Two Artists, Connected by the Music

Venezuela-born choreographer Jose Navas--the driving force behind Compagnie Flak, the Montreal-based group he founded in 1995--had previously only worked with living composers. As for working with a classically trained musician on stage? No way, said Jose.

But that was before he met cellist Walter Haman at the Banff Arts Centre in Canada in 1999. While Navas had been finishing a piece for Flak (the troupe’s name means “trunk” in Swedish), Haman, principal cellist of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra in Italy and the Napa Valley Symphony, was a resident artist in that bucolic Canadian Rockies setting.

Initially, Navas, 37, had been somewhat skeptical when an eager Haman, who was born and raised in Fresno, and at 28 lives in San Francisco, approached the more seasoned performer.

“Walter came up with the idea of collaborating, and honestly, to me, it was an interesting invitation,” Navas recalls by phone from Toronto. “But I wasn’t interested in doing a solo show [with an onstage musician]. I was more interested in working with the company. Once we started talking, and he showed me different pieces, though, I realized this was such a different feeling, that I started to get real excited.”

That excitement led to the creation of the Haman/Navas Project, and a spare, 60-minute, untitled sound-and-music collaboration. The sounds, in this case, are those of Benjamin Britten’s Cello Suite No. 1, and a lesser known work, “Yakamochi,” by composer Allan Hovhaness.

Currently in the midst of a six-city, two-month North American tour, the duo will give the work its West Coast premiere at the Skirball Cultural Center on Thursday and Friday.

“It’s just wonderful music,” Navas says, “and it has opened up a huge window for me. I was pushed to understand music in a different way, and I saw that diving into the project was going to change me personally.”

Haman explains that they’d purposely eliminated obvious musical choices--Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, for example, and began digging into the rather large repertory of the 20th century cello canon, listening to a number of recordings, as well as unearthing more rarified pieces, specifically the Hovhaness, a work that has yet to be recorded.

“We wanted to venture into new ground,” Haman says, adding, “It’s like chamber music, but it’s between a dancer and a musician, rather than two musicians.”

Navas began his studies in Caracas, moving to New York in 1988. There, in addition to working with Stephen Petronio and Lucinda Childs, he met and subsequently began working with Nova Scotia-born choreographer William Douglas and his company, William Douglas Dance. The pair was contemplating a move to Amsterdam but made a stop, instead, in Montreal in 1991. “We liked it so much--the community itself and the life in Montreal--that we gave it a try. Eleven years later I’m still there,” Navas says, adding wryly, “It was sort of a long stop.”

It yielded a fruitful partnership in both their personal and professional lives. In 1995, Navas and Douglas shared the prestigious Bessie Award for a solo Douglas choreographed called “While Waiting.” Sadly, Douglas died of AIDS the following year, but not before he saw Navas succeed in starting Compagnie Flak. Since then, Navas has created more than a dozen works, as well as pieces for other troupes.

Among the latter have been a trio for Canadian dancer-choreographer Benoit Lachambre and a work for eight dancers for Montreal Danse in 1997-98. For Flak, in 2000, Navas made “Perfume de Gardenias,” which Dance magazine described as “slicing limbs, and quick stops and starts with sinewy wiggles.”

But it is Navas’ solo work, with its flair for passion and sense of the dramatic, that has consistently drawn praise, and for which the dancer is probably best known.

In 1997, New York choreographer Bill T. Jones created “Sonata and

Navas ponders this notion, responding with measure. “Of course, I think it’s wonderful, but I wonder if it’s because there are few male soloists pursuing a career in contemporary dance, and that’s the closest thing we can relate to. Or is it because I’m dark-haired, dark-skinned and a small dancer? It is,” he adds modestly, “an easy way to inform the audience about what you’re going to see.”

What audiences have seen with the Haman/Navas Project has elicited a variety of reactions. On a bare stage and with minimal lighting, the work opens in silence, followed by an elegant andante cello passage. Responding to the music, Navas fills the space with movements ranging from athletic pirouettes to those that have him tracing his hands around Haman, and making physical contact. At one point Navas kisses Haman’s fingertips.

While the New York Times’ Jack Anderson praised the work as “poignant ... a tribute to the power of music and movement,” the interaction of dancer and musician caused audience members to walk out of a theater in Prague.

“I think some people may feel extremely comfortable if [the piece] were [performed] by a man and a woman,” Navas points out, “but between two men--some people find it offensive. But that’s the beauty of the piece. With no set and no [formal] costumes, there is a very strong relation between the two of us on stage.” Haman hadn’t worked with a dancer before but finds the collaboration fascinating. “To be able to break out of the more traditional classical roles--orchestras, recitals, things like that--to be on stage, doing what I do, it’s wonderful.

“But it’s about how the two relate to each other. We’re feeding off of each other with a live presence. Jose designed a lot of his choreography around me, kind of involving me. Sometimes when you see live music on stage with dance, it might as well be a CD. There’s nothing in the dance that relates to that actual person. This is something very different.”

Navas, who is directing a play in Montreal after leaving Los Angeles, will take his eight-member Compagnie Flak to Switzerland in April. In between his company’s concerts, he resumes touring with the Haman/Navas Project, with stops in England in May and at the Venice Biennale. The work has been so satisfying that Navas says he wants it to be long term, with this outing only the first chapter.

“When we decided to make the piece, we talked a lot about making a duo--that it wasn’t about a musician in the corner of the stage. We wanted to make a staging of two artists, two guys, two personalities, and see how the fusion between musician and dancer could be seamless.

“We would like to have a second volume,” Navas continues, “where we may have another musician on stage. We may have a composer for cello, and we may have another dancer, as well. But in the end, my work is very personal, and I want to keep it that way. If it doesn’t go all the way,” he adds emphatically, I’m not interested in it.”

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Victoria Looseleaf is a frequent contributor to Calendar.