Room for Fantasy in a Grand Hotel

It’s unusually cold for Miami Beach in January, a chill breeze is blowing off the Atlantic Ocean, and choreographer Heidi Duckler, in a black leather jacket, is shivering on the vast poolside plaza behind the Eden Roc Hotel. “It never gets this cold in L.A.!” she says.

Undeterred, four dancers, two from Duckler’s L.A.-based Collage Dance Theatre and two from Miami, do a sensual, gliding waltz with a set of vacuum cleaners, chins and arms elegantly elevated, like a quartet of poised flamingo housekeepers in a Disney cartoon. Hotel guests, bundled in sweatshirts and dark glasses, stop to gawk or smile. L.A. actor Bryan Anderson, a sometime Collage participant here playing a disillusioned magician, embraces one woman, who wheels him off triumphantly on her vacuum. Duckler grins. “They’re making magic,” she says. “Sexual magic.”

Duckler is doing what she usually does, just on the opposite coast. She and her company specialize in site-specific dance--they’ve created work in the Los Angeles River, at the Lincoln Heights jail, and in the bowels of the Subway Terminal Building, to name a few. Now, she’s taken her method--find a site, research its history and create a dance inspired by both the physical particularities of the place and its real-life uses--and six of her dancers out of town for the first time.

Which means mining a site from a whole new point of view. Instead of building on native knowledge, Duckler has tried to be an understanding insider and at the same time maintain her outsider curiosity.

Miami and L.A. have a lot in common, Duckler says. “We’re both on the coast. There’s immigration issues, extreme weather--you’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got earthquakes. We’ve both got flamingos and palm trees.”

And both cities are built on fantasy. If L.A. is the locus for screen dreams, Miami is the site for real-life dreams--for those on vacation or in retirement or in exile from troubled islands to the south. So Duckler picked as her focus a site where all those dreams converge, the Eden Roc, a glamorous hotel that epitomized the Miami Beach of her imagination. After all, she says, “I am a tourist here, and I always think it’s best to do what you know.”

Duckler hopes to excavate her own and others’ fantasies of Miami in “Under- Eden,” a multimedia dance piece at the Eden Roc Thursday through Saturday. Produced by the Miami Light Project, this city’s leading contemporary presenter, “UnderEden” is the fourth and final work to come out of the OnSite Performance Network, a four-year project created by Dancing in the Streets, a New York nonprofit group that funds and promotes site-specific performance. The project paired selected choreographers and presenters around the country.

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The underlying theme of “Under- Eden” is the transformative powers of fantasy and the way it drives the tourists, retirees and workers who inhabit the hotel. It revolves around Anderson’s character, a magician who believed in magic as a child and is now disillusioned. As the performance moves from lobby to ballroom to plaza to cabana to pool, reality and fantasy mix, ultimately renewing the magician’s faith. Along the way, Duckler often takes playful advantage of Miami Beach imagery and the hotel’s theatrical design. Dancers fling themselves wildly up 12-foot-high lobby windows, and giant video projections by BJ Krivanek illuminate the hotel’s outside walls.

There’s a drag queen from Panama City (Florida, not Central America), a fruit-decked dancer undulating down the banister of the grand lobby staircase, a film of a dying man’s last words playing on a cabana lounge chair, a real-life shaman (Adrian Castro, a local poet who is also a babalawo, or Santeria priest) who performs a ceremony that transforms the magician into a mermaid swimming in the hotel pool.

The last is swum by dancer Heather White, who thoroughly enjoys playing a mythical creature and performing graceful arcs in her rubber-finned costume. “I love having the power,” White says. “I love fairy tales about mermaids.”

The $150,000 project is an important one for Miami Light and its third major commission. Executive director Beth Boone got involved with the OnSite Network at a presenters’ conference in 1997, and thought a site-specific piece would be an ideal project for Miami’s usually warm weather and outdoor-oriented culture, as well as offering ways to involve local artists, pull in new audiences, and create something intricately linked, both physically and thematically, with Miami.

Duckler was suggested to Boone by OnSite Network organizers, and Boone liked the idea of the connections between L.A. and Miami, as well as Duckler’s interest in working with local residents, themes and artists. Duckler visited Miami 10 times in the two years she prepared for “UnderEden,” exploring the city, interviewing Miamians, teaching workshops at the Florida Dance Festival, and gathering Miami dancers and other performers for the show.

“I like the idea of people being able to stumble on art and experience it outside a formal theatrical setting,” Boone said. “Heidi refers to herself as an urban archeologist. She has spent much of her life educating her community and herself and her company about how a site informs the content of a piece. So she started to excavate these layers of meaning and history in Miami Beach and in the hotel.”

Once she focused on the notion of hotel-as-real-life-stage, Duckler, a fan of 1950s-era moderne design, fell in love with the 1957 Eden Roc, with its dramatic, three-story lobby and sweeping spaces. “I felt this affinity for this kitschy theatrical environment,” Duckler says. Moreover, those grand spaces also provided a perfect setting for the notions of fantasy colliding with reality that Duckler wanted to explore.

“A hotel is a symbol for illusion, for what we seek and desire,” says Duckler. “Yet the city seeps in--you cannot escape reality. It’s there in the form of the staff who live there. So I started to think about groups: tourists, residents, exiles and workers.”

Duckler cast her work with the same eye for mixing fantasy and reality. Six elderly women from a Miami senior center perform a line dance and sun themselves under a ballroom chandelier. The work also incorporates a video interview with one of the hotel’s maids, a Cuban immigrant. Audience members must check in at the front desk.

The theme of transformation dovetails nicely with the goals of the management at the Eden Roc, which has just undergone a major renovation. Designed by Morris Lapidus, the Eden Roc epitomized its era’s over-the-top glamour, boasting guests such as Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in the 1950s and 1960s. But by the 1970s, the Eden Roc was passe and dilapidated.

The Eden Roc’s marketing director, Randy Griffin, saw Duckler’s project as a vehicle to help give the hotel a hipper image. “This is a way to affiliate ourselves with the cutting edge,” Griffin said.

Plus, the project has elements of a time-honored Miami Beach notion, the bizarre publicity stunt. “Guests come up to me and say, ‘There’s a lady covered in fruit lying on the banister,’ ” says events manager Chris McDonald.

The fruit-covered lady is Karyn Klein, 42, a longtime member of Collage, who grew up in Miami Beach and remembers coming to the Eden Roc for bar mitzvahs and weddings as an awe-struck teenager. “It was still glitzy and glamorous back then--it was the place,” Klein remembers. As she rehearses her undulating descent along the banister of the hotel’s grand staircase, a man waiting for an elevator yells, “That’s a hell of a way to get down the stairs!” while a watching couple giggles in agreement.

“We create in front of everyone,” says Klein. “So people who never see art get exposed to it. I like being part of that.”

In a way, Duckler too has been able to live out new fantasies here, just like any other tourist. “I always wanted to be a mermaid, didn’t you?” she jokes. “It’s fantasy, magic, desire. That’s one of the beautiful things about not being a resident: You do have a sense of the magic here. I’m naive, willing to believe.”

She says she will be sorry when it is over. “I’m really going to miss Miami,” Duckler says. “Will I be an exile now?”