‘Love’ on Grand Scale in Multilayered Production

If turning life into art is a kind of sorcery, then David Rousseve has many tricks up his sleeve. And more than one story to tell.

Since he founded his dance theater company Reality in 1989, the choreographer/director/writer/dancer/actor has become known for experimental dance theater that mines the personal--his own experiences as the grandson of a Creole grandmother, a Princeton undergraduate, a soap opera actor, a gay man in the age of AIDS--to explore universal themes.

These days, there’s new material to add to the mix. In 1996, Rousseve moved to L.A. from New York to join UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures faculty, and his first major work since then, “Love Songs,” will have its California premiere tonight at Royce Hall.

Rousseve was “burnt out” on New York, and UCLA made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: full tenure, a quarter off each year to do his own work, and an understanding that it would take some effort on both sides to find a paradigm that would allow the working artist to function within what he calls the “phenomenal demands of academia.”

Reality remains based in New York, where its administrative arm and five of its seven members are located (the others are in San Francisco and L.A.). To develop work, Rousseve’s dancers meet for intensive, three-week residencies around the country.

“It seems like a really weird scenario,” says Rousseve, 39, sipping coffee on the terrace of his house in the Silver Lake hills, where he lives with his partner, Conor McTeague, and their three dogs. “But the traditional [dance company] model--working like a dog, being radically underpaid--artistically, it wasn’t desirable. The only people who will do this are people in their 20s.” His dancers, he points out, are all over 30: “The process works best when people have something to offer other than their bodies.”

In many ways, “Love Songs” bears the mark of Rousseve’s earlier work. Like “Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams” (1994)--perhaps his most famous piece--it is a multilayered production that mixes African American storytelling, surreal imagery and nonlinear time frames. In “Love Songs,” a tale of the loss of love and compassion in contemporary society, the central characters are slave lovers in the 1800s; the set is a faded ballroom; the music is mostly Puccini and Wagner. Rousseve is the story’s all-purpose narrator, exchanging souls with modern-day crack addicts and old men without so much as a costume change. And as he has done in the past, Rousseve employs a multicultural “chorus” of local extras.

Observers have debated the merits of the most obvious difference between “Urban Scenes” and the new work--Rousseve’s use of opera instead of gospel music. For him, it wasn’t a big leap. Like gospel, he says, opera has soaring melodic lines and the power to stir big emotions. He admits, however, that it took some effort to get comfortable with Wagner.

“The only thing I knew about [Wagner’s music] was that it was long and boring, and the flip side, that he was a real pig, an anti-Semite, which no doubt meant a racist, and I knew he was a misogynist.” But once he listened to it, he “fell in love” with the composer’s work, even discovering an affinity for Wagner’s artistic intentions. “He wanted to direct, choreograph, write the music and the libretto,” he says. “I’m [also] trying to create this fusion of elements where the whole is much stronger than the different parts.

“It’s such a conscious choice that Wagner in all his glory--love him and hate him--and Puccini [are combined] with absolute down-home characters from the black vernacular. People either think, ‘That’s absolutely brilliant,’ or they think, ‘Oh my God, he used to do such sophisticated work,’ ” he says, laughing.

This Time, the

Dancing Came First

David Gere, a dance critic who is also Rousseve’s colleague at UCLA, says that the choreographer’s subtexts--AIDS, slavery, racism and more--demand the scope and feeling conjured by grand opera. “I think his desire to work large--with 20 extras, in an operatic form, with big music--is all part of his desire to grapple with themes that are as big as we can imagine,” he says.

In addition to changing the music for “Love Songs,” Rousseve also turned his process on its head for this production. In the development of earlier pieces, he put more emphasis on text than on movement, typically writing a narrative before ever setting foot in the studio. This time, he concentrated on dancing. “We spent the first year working without any text,” he says. “We worked on what’s a more vulnerable, released way of moving, moving from the joints and the bones, redefining virtuosity that is less based on how high can you throw your partner, but how generous can you be giving and receiving weight.”

He also relied more on his dancers to generate raw material. Asked to re-create “the most intimate physical act you can do with a human being which is not sexual,” dancer Julie Tolontino chose to portray dressing a friend who had died of AIDS for his funeral.

In the finished “Love Songs,” Rousseve added a sequence in which Tolontino tries to dance with the limp body. “It’s literal,” he says. “She’s dancing with a dead body, and it’s about people who have left us and are no longer here for us to love,” he says. “[But also] it’s metaphoric--trying to get something from a partner that you’re never going to get. No matter what she does, this partner is never going to get up and do the watusi with her.”

And that’s just one of “Love Songs’ ” multitude of resonant images and diverse references--part of Rousseve’s something-for-everyone approach to getting his message across.

He admits that after a performance of the two-hour-long “Love Songs,” some audience members might ask, “ ‘What are those people doing with this over-the-top drama [set] to Jessye Norman singing?’ It’s very emotional, very loud and, some people would argue, melodramatic.

“An innate part of African-American culture which is very much a turnoff to some people and was in fact for many years a turnoff to me is that it is very loud and emotional,” he says. “But I’ve come to recognize that’s a part of my voice and just who I am--loud, queer, emotional. I’m not actually interested in toning that down. What keeps it from empty histrionics is some sense of craft. But you can’t talk about issues of AIDS, issues of death, issues of love without being loud.”

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* “Love Songs,” today and Saturday, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $10-$28, (310) 825-2101.