BICOASTAL CHOREOGRAPHER : EISENBERG GOES BACK TO HER ‘CREATIVE SOURCE’: N.Y.

For choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg, you can go home again, and the trip is more than worth the cost in the new insight and impetus it can inspire.

By recently returning to New York, where she started as a dancer, Eisenberg not only broke a creative block but gained valuable perspectives on her career as a Los Angeles choreographer.

“It wasn’t till I hit New York that I could work on my solo,” she says of a work--not so coincidentally about shifting perspectives--titled, “A Gestural Way of Looking--the Overture to a Larger Body.” It is scheduled to premiere at the Japan America Theatre on Friday.

In New York, “a pure way of working, a way to get back to my creative source,” emerged for the 36-year-old choreographer, prominent in the Los Angeles modern dance scene since she left New York in the mid-’70s.

“I just forced myself to forget about all my L.A. responsibilities,” she recalls. “Being an artistic director of a dance company, grant writing, endless phone calls to arrange rehearsal schedules, talking with my board of directors, arranging publicity--I just stopped it all.”

“Instead, I did what an artist should do: I experimented, tried out improvisational ways of working for a change, took up drawing, did aerobics--all new adventures for me.”

Working on her first solo since 1981 in an apartment complex for artists on the Hudson River, Eisenberg says she “connected the hieroglyphics, the pictures in my mind, the symbols with the pure dance expression in me, to come up with something completely different.” She also decided that this 20-minute solo would turn into a full-evening work in the years to come.

But Eisenberg made more than inner connections while in New York. “I wanted to relearn the dance scene there, talk to presenters, check out the gorgeous St. Mark’s Church.” And learn she did, arriving back home in Los Angeles with the confirmation of a coveted gig in the “New Stuff” series at Performance Space 122 (known as P.S. 122) in June.

Eisenberg emphasizes that “it’s important to show work there these days; it’s an international center.” But she bristles at the suggestion that future trips to New York might be interpreted by her colleagues as a calculated career move away from Los Angeles.

“L.A. will always be my home base,” she declares. “I’m not going to start all over again in New York. That’s crazy: At 36, I’ve passed enough trials by fire. I don’t need to keep proving myself constantly.”

“I don’t plan to live in New York,” she adds. “But I do miss the energy of the place and that’s what draws me there.”

“It’s not that we don’t have a community of dancers in L.A.,” she says. “It’s just that you never see anyone in L.A. You don’t bump into dancers in the street as you do in New York. Usually you get in your car and go to the studio and rehearse your company and then go straight home.”

“Hanging out, going to parties--it’s synonymous with New York,” Eisenberg says. “Once I wanted to work on my own. Now I need something new.”

One pressing practical consideration leaps to Eisenberg’s mind: touring. European sponsors seldom venture as far west as Los Angeles in search of talent. “So that’s an important reason for a growing artist to show work in New York.”

“It’s not just me: Anyone who wants to tour and grow as a choreographer would have to get out of L.A. these days and test other dance waters. The scene has deteriorated in just the past couple of years; it’s real sad.”

In fact, Eisenberg believes that an entire era of dance expansion may have ended in Los Angeles now that the Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance and the House performance space in Santa Monica are defunct.

“I should know: I’m a product of LAADA,” she declares. “I was supported by the excitement it generated just as I hit L.A. It was the promise of a dance scene about to get solid interest from an expanding audience.

“I’m terrified about the fate of new dancers here. Where will they work? I remember a time where anyone felt they could self-produce. The House was our version of P.S. 122.”

However, Eisenberg’s new outlook keeps her from excessive pessimism. “I want to show my work to an audience outside of L.A., but my life is not on the line as if I were some kid out of college expecting stardom in a flash,” she says. “Life is a process and I’m in for the long haul.”

“My main concern right now is to make sure that I dance my ass off at the Japan America Theatre and then later I’ll worry about P.S. 122 and the rest. All this coastal talk means nothing without doing good, strong work. If you lose your work, if you lose your sense of self, then you have nothing.”