E-Mail This Article to a Friend Shaping and discovering 'Dance Straight Up!' at Zero Arrow Theatre BY DEBRA CASH

Being selected for the "Dance Straight Up!" showcase at the new 300-seat Zero Arrow Theatre in Harvard Square next weekend (February 10 through 13) was just the beginning for choreographer Sara Sweet Rabidoux, Kate Digby, Nicola Hawkins, and the duo of Pinar Mavi and Melissa "Buffy" Wells. Eighteen dancemakers submitted video tapes of past work to the fourth annual CRASHarts competition. Six were finalists. When the four ensembles got the word that they had earned their slots on the program, the hard work was still ahead.

CRASHarts and World Music director Maure Aronson brought in Gus Solomons Jr. to judge the competition. Solomons, a former dancer with Merce Cunningham, teacher at NYU, sometime dance critic, choreographer, and most recently artistic director of the dancers-over-50 troupe Paradigm, is not exactly an outsider to the Boston area. He grew up halfway between Harvard and Central Squares in Cambridge, and there’s a center for transportation careers named in honor of his father across the street from Rindge and Latin High School. He’s a quick-talking, famously opinionated fellow. He laughs when he says that "like a fool I volunteered to oversee" the choreographers’ development process.

"Dancemakers tend not to be specific about what it is they want to get across," he explains over the phone from New York. "You can’t be at the beginning. You make lots of movement phrases and see what sticks. But then you have to go back to square one and begin to shape it to shape what you discovered.

"What most often happens with choreographers is that they make more and more steps and just string them together. Their train of thought has no relationship to what an audience will see. They don’t take the audience on a trip. The audience may see something that it likes or steps that are hard to do or fancy costumes, but that doesn’t grow the field.

For some time, the Boston Dance Alliance has discussed creating forums for mentoring working choreographers, but such opportunities are still rare. Solomons viewed tapes of the works in progress, communicated with the choreographers by phone and e-mail, and in mid December came to town for a look at how the dances were developing.

Sara Sweet Rabidoux choreographed not one but two dances under Solomons’s tutelage. She finished The Captain Hates the Sea so rapidly that her seven-year-old company, Hoi Polloi, was able to present it during its performances at New York’s Joyce/SoHo. Her "Dance Straight Up!" premiere, The Day of the 24 Cakes, is based on the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. "Their daughter, Frieda Hughes, has spoken out saying that people should leave her mother alone, but it’s hard to leave Sylvia Plath alone if you grew up in Massachusetts and were a writing major in college."

Kate Digby had met Solomons at Concord Academy’s Summer Stages program. "He’s funny and kind, and it’s nice to be in a process with ongoing feedback." Digby’s folkdance-based quartet, Here/Waiting, set to music by avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating, deals with issues that are hard to pin down in words or in movement. "I was interested in things that exist or are said to exist but are not manifest yet. For instance, in the Bahá’i faith, women and men are equal in the sight of God. That’s the reality, but we have not experienced it yet."

Turkish dancer/choreographer Pinar Mavi and Melissa Wells used the differences between their companies to depict the challenge of immigration and question the concept of the American melting pot. Wells danced with Ahmet Luleci’s Collage dance company, where Mavi was assistant director. The biggest challenge to their collaboration, however was not creative but logistic: Mavi works full-time as a software engineer.

Nicola Hawkins, perhaps the most familiar of the local choreographers on the "Dance Straight Up!" program, used the CRASHarts commission to develop her dance for a larger, mixed-media work that will premiere at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem this June. At PEM, she will be collaborating with the brilliant batik artist Mary Edna Frasier, whose 30-foot-long silk panels portray aerial views of coastlines and astronomical imagery. "In India, a rectangle of fabric can be anything, from clothes to shelter to a carrying device," Hawkins says. "It seemed as if all one needs in life is a rectangle of fabric." Although her work will be danced to a musical collage this weekend, clarinettist Evan Ziporyn is composing a new score for the larger, PEM work.

Hawkins, who was born in England and divides her time between Boston and Newfoundland, continues, "My first few conversations with Gus were about choreography in general, why we do it and the doubt that comes along with it, the relevance of choreography in a world that is otherwise full of strife. The war had gotten me questioning the value of choreography and what I was doing with my life. I wanted to make the piece about peace. In dance, peaceful movement isn’t necessarily slow and stately. It doesn’t mean retreating into a quiet, calm world. I came to the conclusion that peace was about participation and taking action."

"Dance Straight Up!" is presented by World Music/CRASHarts February 10 through 13 at Zero Arrow Theatre, Zero Arrow Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $30; call (617) 876-4275, or visit www.crasharts.org