E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dream factory Martha Clarke flies the Bard BY IRIS FANGER

The bond between interviewer and subject, the director/choreographer Martha Clarke, is established early in our meeting at the American Repertory Theatre: both of us played Puck in high-school productions, and we can still recite reams of the character’s lines.

This time, Clarke is on the opposite side of the footlights, directing Puck, a trio of flying fairies, and all the other inhabitants of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a production that opens for previews at the Loeb Drama Center January 10. Her collaborators include actors from the ART resident company as well as dancers and thespians imported from New York, composer Richard Peaslee, set and costume designer Richard Israel, and flight director David Hale, a member of the legendary firm Flying by Foy, which made theatrical history in 1954 when Mary Martin’s Peter Pan flew out above the stage lights into the audience.

Clarke says she relishes the process. "It’s what my life is about, the collaboration with the actors, the designers, and the composer. The actors improvise scenes. I get an idea of what the scenes mean to them and begin shaping their ideas. I appreciate so much the immersion and the intensity of working."

At a flying rehearsal later in the week, Clarke watches Hale instruct some of the actors cast as the rustics, who will be minding the rope-and-pulley systems controlling the fairies on the wires. It’s Clarke’s idea to have Shakespeare’s "rude mechanicals" visible, just at the side of the stage, as part of their role in the play. The three dancers cast as flying fairies — Erica Berg, Lisa Giobbi, and Paola Styron — are veterans of earlier Clarke works; here they’re directed to skim the earth, rather than perform aerial tricks, except for a startling 360-degree turn in the air. The performers’ grace and ease at leaving the ground is evident, even at this early stage of the work. Jesse J. Perez, who plays Puck, remains earthbound, along with John Campion and Karen MacDonald as fairy royals Oberon and Titania. MacDonald, watching the proceedings from the safety of a seat, remarks, "The Queen of the Fairies does not fly. She has had her wings clipped." Clarke says, "You can only get the quality you want with dancers."

A former dancer and choreographer who spent three years in Anna Sokolow’s company before joining Pilobolus as one of only two women in the troupe back in the early 1970s, Clarke found early inspiration in text and drama. "I choreographed a dance to Sean O’Casey reciting a portion of Juno and the Paycock when I was a junior in the dance division of Juilliard. My graduation piece in 1965 was Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘A Winter’s Tale.’ " But the seven-plus years with Pilobolus reinforced an unconventional take on choreography that would be rooted in images and metaphor rather than in conventional steps and that would accompany Clarke from dance to theater.

"I’ve always gone toward theater or film to regenerate myself rather than to watch dance, even when I was dancing," she explains. "One reason I gravitated toward theater is because one could actually get a month or six weeks to allow a play to develop in front of an audience. It’s hard for a dance company to get more than two or three performances. I’m so happy to be directing theater and using choreography." Clarke’s most evocative performance works include The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), which is based on the fantastical painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and the succulent Vienna: Lusthaus (1986), an impressionistic view of Vienna circa 1900. Along with the satisfaction of extended runs and revivals of her works, Clarke was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991.

"When I stopped dancing, I wasn’t generating material out of my injured body. It seemed time to take on another vocabulary. I also think dance is theater. Once we get our scene blocked, if the physicality is valid, we can begin to play with it. The language can be shaded to fit the physicality. I think I’m different from some theatrical directors. I find the special relationships and rhythms around the stage. It becomes architectural."

Clarke, who is accustomed to scripts written to her specifications, adds that Shakespeare is "my first dead playwright. I’m going to be 60. I’m having an incredibly good time with this one. It’s just a matter of finding a personal vision for it and the right company. When you’re working with new writers, like choreography, it’s lumpy. This play is comedy, tragedy, romance, irony.

"I always thought if I did Shakespeare, this was the one. The multiple stories are something that I understand. The play is about transformation of love, the transposing of love to the wrong people, wrong objects. I think everyone in the play is a diva, and their needs come first. It’s about passion, not reason, and about the magic of falling in love."

The American Repertory Theatre presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, January 10 through February 28. Tickets are $12 to $69; call (617) 547-8300.