Keeping Them Off-Balance

“It can be tedious touring the same piece if you approach it as repeating the same thing,� Edouard Lock is saying about “Salt,� the latest work he has created for his Montreal-based troupe, La La La Human Steps. But considering that the company is on a two-year tour with “the same piece,� doesn’t repetition seem a bit inevitable?

Not exactly, Lock says quickly, explaining that he calls rehearsals regularly on the road to keep the choreography from becoming too stable and to keep the dancers from getting too far from the holy grail in La La La land--the edge.

Lock’s multimedia evening-length works are inevitably explosive and rapturously athletic, with dancers tumbling into steps, yanking their partners and generally seeming like “West Side Story� punks gone stylishly bad. The music is loud, even when more languid romantic restlessness sets in and filmed projections like shadow selves play over the dancers’ bodies.

In pieces like “Human Sex� (1985), “New Demons� (1987), “Enfante-C’est Destroy� (1991) and “2� (1995), the burning image that often remained from a Lock evening was the intrepid Louise Lecavalier, a streetwise Wonder Woman who rocket-launched herself sideways through space, seemingly unconcerned with being caught, then in turn snatched her partner from the air and spun him like a baton.

With “Salt,� however, an unexpected element has entered the equation--pointe work. It’s not your ordinary ballet, of course, but a skewed classical turn much lauded since the work’s October 1998 premiere in Japan. Coming to Irvine and Los Angeles this week, “Salt� has already been called “simply brilliant� and “a serious case of innovation.� One Frankfurt critic named Lock the creator of “the last truly innovative dance style of the 20th century.� Another, in Copenhagen, said that Lock “dances along the tracks George Balanchine laid.�

An icon of postmodern noir following Balanchine? You have to know that Lock’s former kamikaze dancers--led by the intrepid “flame on legs,� Lecavalier--have gradually been replaced with ballet dancers. And that their style of toe dancing is not necessarily one that Balanchinians will recognize. A French critic described the dancers as “topsy-turvy silhouettes on reinvented pointes, which scratch our souls with acid disenchantment.�

Today, Lock, 45, is on the phone from Calgary, Alberta, where the troupe has just finished a five-hour-long pre-show rehearsal, “balancing and re-balancing� moments that are in danger of becoming stale. Lock talks about the process in a keenly laid-back manner that conjures up his customary black leather jacket and cigarette.

“If the dancers remain in a place they’re technically comfortable in, there isn’t that spark,� he says. “As the tour goes on, they get a knowledge of the material, and they have to stretch that knowledge out again. They have to go further in order to get back to that edge.�

Unlike many other edge-conscious contemporary dance companies, which usually lack large followings, La La La is known for filling big venues all over the world. It probably didn’t hurt that Lock was linked with high-profile rock stars when he worked with David Bowie in Bowie’s 1990 “Sound and Vision� world tour, and, in 1992, when he collaborated with Frank Zappa on “The Yellow Shark,� a series of televised concerts.

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His move into the realm of pointe shoes came about gradually and despite his minimal classical training. Always an idiosyncratic performer (he stopped appearing in his own pieces in 1995), Lock didn’t begin dancing until age 18, when he was a literature major taking a stray theater class in college in Montreal. Almost immediately, he dropped out of college and became a rebellious but chic choreographer. At first he made what he calls “very lyrical pieces.� Within a few years of founding his own company in 1980, he had developed his distinctive high-powered cocktail of a dance style by combining anecdote, film, driving music and vertiginous virtuosity.

By 1988, he was delving into ballet, with “Bread Dances� set to Tchaikovsky for the National Ballet of Holland. “It was kind of edgy but sweet,� he says. “And it felt comfortable. We were touring ‘New Demons’ at the time, which was about as unballetic as you can find, but ballet didn’t feel like a stretch. I can’t explain it, but it was fun to do.�

After Lock set pieces on other ballet companies--�Etude� for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (seen in Southern California in 1997) and “Touch to Include� for Nederlands Dans Theatre last year--several adventurous ballet dancers were attracted to his company. Now, seven out of nine performers in “Salt� are new to La La La, with all the women on their toes. It is a little strange, he admits.

“Pointe highlights a purity of line and therefore does something I’m not really interested in doing,� he says. “But the idea of highlighting line and breaking it up at the same time was really interesting. I didn’t want to make a nice, posy ballet, and I didn’t want to sacrifice speed or attack to the pointe shoe--that took a while for the dancers to get a handle on.�

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It also took Lecavalier a while to get a handle on dancing with the ballerinas. At 41--and, Lock says, faster and more precise than she was 15 years ago--Lecavalier says she had become tired of the company’s constant touring. Long before “Salt,� she had been discussing with Lock her plan to pursue new projects. But La La La’s drift toward ballet also played a role in her departure last summer.

A seminal influence and close collaborator with Lock for 18 years (she always hated the term “muse�--�it sounds so passive�), Lecavalier decided to do one last project with La La La and danced in “Salt� for six months in a role it was understood could be “extracted� when she left. But for the first time, she found herself straining to “find a link� with the other dancers onstage.

“I had a different evolution than them,� Lecavalier says on the phone from her new apartment in Paris. “All of them were raised in ballet, and they’ve lived that trip a lot. So for sure, I’m different.�

For sure. The new, razor-sharp ballerinas are daring, but they do not bench-press male partners, for instance, as the small but powerful Lecavalier has been known to do. In “Salt,� the movement is not conventional--the women twist and jerk into geometric breakdowns--but partnering strategies are. “Edouard went very much in this direction for ‘Salt’--that kind of duet,� Lecavalier says. “I don’t know if it’s because of the pointe shoes, but they have to rely much more on the men. He’s probably not looking for the same things he was looking for eight or 10 years ago.�

Whatever Lock has been pursuing all these years, he admits, may not have been as fully realized without Lecavalier, with whom he still plans to do occasional projects. “She was very important, because an abstract thought has to be practicalized,� he says. “She would make it real, whatever idea I had. She has such finesse and power and courage. I never found limits to what she could communicate. But there’s a price to pay. It’s an arid life, it’s a very disciplined life with a huge amount of stress involved.�

About that Spartan assessment of dancing with La La La, Lecavalier has another view. “For me, it was with much joy I did it. It was my choice, every day, to go to rehearsal. It was not out of discipline--I’m not such a disciplined person, although I’m not the opposite, either. But it was really because I enjoyed it. It was not a sacrifice at all.

“Edouard might see it like that, because he’s outside the dancer’s body. But I’ve seen my father work as a carpenter, and it’s the same thing--it’s also very hard, but he enjoyed it. He didn’t complain of being tired. It’s the same when I’m dancing.�

“The intensity of Louise in rehearsal and the beauty of it was really amazing,� says David Lang, the L.A.-raised, New York-based composer of the score for “Salt� (with additional music by Kevin Shields). He thinks Lock will have to make “a psychological adjustment� when he creates his next piece for La La La without her. “But to me, she was a remarkable dancer in a company of remarkable dancers,� Lang says from his SoHo apartment. “I’m not at all worried about her absence, because this piece is very strong.�

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Lang, co-founder of the new music festival Bang on a Can, found working with Lock a “fantastic� experience that gave him a free range. “Edouard told me to write the things that I wanted to write,� he says, “and he would figure out how to bring all those different parts together.� They never discussed themes, Lang says, though they sometimes talked about tempo and “feel.�

Both are pleased with the result, which is played by onstage musicians on piano, cello and guitar. “It’s touching in a way that makes it seem to latch onto parts of you,� Lock says. “It seems to make you want to dream. I like the influence it has on the movement, which is to almost submerge it into some sort of sea or something.�

When Lang first saw the show, his reaction was visceral. “It was shock mostly,� he says. “As a composer you think that music can tell the whole story. But I think Edouard reveals a little corner of the music that I wasn’t even aware of. He makes movement that is frantic, expressive and intellectual at the same time, and allows you to interpret something in a number of ways simultaneously.�

Although the dance scene is now strewn with “extreme dance� companies, featuring more pumped-up performers in biker shorts and knee pads than you find in the Tour de France, it was an unusual aesthetic in the early ‘80s, when Lock first started launching his dancers like missiles across the stage. “Back then, people were frankly aggressive and angry about the work,� he recalls. “We hadn’t even cranked up to full speed, but people called it violent. Which I never really understood, because it wasn’t violent, it was fast. But at that time there wasn’t much realization that the body could take an extreme stance.�

Twenty years later, Lock still believes in the extreme--what’s inside most people, he thinks, is far more extreme than the outside, and dance can be revealing. But if you want to know exactly what it reveals, that’s the wrong approach entirely.

“I think knowledge of anything is an illusion,� he says. “So, as long as you don’t believe you’ve totally understood what you’re doing, then you’re fine.�

The point is to stay “on the edge of something, where there’s a fragility and vulnerability.�

Maybe it’s the perilous teetering that is possible on pointe shoes that drew Lock to them. He seems happiest with the inevitability of losing one’s balance, barely recovering and risking a fall again. It’s all a fruitful process--especially if you accept one of Lock’s main tenets. With dancing, as well as living, he says, “You have to accept that you’ll probably never get to a place where you totally understand what you’re doing. You have to approach it with the idea that you’re searching for something you’re never going to find.�

* * “Salt,� La La La Human Steps, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. $30, $35. (949) 854-4646 or (714) 740-7878. Also at the Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. $27.50-42.50. (310) 825-2101.