Fresh kicks, classical style

“JUST because we are classical dancers,” Michael Nunn says, “doesn’t mean we sit in a darkened room eating lentils in the lotus position.”

Indeed not. Nunn and William Trevitt, better known as the Ballet Boyz, are revving up for an assault on America. Their company’s cross-country tour will open at UCLA’s Royce Hall, Oct. 3-4, and wind up in New York in November. Another North American stint, this time including Canada, is already being negotiated. For the current tour, they’ll be sharing the stage with three other dancers, including a pair of feisty ballerinas who have discarded their tutus.

The company’s goal is to kick ballet into the 21st century with works by such up-to-the-minute choreographers as William Forsythe and Christopher Wheeldon. But the “Boyz” moniker is the result of a pair of successful television documentaries made for London’s Channel 4. “Now,” says Trevitt, “though we’ve never liked the name, we have to promote ourselves as the Ballet Boyz. When it was first proposed by Channel 4, we thought it was stupid, we hated the name. OK, it’s served us well, but do we look like boyz?”

“You have to sell tickets any way you can,” Nunn interjects. “And the ‘Boyz’ thing really has opened doors for us.”

A pseudonym is born

Trevitt, 34, and Nunn, 36, have actually known each other since they were boys. The two met in 1984 at the Royal Ballet School. “Billy was already there,” says Nunn. “We were both asked to join the Royal Ballet in 1987.” Eventually, they both were also cast in leading roles and went on to marry “ballet girls” who were dancing with the company.

Then, more than a decade ago, the pair began a sideline in photography. One of the first jobs they went after was a poster for a Royal Ballet performance. “We didn’t want it to look like a couple of ballet dancers being given a silver spoon,” says Nunn. “So, George Piper was born.” The pseudonym is an amalgam of their middle names. “George from me. Piper from Billy.”

In 1999, they moved on to video and made “Ballet Boyz,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary about their final days with the Royal. It was a tense time. Along with three other men, they were planning to stage a mass exodus in order to join a new troupe, K Company, that dancer Tetsuya Kumakawa was setting up in Japan. Their follow-up film, “Ballet Boyz II -- The Next Step,” focused on K Company’s tumultuous first season.

Then, in 2001, they launched their own company: George Piper Dances. It has succeeded beyond all expectations.

“That first show was a real ‘all or nothing’ situation,” Nunn remembers. “We spent every penny we ever had on it to try and establish ourselves as something more than just another small dance company.”

To accomplish this, they enlisted their video skills. Each performance includes live and impromptu backstage footage interspersed among the dances. For the American tour, they are also compiling a five-minute, back-catalog introduction.

“Our videos,” Nunn says, “offer an insight into us as people, give audiences a way in. I think it makes the performance a much closer experience. We want the audience to see that we’re normal, hard-working people who just happen to have quite an extraordinary job.

“It’s our way of breaking down the barrier between the audience and what can seem a bunch of rather forbidding people.”

“In Greece recently, we dubbed the whole show and they loved it,” says Trevitt. “Michael did the intro, the first 30 seconds, live to camera, from a Greek phrase book, and all of a sudden you’ve made friends.”

“There are only five of us,” adds Nunn, “so we replace spectacle with personality.”

The American program will open with Forsythe’s sizzling quartet “Steptext.” Its sleek neoclassicism requires accomplished technique. It is also something of a cantankerous piece, which begins by deliberately throwing the audience off kilter: It “starts” seemingly before it’s meant to. The house lights have yet to go down when the dancers begin appearing on the stage and performing in silence. Forsythe, like the George Piper dancers, relishes the challenge of discovering ways to break down the traditional “us” and “them” conventions that exist between audience and performer.

“It’s such a statement,” Nunn says. “You can hear audiences thinking, ‘Do we sit down? Do we talk? Do we watch?’ You know immediately that this isn’t just another dance show. Some people get annoyed, but it’s a great way to grab their attention. And there’s no way anybody can argue with the technique.”

“I’ve seen too many classical dancers go off to do other stuff and lose the edge on their technique,” Trevitt says. “It’s important for us to keep that edge -- it’s how we’ve kept the standard of our shows so high.”

Prestigious approval

Nunn and Trevitt had already danced in Forsythe’s works while they were with the Royal Ballet. When the choreographer found out they were going to form their own company, he phoned to say it was a great idea, they should have done it earlier, and which of his works could he give them? “He’s been really good,” says Nunn. “Probably the most helpful of anyone. And having someone like him saying you’re doing OK, well, what can I say?”

Someone else who thinks George Piper is doing considerably better than OK is Wheeldon, who also started with the Royal Ballet. The much-sought-after classical choreographer has created a new quintet for the troupe, set to music by Philip Glass and called “Mesmerics.”

Wheeldon is in such demand, however, that the company had to work around his schedule. They started rehearsing with him more than a year ago and have snatched brief times in studios both in London and New York. This summer, the piece had to be put on hold while Wheeldon choreographed a new work for San Francisco Ballet, “Rush,” to Martinu’s Sinfonietta La Jolla. It received its world premiere at the end of August, when San Francisco Ballet performed an evening of Wheeldon works as the finale to this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

George Piper’s American evenings will end with “Torsion,” a half-hour duet for Trevitt and Nunn by yet another former member of the Royal Ballet clan, Russell Maliphant. It’s intense -- laid-back yet athletically daring. Maliphant has been linked with George Piper right from the beginning. His “Critical Mass” appeared in the group’s debut evening and, come December, Trevitt and Nunn will step back onto the Royal’s Covent Garden stage when they share a Maliphant world premiere with ballerina Sylvie Guillem. This is an unexpected development because the pair’s departure from the company was acrimonious.

“Strange how things turn out,” Nunn says.

And how do the Boyz think George Piper Dances will play in America?

“I’ve no idea,” Nunn admits. “None at all. The things we do and the style in which we do them are ideal for someone who is skeptical about dance, or hasn’t seen that much. I am a little nervous, but I do think we open doors to quite a broad spectrum of work.”

Thinking big, George Piper Dances will also soon be hooking up with Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of London’s Royal National Theatre. In fact, some initial workshops have already taken place with Hytner and Wheeldon for a hybrid staging of Handel’s “Messiah” that will involve some 70 actors, singers and dancers. It’s scheduled for a minimum of 50 performances over the Christmas holidays of 2004-05 and later at the Kennedy Center as well.

Before that, Nunn and Trevitt are both slotted in for summer guest performances in the revival of Matthew Bourne’s all-male “Swan Lake.”

“This should all just keep evolving,” Nunn insists.

“It would be easy to invent a successful formula and just keep doing it until it peters out or we get bored with it. But we’ve had a certain amount of success, and that buys us a little bit of leeway to take some risks. That’s what will keep it interesting.”

Robertson has been the dance editor of Time Out London since 1984 and also edits the British quarterly Dance Now.

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George Piper Dances

When: Oct. 3-4, 8 p.m.

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

Price: $25-$45; students, $20

Contact: (310) 825-2101