What a Daughter Can Teach

Jackie Planeix and Tom Crocker have the well-defined, lithe lines you’d expect of dancers. Petite Planeix, with eyebrows like two black slashes over dark brown eyes, radiates a gamine delicacy; blue-eyed Crocker is a muscular presence with close-cropped hair and a determined jaw.

Together, they are Blue Palm, the French American, husband-and-wife performance duo. They’re known in L.A. and in Europe for eclectic, sensual, slyly observational, adult dance-text satires and balletic romps. But in 1993, they became parents, and parenthood, they say, has not only been part of the evolution of their personal lives, it has also been a profound part of the evolution of their art. In fact, Planeix and Crocker don’t separate the two.

“We’re not really a dance company, or a theater company,” Crocker said. “We’re just a couple who has this ongoing, three-dimensional conversation--our art goes from the dinner table to the stage. Essentially, we’re just trying to be engaged in life. If we can do a sort of heightened reality of this or that which amuses us, then we put it on the stage.”

That this life-as-art conversation now includes parenting doesn’t mean that avant-garde Blue Palm has gone mainstream. Audiences can still expect the unexpected when the duo’s new play for families, “Childhood,” opens Saturday at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank for a six-week run.

In the seriocomic, stylized, sometimes wacky meditation on childhood, Blue Palm explores “the essence of the emotional landscape of 3 to 17, trying to reach out with the poetry of it and the imagination of it,” Crocker said.

Among “Childhood’s” vignettes, curious angels, waiting to be born as children themselves, look down from the heavens to see what children are like, and discover play, turf battles, candy and poignant, soon-to-be-lost self-knowledge. In “The Lot,” an adult makes a bittersweet reconnection with his sense of play and wonder when he encounters a childhood playmate who never grew up.

In “Children’s Portraits” are such archetypes as “the timid soul,” the bully and the good student. “3-2-17” observes how children venture out into the world, a process that Planeix and Crocker exotically liken to leaving the safety of a jungle for the rewards, dangers and freedom of the savanna. The show’s run at the Falcon will be the first time that one of the couple’s family-oriented works will be seen in the U.S. in an engagement longer than a day or a weekend or two. It also marks a new direction for family programming at the Falcon, where conventional fairy-tale fare for young children has been the norm.

“Childhood” offers “a wonderful combination of wry humor and true appreciation of childhood [that] resonates on a lot of levels,” said Jan Breslauer, the Falcon’s new producing director. Blue Palm was a natural for the first family show of her tenure at the Falcon, she said, “not only because I’ve loved their work for more than a decade, but because they set the keynote of where I think our family programming can and should aspire to go: They represent a unique combination of humor and intelligence and a kind of aesthetic that is not only a lot of fun, but accessible to someone who’s 6 as well as someone who is 60.” Former soloists with French choreographer Maurice Bejart’s renowned Ballet of the 20th Century, Planeix and Crocker met in Brussels as teenage students at Bejart’s interdisciplinary school MUDRA. Married in Paris in 1987, two years after they hooked up as Blue Palm, they developed their hallmark style, layering movement and text, sophistication and humor in such works as “Dance Talks,” “Folie a Deux,” “Cocteau en Californie” and “Millennium Stories.”

Daughter Madeleine inspired such intimate pieces as “Pour Madeleine” and “Ooh, Ooh, Baby.” The duo also created two highly original children’s shows: “The Five Senses,” a burlesque that included a princess whose nose guided her to true love, and the wicked spoof “Blue Palm Startles Little Red Riding Hood, Eats Hansel and Gretel, Then Dances With Sleeping Beauty.” In it, life imitated literature as mounds of real donuts enticed swarms of young audience volunteers to join the couple onstage.

Children’s work is a creative step forward, not backward, Planeix said. “We’re very interested in the arts’ place in society, in what our roles are as artists, in why we keep on being artists. We’re not shedding what came before. We’re continually adding on to make it a richer and more informed domain.”

Originally created with funding from the Ford Foundation, “Childhood” played at the Theatre Dunois in Paris in 2000, after an initial performance at Hollywood’s John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. In October, Planeix and Crocker will begin touring a smaller version of the show for the Music Center Education Division, under whose auspices they have been teaching and performing theater and dance in L.A.-area elementary and middle schools for the last three years.

Barbara Leonard, the division’s artistic director, finds the couple’s ability to draw teachers and students into their creative process compelling. “They work as a team and individually, but seeing them as a team is really something,” she said. “That combination of stylized dance and theater is a great partnering, and the way they partner the art forms, they also partner as artists.”

Louise Steinman, cultural programs director for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, has worked with Blue Palm since she curated performing arts programs for Barnsdall Park’s Gallery Theatre. She commissioned both “Cocteau en Californie” in 1989 and Blue Palm’s 1991 fairy-tale romp, and calls the company “one of L.A.’s treasures.” A sense of how seriously the two commit to their art is apparent at their longtime home on a steep hill in L.A.’s funky-hip Silver Lake district. Its white-and-blue, Swiss chalet-type exterior reveals an interior that appears remarkably devoid of material possessions. In an Ibsen-esque living room with sumptuous dark wood paneling, carved moldings and beams, there is a barre in lieu of furniture.”It’s a very hard path,” Crocker acknowledged, with a nod to the empty room. “[But] there’s nothing worse than not knowing what you think, or care about or want to do or what you love. That’s a torture, it seems to me. It’s unbearable to live a life where you don’t feel resonance.”

Lately, because of their daughter, Planeix and Crocker are finding more and more resonance in teaching.

Children respond to their postmodern approach that allows them, “on a bare floor, in a bare space,” to define their own boundaries of movement and expression within the context of a disciplined process. Adults respond to the artists’ fundamental belief in a mind-body connection to creativity, finding ways through often playful rhythmic movement to “open the channels” to integrate the two. “Isn’t it something how you begin [life] with these almost dance-like sensations and how that changes in becoming an adult? How the sense of time or gravity [changes] your sense of body and self? We think that everybody should be able to dance and act and play,” Crocker said.

That sense of reconnection with younger selves in “Childhood” is meant to resonate with adults, and the content is also crafted to challenge children “to go places that are not in their frames of reference,” Planeix said.

But “Childhood” is also deliberately “clear and direct in its emotional connections and the simplicity of the format,” Crocker said, so that children understand what’s happening, even in the “Angels” segment, in which adults might hear a bit of Samuel Beckett in the spare, absurdist quality of the angels’ seriocomic dialogue.

To make the show easily “readable” for young children, Blue Palm is eschewing its usual minimalist staging style for a fully staged production. It will have visual projections; dark and light musical excerpts from 18th and 19th century classical works and from contemporary French composer Hugues le Bars; a balloon drop; mirror balls; and the participation by six of Crocker and Planeix’s young students, ages 7 to 10, including daughter Madeleine.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for children in the audience to see themselves onstage, reflected in the world of art,” Breslauer said.

Don’t expect anything gushy, though.

“There’s this metamorphosis that happens to a lot of artists who do shows for children,” Planeix said, “where they sort of go cuddly. We don’t. We’re coming from the same place artistically as if we were doing a show [only for adults]. If there’s a prank or a pratfall, that’s not all there is. There’s a context.

“There’s all this noise and mess that are part of childhood, this little flame, this idealism, and they go hand in hand. Our approach takes in all of that; it says you are all of these things.”

Later, the conversation continues at one of the couple’s favorite eateries, Madame Matisse, a tiny, no-frills cafe where Crocker and Planeix are greeted like old friends in French by the chef, and patrons dine outside mere feet from East Sunset Boulevard’s lumbering delivery trucks and noisy commuter traffic.

Fame and financial security may be elusive, but the two artists say they are amply rewarded by the creative life they’ve chosen.

“To make sense of the world we do this, and to make sense of ourselves we do this,” Crocker said. “We’ll be on our deathbeds and it will have been about our relationship, what we shared onstage, and Madeleine, our daughter. And then we’ll go.”

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“CHILDHOOD,” Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank. Dates: Opens Saturday, 3 p.m. Plays Saturdays, 1 and 3 p.m. Closes Oct. 23. Prices: $12.50. Phone: (818) 955-8101.