Dancing the L.A. Shuffle : Naomi Goldberg's company reflects the creative power of the city, but that was the easy part. Now it has to tackle what's tough: stability and a commitment to bringing dance to the neighborhoods.

By Jan Breslauer

Aug. 28, 1994 12 AM PT

<i> Jan Breslauer is a Times staff writer</i>

Choreographer Naomi Goldberg doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word clash . She mixes modern dance and ballet idioms, choreographs to everything from Bach to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and leads a company that’s as devoted to hip, postmodern concert dance as it is to folksy community center projects.

In fact, eclecticism is her calling card. “She’s a classicist who’s got the heart of a romantic,” says outgoing Mark Taper Forum associate artistic director Oskar Eustis, on whose upcoming Taper staging of Eduardo Machado’s “Floating Islands” Goldberg is the choreographer.

“She has an ability to translate ideas, themes, emotions and text into kinetic terms. She gives it discipline and precision, but her work is suffused with emotional life.”

Goldberg’s theater and opera choreography has included Han Ong’s “Swooney Planet” and other works for the Taper’s New Works Festival, “Carmen” for the Long Beach Opera, “The Mikado” for the Milwaukee Opera and more.

“She has a kind of infectious enthusiasm--I don’t want to say it’s ego-less, but it almost feels that way,” says Eustis, who first worked with Goldberg on a Manhattan Theatre Club production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Day Standing on Its Head.” “She’s astonishingly generous.”

Yet Goldberg’s principal showcase is her 5-year-old company, Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet. On Saturday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, the group presents “Three Tales,” an evening of original works based on dramatic adaptations of legends and folk stories from a variety of cultural traditions. The scenarios are written by such playwrights as Gotanda, Luis Alfaro, Nasser Nasser and Kathleen Tolan and Charles Mee Jr., with music by Fredric Myrow, Robert Moran, Daniel Lentz and Carlos Rodriguez.

But L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet isn’t just another modern troupe with a slate of bookings at the usual chi-chi sites. What makes this company unusual is that it’s also committed to teaching and performing in neighborhoods where dancers seldom tread.

And it’s the interplay of the two identities that gives the troupe its drive. “There is this constant duality that comes down to the trained, perfectible form and the accepted free form, between the beauty that comes from training and the wonder of people just sharing in the moment,” Goldberg says.

In a city where few companies stay together more than a year--let alone long enough to develop an aesthetic and a mission--L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet has already passed par. But it’s at a Rubicon. Armed with an increasingly proficient style and an agenda, it’s now got to tackle such new challenges as stabilization and touring.

And L.A. may be a tough place to do that. “Los Angeles is a very easy place for new ideas to come up and especially for individuals to surface,” Goldberg says. “I don’t think L.A. is really about the survival of groups of people, companies or something that has a plan for making roots.”

It’s around 9 p.m. on one of those recent hot (and very humid) August nights, and Goldberg is rehearsing her company in its upstairs studio at the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. Sweat-dripping brows go unnoticed and the camaraderie is evident as the members work.

L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet is a company that really does look like L.A. It’s not just that the dancers are noticeably more varied in body type and ethnicity than in most modern troupes. It’s also that the material sports a panoply of cultural influences and terpsichorean vocabularies.

The program that these dancers are rehearsing, “Three Tales,” ties together several adaptations of classic stories from different times and places. It features the company (Susan Marie Castang, Damon Cavena White, Shawn Oda, Alissa Mello, Katherine Sanders, Teresa Enroth, Miki Inoue and guest artist Tim Fox), along with 20 girls who appear as guest performers in one section.

Goldberg herself will dance the prologue, “Mango,” a scenario by Nasser based on a folk tale from Trinidad. The “Three Tales” themselves are: “Princess of the Moon,” Gotanda’s reworking of an 8th-Century Japanese tale; “La Llorona,” Alfaro’s take on the Mexican folk story, and “The Sisters Grimm,” Tolan and Mee’s adaptation of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty.”

The prologue and three main dances all focus on female protagonists--which comes in handy since L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet, like many modern companies, is composed mostly of female dancers. It’s also in keeping with Goldberg’s propensity for non-sexist choreography featuring strong women’s roles.

But then, Goldberg, 33, is something of a strong female protagonist herself.

Born into a Jewish family that she describes as “intellectual”--her father was a doctor, her mother an educator and her two sisters both hold doctorates--Goldberg grew up in Teaneck, N.J. At age 9, she was accepted into the School of American Ballet, the academy of the New York City Ballet. By the time she was 12, Goldberg had to drop all of her other extracurricular pursuits because the dance training was so demanding.

In high school, Goldberg would spend an hour a day on her New Jersey campus and the rest of the time training in New York. “There was always this conflict because I went back and forth,” she says. “I always had this split between this School of American Ballet/Balanchine perfectionism and this other side of my life that was just about this girl from New Jersey.”

It wasn’t a happy straddling of two worlds. “My early- and mid-teens were the most difficult years of my life,” says Goldberg. At 16--about the age when dancers typically advance into company apprenticeships--Goldberg injured her ankle, capping an unfortunate series of sprains and strains. Within a couple of months, she decided to apply to college.

Goldberg enrolled as an English major at Barnard College at Columbia. She left after a year, though, to join the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. “Once again, injuries started happening,” says Goldberg. “But I had discovered the West Coast.”

Sidelined from dancing and encouraged by her then-boyfriend--a fire-eater--Goldberg went on tour with a company of street performers. The group included such later-to-be-well-knowns as the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric.

For a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey, it was like running away to the circus. “I was still a pretty good girl, so my life went into this spin,” Goldberg says. “(The tour) had a huge influence.”

Goldberg eventually returned to New York, where she re-enrolled at Barnard as a dance major. “I started my first real study of classical modern dance techniques: Graham, Cunningham, Limon,” she says.

Yet modern technique seemed as restricting in its own way as ballet. “These (disciplines) were not interesting to me at all because I thought they were like ballet: Here’s a vocabulary. But to me, a flexed foot was just the opposite of a pointed foot.”

She found herself drawn instead to less codified, experimental forms. “The things I got into were contact improvisation and dance that was conceptually based or completely free form,” says Goldberg, who also developed an avid interest in New York’s then-burgeoning performance art scene. “I didn’t have to worry about choreography. There were no mirrors. Everyone wore loose clothing.”

The passion for contact improvisation led Goldberg to San Francisco. After a year, however, she tired of trying to make it in the Bay Area and moved to L.A.

In 1985, L.A. seemed like a comparatively easy place to do your own thing. “When I first came, it was easy to do whatever,” says Goldberg, who made ends meet first by working as an extra in TV and film and then later as a substitute teacher. “There were so many little places I could go and do little dances.”

In 1987, she landed a role in the Taper production of “Ghetto,” where she met the man who was to become her longtime mate--stage director Brian Kulick--as well as several fellow dancers with whom she would form a group known as Dance Diner. The group lasted only seven months, but it gave Goldberg her first taste of what it might be like to have a company.

In 1989, Goldberg choreographed a work for the annual Dance Kaleidoscope festival. The piece, which featured 20 performers and was set to a Bach suite, combined dancers and non-dancers, and structured improvisation with choreography.

L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet sprang from that experience. First the group needed a name. For lack of a better idea, it ended up with a name that Goldberg admits has been “problematic . . . If I had a better idea, I’d take it.” It had better luck finding a base, striking a mutually beneficial arrangement with the Hollywood-Los Feliz JCC in Silver Lake, where the company is still headquartered.

Goldberg promptly got her administrative feet wet. “The first two years I was learning what leadership meant,” she says. “The company actually began in a very open way and has been getting more streamlined.”

An essential component of the streamlining process has been clarifying the group’s dual-pronged commitment to concert dance and community projects. “We said, ‘Let’s develop the two separate sides--the community work and a repertoire of work based on a method of training,’ ” Goldberg says. “We want dance to be beautiful, with the highest of aesthetic concerns, and we also want dance to be able to touch people in a way that comes from direct experience.” She achieves her goal, in part, by bringing non-dancers onstage as part of her performances.

This populist tactic may be unusual among modern dance companies, but it’s integral to how L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet sees itself. “One of the most important things about the company is its long-term commitment to exposing people, and especially children, in L.A. to dance,” says board member Sasha Emerson. “It’s not about dance as an elite art form.”

“They give a tremendous amount back, going around to gyms and schools,” Emerson continues. “Everybody talks about multiculturalism, but it’s all lip service unless you’re really out there. Naomi gets as much back from that kind of work as she gives to it.”

Major community efforts have included the 1991 Poinsettia Project, performed in the gym of the Poinsettia Recreation Center in Hollywood, in which neighborhood novices mixed onstage with professional dancers in a four-dance bill.

The Spring Gym Tour 1992 took the company to a string of Southland sites where dance is seldom performed. “It was then that I got the idea that I should hone in on the choreography more and start having more of a (fixed) group of dancers,” says Goldberg.

Also in 1992, Goldberg was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disorder. That further reinforced her renewed focus on choreography and running the company, although she has continued to dance as well.

It also turned Goldberg’s attention to the codification of an L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet method. “I’m not tied to this company doing just my choreography,” she says. “I am tied to the company having a common technique.”

The point is to refine a company language of movement that will enable both teaching and the company members’ capabilities. “We had to sit down and discuss what our classes were going to be about,” Goldberg says. “Out of that, we create our body of work as a company.”

It was a consciously eclectic approach. “We asked what are the principles from modern dance that we want to keep? What are we getting from ballet?” Goldberg says. “I also wanted to bring in alternative approaches to the body.”

The technique takes its leg work from the Balanchine style of ballet in which Goldberg was trained, particularly in its quickness of movement, jumps and sense of lightness. It also incorporates exercises from Graham, swing-like movements from Limon and some of the footwork and the rounded back of Cunningham. All of the dancers also practice yoga.

Goldberg’s signature choreographic style is based on this basic movement language and features an evocative mix of gender-ambiguous character study and imagery. That style has begun to clarify itself particularly during the past year.

In a 1993 show at Cal State L.A., Goldberg premiered two new works that may be the clearest articulation yet of the company aesthetic. “Sleepwalker’s Travel Guide” is a highly theatrical multi-part dance set to New Orleans funeral procession jazz and “American Studies,” set to music by John Adams, evokes images of church and community.

Those works--combined, Goldberg hopes, with the new material on the Ford bill--will form the basis of an L.A. Modern Dance and Ballet touring repertoire. The troupe has also continued with its community work, including the 1994 Angels Gate Dance Project in San Pedro, which culminated in two performances featuring 28 neighborhood residents.

Now the barrier that stands between the group and the even greater public it’d like to have is one that’s familiar to most young L.A. companies. “We have one obstacle only and that’s that we are just not raising the money we need to get this company into the proper venues,” says board member Emerson.

Yet Goldberg is optimistic, even in the face of an uphill battle. “What I found out quickly about L.A. is what a fluid place this is, which is also exactly why the company is now facing a difficult time,” she says. “We would like to see our dancers make more of a living dancing. And the problem that we’ll continue to face is building something that has a sense of stability to it.”*

Vital Stats

“Three Tales”

Address: John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd.

Price: $15

Date: Sept. 3, 8 p.m.

Phone: (213) 466-1767