The spirit is willing

WITH her walker as dance partner, Marion Scott performs her latest choreography in her living room. Wearing a pink housedress and with her gray hair in the dancer’s bun she has long favored, she takes slow, ceremonial steps toward a nearby chair. She moves from standing to sitting in deliberate stages. Once seated, she dances with her arms. When she stands again, her gaze is distant yet serene and victorious. She’s looking death in the eye -- but not for the first time.

As she prepares for the 10th installment of her “Spirit Dances” at Highways Performance Space, the 84-year-old choreographer concedes: “I’m going to die at some point. But other than that, I have no plans to retire. I’m giving my life meaning, and unless I have something like a heart attack, I will keep going.”

Two years ago, around the time she got the walker, Scott wasn’t so sure she would dance again. But if anyone knows how to stage a comeback, it’s Scott. In 1968, she disbanded the Marion Scott Dance Company, which had been in existence for two decades, and she didn’t perform again for 17 years. But then, after three hip-replacement surgeries and bouts of severe depression, she formed a new company that lasted three years and, more important, led to the epiphany that she was far from finished.

“We were in between rehearsals at this theater, and I walked onstage and knew I was home,” she recalls. “I knew I was meant to perform, no matter what condition I was in.”

As an octogenarian, the former UCLA dance professor has dislocated her knees, suffered silent strokes and been hospitalized for high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. For “Spirit Dances 8” in 2004, she performed leaning against a wall for support. Just before “Spirit Dances 9,” she wound up in the hospital and had to cancel the show. Today, her dining room table features a tray neatly arrayed with 26 bottles of medication.

Yet though she’s diligent about taking her pills, Scott knows what’s really keeping her alive. “It’s the ‘Spirit Dances,’ ” she says. “They are healing for both the dancer and the audience.”

Scott began her theme-based series in 1999, and over the years the shows have celebrated the aging process, paid tribute to dance icon Isadora Duncan, explored the effect of masks on movement and relied largely on improvised performances. In more recent years, though, Scott has worked on adding more choreographic structure to the dances, and she now collaborates with a core group of performers ranging from their mid-40s to their 80s. Company members work individually on dances and meet once a month for feedback.

“Marion has really opened people’s eyes to the value of getting older,” says Roberta Wolin-Manker, a choreographer and dance professor at Santa Monica College, who until this year produced the series. “She has revived careers and shown us what people can do in the later years of their lives.”

Allegra Fuller-Snyder, for example, hadn’t danced for years, though she “was surrounded by dance” as a professor and pioneer in dance ethnology at UCLA, when Scott asked her to participate in the series’ second installment. “I thought that was absolutely ridiculous,” she remembers. “But the piece was called ‘The Crones,’ so I thought, ‘Why not?’ I decided to try and realized that I could dance from the heart, that it didn’t have to be about technical mastery.”

Now 79, Fuller-Snyder will perform in the latest show, called “Courage Has Many Faces,” despite a recent shoulder injury that limits her mobility on the left side of her body. “After all these years of not dancing, I discovered that the spirit of dance remains vital within me,” she says.

For Wolin-Manker, the show’s title inspired her to create a dance dedicated to her daughter-in-law, who recently died of cancer. “Marion allows each of us to have our own voice in the company,” she says. “She helps people go to that place inside themselves and works with them to shape and present that essence in a cohesive way.”

*

A mentor to many

BUT Wolin-Manker, who first met Scott as a graduate student at UCLA in 1983, says that while Scott influenced a number of choreographers who studied or worked with her early in their careers, “everyone is making different work, and no one looks like the other. Marion always knew how to key in to your essence and could draw out what makes you special.”

“Marion saw early potential in me,” says Hae Kyung Lee, now a dance professor at Cal State Los Angeles and an internationally known choreographer who studied with Scott at UCLA in the late ‘70s. “Years later, I approach teaching in that way, where I try and find the talent in my students and help them develop it.”

Lee, who often draws upon her Korean heritage in her work, adds that all of Scott’s work “has been about spirit. She has always approached dance in a spiritual way. She works from the inside out, and that’s why I feel so connected to her.”

Before showing her dance called “Prayer,” Scott sits at her dining room table wearing a blue robe and a favorite pair of dangling amethyst earrings. When she speaks about dance, she closes her eyes. When the conversation turns to her daily life and all the doctor visits, she opens them. She says that her first visceral understanding of how “spirit moves through you” came when she was a young dancer in New York auditioning for a company run by modern-dance pioneer Helen Tamiris.

“I always had bounce but not height,” she says of her jumping ability. “But at the audition, I remember feeling so buoyant, and afterward I found out I was accepted into the company.”

Raised in Chicago, Scott had made a beeline for New York at age 18 and, in addition to Tamiris, studied and worked with such other pioneers as Martha Graham, Jose Limon and Doris Humphrey. “Of course I drew from them,” she says of her mentors.

But Scott says she also learned from the years when she didn’t perform and suffered from depression. “I got fat, and I was so negative,” she says. “I was so depressed, I even thought about suicide, but this finally led me to dance alone in my living room. I started expressing my despair through movement.”

Spirit dance, says Scott, is “expressing that which is larger than yourself. You are dancing the part of yourself that is searching for something higher -- call it God, call it whatever you like.”

These days, Scott expresses joy rather than despair when she dances. The depression she felt as a younger woman, she says, no longer exists. “I’m not that person,” she replies when asked about a Times interview she gave in 1986 that described her as “stark, intense and self-absorbed.”

“Sure, I have my bad moments,” she acknowledges. “But I have a lot of happiness in my life now. I’m less afraid to die.”

Last spring, Scott wound up performing the duet she had created for the canceled “Spirit Dances 9.” After “being given the OK again” by her doctors, she appeared as a guest artist with fellow collaborator Craig Ng in Wolin-Manker’s “Freedom Dances” at Highways. The duet was about her facing the inevitable end. Ng, an actor and dancer with a martial arts background, played the role of Death.

“I felt really nervous,” he recalls. “Marion’s health was getting worse and worse, and there was the possibility that she could even die during a performance, and here I am playing the part of Death. But then I thought, ‘If you are a dancer who has danced all her life, then wow, what a way to go.’ ”

Scott and Ng performed the piece mostly without mishap. But one night, as they exited the stage, Scott stumbled and Ng struggled to support her. “In the end, we made it,” he says. “And she looked at me with such joy on her face.”

That might explain the calm and dignified expression in Scott’s eyes when she rehearses her “Prayer” dance. “As long as I use this walker and work within my limits, I can still do my best work,” she says. “I’m looking forward to ‘Spirit Dances 11.’ ”

*

‘Spirit Dances 10: Courage Has Many Faces’

Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica

When: 8:30 p.m. April 20 and 21, 2:30 p.m. April 22

Price: $15 and $20

Contact: (310) 315-1459 or www.highwaysperformance.org