Unleashing His Inner Women

If it’s true that clothes make the man, in the case of Peter Wing Healey--dancer, choreographer, librettist and director--they also make the woman. But Wing Healey, 46, wants to be perfectly clear that when he dances as a woman, as he does at the Los Angeles Theatre Center this week, it is not to be mistaken for drag.

“People who want to see a drag show are disappointed--mystified,” explains Wing Healey, slightly out of breath during a break in a rehearsal recently. “If you’re a man dressing as a woman, you’re expected to be the bawd--an over-the-top, licentious, sexual, bawdy woman. I’m not doing that. It’s serious work. I’m doing tragic female roles.”

In fact, he’s doing three, in pieces he calls solo dance dramas--Isadora Duncan, the pioneer modern dancer who died when her scarf wrapped around the wheel of a Bugatti; the character Amneris, the other woman in the opera “Aida”; and Siren, one of the half-bird, half-goddesses from Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths.

“Tragedy can only be a work of theater,” Wing Healey explains. “It’s artifice and . . . artifice is necessary for tragedy.” Not to mention for a man playing a woman.

But it’s not just his gender-bending approach that makes Wing Healey an unusual performer. It’s his size. Tipping the scales at close to 250 pounds on a 5-foot-10 frame, his body type is not typically found at dance-studio barres.

Still, Wing Healey has an impressive pedigree. In New York, he danced with the Daniel Lewis Dance Repertory Company, where he performed male roles such as El Indio in Jose Limon’s “La Malinche,” and with Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians. More recently, Wing Healey has danced with the famed Mark Morris Dance Group. His portrayal of Mrs. Stahlbaum, the mother in every production of “The Hard Nut,” Morris’ version of “The Nutcracker,” consistently wins glowing reviews.

Not willing to divulge exact numbers, Wing Healey offers this assessment of his imposing physique: “Let’s just say my weight is less than Meat Loaf--the old Meat Loaf--and under Jessye Norman’s.”

For choreographer-dancer Morris, who has himself danced as a woman and experimented with “alternate” body types in his work, Wing Healey’s size and role predilections are just part of his appeal.

“Peter was the first person I thought of to be Mrs. Stahlbaum. I wanted a big gal,” he says jokingly, adding, “Peter’s fabulous.”

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He wasn’t always big, but he often danced in dresses. Wing Healey, who was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., had a peripatetic childhood. His father was an executive with Scott Paper Co. who moved the family around--from Vancouver, Canada, to Pennsylvania to Massachusetts. He says he was not a fat child, and that he remembers cavorting around the house in dresses and ribbons from the age of 3. He also studied classical piano and sang in church choirs. When he was 14 and living in Canada, Wing Healey went on a tour sponsored by England’s Royal School of Church Music. It soon became apparent that he was hooked on the performing arts.

“I went for a semester at Haverford College in Philadelphia,” he says, “and, in addition to music and French, I took a [Martha] Graham [dance] class for my gym credit. I had stopped playing the piano, and suddenly, I saw a future for myself.”

Wing Healey left Haverford for the Philadelphia Dance Academy, diving into ballet and modern dance before winning a scholarship to the summer dance camp Jacob’s Pillow. For the next two years, he enrolled in the dance program at the Boston Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Ray Harrison, who had been in the original production of “Oklahoma!” choreographed by Agnes de Mille.

The young dancer then won a summer scholarship to the Alvin Ailey School and, while in New York, work offers came his way. Forsaking a degree at Boston Conservatory, he took up full-time residence in Manhattan and took classes at the Graham school.

“You’re in the studio with this creature wearing giant earrings and black silk pajamas dragging on the floor,” he remembers. “It was mind-blowing. She was really inhabiting such an exotic and deeply committed, out-there position. I realized that modern dance was the perfect synthesis of acting and classical music.”

In 1976, Wing Healey, still slender (“I starved myself and made the grade”), started working in the Lewis company. Meanwhile, he met Mark Morris, who was in the Lar Lubovitch Company, after a Lubovitch performance one night. In 1979, Wing Healey joined Laura Dean Dancers and recommended Morris for the company. Touring New Zealand, Indonesia and India with Dean’s troupe, the two became good friends.

Wing Healey left Dean in 1981 because of injuries. “My range of movement was becoming limited, and I couldn’t justify doing it anymore. I also wanted to concentrate on my own work.”

To pay the bills, Wing Healey learned word processing and, working behind a desk, began putting on weight. (“Being able to work on your body and get yourself skinny is a huge luxury,” he says.)

It wasn’t until 1985 that he was able to get his own work onstage, in the form of the freelance Mesopotamian Opera Company. With a core group of dancers, opera singers, actors and musicians, the company has performed nearly a dozen “dance operas” in New York since its inception. Wing Healey has choreographed more than 20 ballets for Mesopotamian and written four librettos. He also did much of the initial fund-raising. More importantly, he has danced in most of the productions--mainly as women.

Among the productions is 1988’s “Jane Heir,” in which Wing Healey exchanged Charlotte Bronte’s gothic English setting for Manhattan’s trendy money-and-art scene. Playing the eponymous role, the dancer embraced femininity--one reviewer called it a rendition of “grand passions . . . amid hilarity and hysteria.”

“ ‘Jane Heir’ was the first time I had done a narrative that had any kind of substance,” he says. “I struggled with the notion that [in contemporary dance] you’re not allowed to do roles anymore--it’s old-fashioned. Once I let myself do that, wonderful things happened. When I was a young, skinny guy, I did Icarus and felt that nobody really noticed me. When I started doing female roles, I was able to harness a power that I had not been able to when I was younger.”

Not long afterward, Morris cast him as Mrs. Stahlbaum, which he has performed around the world since its premiere in 1990. It has provided Wing Healey, who still kept his day job, with semi-steady work and a fistful of good reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle called him “a cross between the dance goddess Isadora and the late movie star Divine.” Lewis Segal of The Times wrote, “Healey has mastered ballerina mannerisms so perfectly that he is both funny and endearing.”

The same year that “Hard Nut” premiered, Wing Healey moved from New York to Los Angeles, following his life partner, who is a professor at UCLA. Wing Healey now commutes to the East Coast for various Mesopotamian Opera Company productions, and he has also begun working behind the scenes in dance, notably as a rehearsal director with White Oak Dance Project, which Morris founded with Mikhail Baryshnikov, and also as Morris’ assistant choreographer for the Los Angeles Opera production of “Nixon in China.” (Just this spring, Wing Healey spent eight weeks in London working with Morris on a revival of the opera there.)

A work that Morris made for Wing Healey, “Greek to Me,” set him thinking about doing solo pieces. Performed in 1998 at the Getty Center as part of an American Repertory Dance Company program, “Greek to Me” made working alone seem like a viable alternative.

The first dance drama he concocted was “Daughter of Earth,” part of a solo festival last year at 2100 Square Feet theater. Wrote Sasha Anawalt in the LA Weekly: “If Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn had had a child, Wing Healey would be it.” That piece, in a revised version, is now “Siren.”

“I had been separated from my [opera] company,” says Wing Healey, “and that was very hard. [While] I have this deep need and love for having characters interacting on the stage, fate has forced my hand.”

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On this day in the rehearsal studio, Wing Healey is putting the final touches on his version of dancer Duncan, a piece that has been six weeks in the making and is the title work of his current concert: “The Death of Isadora.” He’s also working on “We Are All Amneris.”

For the opera character, he dresses in a gold-paneled skirt created by his co-costumer, Karolyn Kiisel, and wields a 15-foot silk train, as much a prop as anything else. Flinging it through the air, it becomes at times a river of blood, a shadow, a column behind which Amneris hides. He executes a series of tiny steps and aggressive whipping turns, his face a picture of grief. Draping the fabric around his body as if channeling the fashion designer Vionnet, the gold skirt glistening, Wing Healey doesn’t so much lose his maleness as transcend gender altogether.

“Playing female roles,” says Wing Healey, “feels very authentic to me--it’s intuitive. To play female roles is a special gift. If you have it, you know you should do it.”

To create all three characters, Wing Healey began with the music.

“I’ll sweep through the music, improvise, and a dramatic idea will come to me . . . one phrase at a time. Isadora came together [while] I was listening to [Berlioz’s] ‘Symphonie Fantastique.’ Maybe it’s a chestnut, but when I’m using this music, I feel I’m really wedded to it.”

To demonstrate, Wing Healey starts a CD and begins to mime Duncan dressing for a lunch date. As he puts on the fateful scarf, wraps it around his neck, removes it, dons it again, the dancer’s impending doom is almost palpable. When the music reaches a fever pitch, Isadora, gazing in a mirror, seems to remember the glory of her past before succumbing to death.

Winded, Wing Healey puts on his glasses and removes layers of costume. With each layer, the persona of Isadora also peels away. The shift in and out of character, exhausting, nevertheless moves him.

“People outside of the arts might think it’s silly,” he says, “but when you’re inside of [the work], like I am, it’s like being caught in the ocean’s current. It’s very powerful; it pulls you.”

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Peter Wing Healey performs “The Death of Isadora: Solo Dance Dramas,” at Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., on Tuesday at 8 p.m., $6, (213) 485-1681.