Premiering in O.C.: a Dance About a Dot

There’s always an air of mystery about how a new dance comes into being. Does the music come first and the choreography after? Is it the other way around? Or something entirely different?

Choreographer Ann Marie DeAngelo has worked in various ways.

The first piece she created for Ballet Pacifica--”Blackberry Winter” in the 1999 summer choreographers workshop--started with the music. Her new work, “Successful Worry,” to premiere March 30-31, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, started with a text she wrote.

“The story’s about a dot who can’t find her place in the world,” DeAngelo said in a recent interview at company studios in Irvine. “It was inspired by Norton Juster’s ‘The Dot and The Line.’ It basically goes a step further and eventually [the dot] invents dot-com, and so finds her place.

“On the one hand, the work [is] supporting technology and all these advances that we have and this computer information-inundated age, but then the question becomes, ‘Is more better?’ I don’t know. So in a way, it’s satirizing that, promoting it and at the same time going, ‘Yeah, but . . . ‘

“I’m not pretending this is a deep piece, although that might change,” she continued. “It’s a fun piece. It wants to be fun. That’s been the motivation behind it.”

As she did for “Blackberry Winter,” DeAngelo again uses music by Conni Ellisor, composer-in-residence at the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

“She’s a very moving composer,” DeAngelo said. “But she’s very eclectic, so she writes in lots of different styles. She’s melodic, and that’s unusual to find because last-century music was very different. Music was going away from the heart.”

The choreographer arrived earlier this month ready for work, with pages and pages of text and its revisions, lists counting out the beats of the music and various stick-figure drawings for possible movement images.

“When I go into a studio, I will try these things out and see if they physically work,” DeAngelo said, describing how she translates the drawings into movements. “For instance, there’s this one--handstands. I’m sure this will be in the dance. Originally, I had more than two people doing it. Then I realized, ‘No, not everyone can do that.’

“But some of these are ideas that, until I go into the studio, I don’t know if they will work.”

DeAngelo likes to start working with dancers by getting them to improvise.

“That enables me to utilize the dancer as an instrument in maybe a more unique way or in a way that some people might not think,” she said. “Many choreographers who have a particular style . . . want the dancers really to do [the choreographer’s] style, and I prefer to mix what I consider my style and what that unique dancer can do.

“I like to assemble different talents. Even though ballet has been my background, my aesthetic is to mix forms.”

She doesn’t always get what she expects, however. She remembers creating and dancing in a work in Mexico earlier in her career. She thought it was just great until she cast someone else in her part and went out front to watch it.

“I cried, ‘Is that what it looks like?’ I’ll never forget that. I was so upset. But that piece led me to the next step, to be able to make something that was more visually cohesive or coherent.

“That’s what I mean by saying it’s all part of a process. There’s really no failure in art. There’s only process. Everything teaches you something. You take that information and you go to your next piece. So if [you] think of it that way, whether someone thinks it’s good or bad is irrelevant. It’s taking you to the next step.”

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIMES

Ballet Pacifica will dance the premiere of Ann Marie DeAngelo’s “Successful Worry” on a program that also includes works by Rick McCullough and William Soleau, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. March 30, 8 p.m.; March 31, 2:30 and 8 p.m. $20 to $24 ($8 student/senior rush). (949) 854-4646.