaughan, lighting designer Lisa J. Pinkham and artistic advisor James F. Ingalls.

“I have said before that I wasn’t inspired by [purely] formal concerns, that I’ve always considered myself more inspired by human dramas and by our societal issues.

“I really challenged myself on this. I spent some time being a little afraid whether I could create movement interesting enough that without any story it would be rich enough and could develop. But I think the audience is going to have a good time.”

* St. Joseph Ballet will dance Beth Burns’ new “Uh-HUH!” and revivals of her “Mother Me” and “Unearthing” today through Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Also at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.$10-$30. (949) 854-4646.

Chris Pasles can be reached by e-mail at Chris.Pasles@latimes.com.