International movement

When the ambitious, binational dance-theater piece “Aura” receives its U.S. premiere tonight at REDCAT, the first words the audience hears, fittingly, will be “Traductor deseado” -- “Translator wanted.”

That’s because at the heart of “Aura,” which was inspired by and titled after a novella by Mexican literary lion Carlos Fuentes, lies the question that inaugurated the project 2 1/2 years ago: To what extent can people truly communicate when they do not share a language?

Co-choreographers Rosanna Gamson and Cecilia Appleton asked themselves that when they met in 2002, during the maiden U.S. tour by Appleton’s esteemed Mexico City troupe, Contradanza. Leigh Ann Hahn, programming director for the downtown series Grand Performances, had invited them to sit down for a discussion of their creative processes, having noted a similarity between Appleton’s brand of dance theater and what Gamson was doing with her Los Angeles-based company, Rosanna Gamson / World Wide.

Gamson, however, proposed that instead, the two women “dialogue” in the studio with their companies. The resulting four-hour exchange was successful, she feels, precisely because of the language barrier.

“It was very truthful,” she says. “You get different information when you have to show rather than tell.”

Appleton agrees their initial meeting was significant. Speaking by phone from Mexico with the assistance of her son (and Contradanza member) Yseye, she chalks that up partly to the “seductive effect Gamson had over the people around her. This seduction also worked on me.”

But Appleton says she also discovered a kindred spirit who shared her thirst for new ways of developing movement imagery. So at the end of the workshop, she turned to Gamson and said, “Now let’s make a dance together.”

“I thought she was just being polite,” Gamson says. Then she attended Contradanza’s performance of “Camas con Historias” (“Beds With Stories”), a surreal ensemble work in which Appleton explores the line between dreaming and reality while altering audience perceptions with the staged equivalent of overhead shots.

“It was surprisingly similar to a dance I had made smack-dab out of grad school,” Gamson says. “Only hers was way better -- it was the dance I had wanted to make. I realized then that there was a reason we met.”

At the time, Gamson had already been thinking about tackling Fuentes’ haunting tale of a young man working as a translator, a widow and her niece.

Art as a bridge

Since its publication in 1962, “Aura” has gained renown for its innovative use of second-person narration. Gamson, who frequently incorporates literary influences in her work, was intrigued not only by Fuentes’ manipulation of tenses but by the visual symmetry of the novel’s bilingual edition. Its alternating Spanish and English pages, separated by the “border” of the book’s binding, resonated with her own questions about the gaps and fissures in language and human relationships.

“But how much more challenging and interesting,” she recalls thinking, “to do this project in symmetry with someone who really is across the border.”

Indeed, the global situation in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks makes “Aura” even more important, says Shannon Daut, program director at the Western States Arts Federation. The Denver-based nonprofit became an early supporter of the collaboration through the National Endowment for the Arts initiative “Cultural Connections,” whose goals “Aura” exemplifies, Daut says. “Art can be a bridge in ways that other kinds of communication cannot, because it speaks to human emotion rather than individual nationality.”

It was another year before Appleton and Gamson were able to meet to discuss the project, this time in Mexico. Six months after that, they were once again in L.A., spending an intensive week during which Appleton set movement on Gamson’s troupe. After Appleton returned to Mexico, she and Gamson adapted this movement vocabulary for their respective companies, all the while strategizing via e-mail.

Less than a month later, in January 2004, the two companies met up in New York City and spent three days combining the material Gamson and Appleton had developed separately. What resulted is now the opening 15 minutes of “Aura.”

For Gamson, this was another auspicious sign. “Here we were choreographing in two separate countries,” she says. “And when we put it all together, it was perfect.”

Despite that initial aesthetic synergy, the project has not been trouble-free. In addition to the logistical nightmare of coordinating rehearsals across a distance of 1,540 miles, there was still the matter of language.

All 10 cast members -- five from each troupe -- are bilingual, and Gamson has been studying Spanish since she and Appleton first entertained the notion of a collaboration. But language, Appleton believes, is a much more intrinsic aspect of identity. “How a people sees and thinks is expressed in the language they speak,” she says. “Spanish is very metaphorical, whereas English is very practical, concrete.”

During a residency in Mexico City last April, Gamson became acutely aware of the gap between the cultures. “I kept throwing out ideas, thinking, ‘I’m such a great collaborator.’ If one thing didn’t work, I’d just move on to something else.”

Rehearsals weren’t going well, though, and the Contradanza dancers were becoming increasingly touchy. Finally, Cecilia’s son took Gamson aside and explained the problem: “We don’t throw our ideas away. We value them and hold on to them.”

For Gamson, it was an “aha” moment of realizing she was much more American than she suspected: “We have so much here in the U.S. and we waste so much, which you don’t think about in terms of creativity.”

Trusting differences

The collaboration finally took off in June, when Appleton and Gamson finalized the script. This provided a workable structure for all of the ideas and themes each woman wanted to incorporate -- “to keep us on the same page,” Gamson jokes. It also enabled them to work independently until August, when they spent three weeks at theaters in Los Angeles, Monterey Bay and Tempe, Ariz., compiling a final draft.

This was no easy task, given that the two had agreed that either one could choreograph any portion according to her own vision. Their task in that final push was to edit and layer their interpretations, a process Gamson likens to the mixing a club DJ or VJ does.

“You have the Cecilia track, the Rosanna track, the music track and the text track,” she says. “You can play all of them simultaneously or you can cross-fade between them or you can take any section and cut and paste it anywhere else.”

Most impressive, perhaps, is the fact that the choreographers promised each other early on that neither would have veto power.

All decisions about what stayed in or was cut were reached by accommodation or, barring that, by their unshakable agreement to disagree.

Gamson admits that although the piece premiered in Mexico in October, there remain sections she and Appleton would prefer to continue tweaking

But Daut says: “If there hadn’t been any differences between them, I don’t think ‘Aura’ would be the success that it is. The project was a challenge, but that was also the point of it. The process of the piece is the piece.”

Or as Appleton puts it, the goal was to learn how to “hear” each other in their differences and to trust those differences -- “because there’s not just one way to say anything.”

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‘Aura’

Where: REDCAT, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: 8:30 p.m. today through Sunday

Price: $28 and $32

Contact: (213) 237-2800 or www.calarts.org