A Voracious Appetite for Dance.

Watching Kathryn Posin's latest ballet, Bridge of Song, is a lot like listening to her talk. Speed is the rule; the thoughtful pause the frequent exception. In conversation, allusions fly in from all directions: folk mythology, nuclear physics, and Freudian psychology, among others; she charges into a topic in one sentence, then charges with equal intensity into another in the next. In Bridge, a sly method underlies the apparently mad mix of Balinese, hip-hop, and classical styles. At fifty-four, Posin is more than a mere survivor in dance's Darwinian ecosystem. She still has the passion and enthusiasm of the fiery young Bennington student she once was, and she still has the tenacity and chutzpah typical of a choreographer who headed a company against all odds, as she did for eighteen years.

Who else would look at New York City's New School University and its prestigious Manhattan partners--Mannes College of Music, Parsons School of Design, Actors Studio, Eugene Lang College--and envision a cross-disciplinary dance program linking them with the nearby Joffrey Ballet School? Posin has done just that; the New School and Joffrey hired her last fall to design and chair such a program [see "Joffrey Ballet Partners New School," February, page 124]. It could offer one of the most revolutionary and important dance curricula anywhere. "Kathryn Posin, for me, was a bolt out of the blue," says Robert Gates, vice president and secretary of the New School. "She wrote a wonderful letter, and she asked a series of good questions and shared her ideas."

Previous academic positions have included a two-year residency at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1980s, a year at UCLA, and another at the California School of the Arts. "I couldn't stand being at UCLA or Cal Arts," she says. "Here, I will be making my own situation." At present she is busily laying the groundwork for the New School-Joffrey program that will open for business in the fall. "It breaks my heart that the best and brightest dancers often get bored and quit," Posin said. "This program will involve art, technology, law, music, literature, design--it will be the cutting-edge liberal arts program in dance. I really have to thank Edith D'Addario, the director of the Joffrey School. She had the vision to collaborate on this. She could have said, `No! Not in my school!' It's almost a tribute to Bob Joffrey's different, American, populist vision. This program is a way of saying that when you dance, you don't have to stop thinking."

Posin is not about to retire to a quiet academic life. Over the last ten years, she has made the difficult shift from choreographing for Kathryn Posin Dance Company to choreographing for ballet companies, a new career that is just taking off. Such a move was especially unlikely for Posin. She is short, wiry, and bowlegged, and she has never danced in a ballet company.

"I have a funny body," she says with characteristic bluntness. "I knew that I would never be onstage in a tutu and tiara. A funny body plus a wild imagination equals modern dance. I did what you'd think would be natural for me, but I never wanted that, even though I did it for eighteen years."

The strong pull of ballet created tension throughout her career in modern dance. She traces it to the premiere of the famous 1959 Balanchine-Graham collaboration, Episodes. "This was Graham being Mary, Queen of Scots, and Balanchine at his most abstract and rigorous," says Posin. "I didn't like Graham in her gold dress. The uncompromising formality of Balanchine tugged at my artistic conscience. I knew that I would never be the same."

Unlike many modern dancers of her vintage, Posin never stopped taking ballet class, and she never stopped attending ballet performances, particularly those of New York City Ballet. She can discuss Serenade and Concerto Barocco in loving detail. She is emphatically not, however, in the neoclassical mold of a Balanchine imitator. For the last ten years, she has been developing her own ballet aesthetic. Her most widely performed piece is Stepping Stones, a 1993 commission for Milwaukee Ballet, to an original score by Joan Tower. Its most striking effects are the geometric shapes created as eighteen dancers find ever-more-ingenious ways of moving about on six platforms of graduated height. Folded into this highly formal dance are a virtuoso dating that thrills audiences and a feminist imagery that gives them something to think about.

BalletMet of Columbus, Ohio, has performed Stepping Stones twice. "Kathy's a unique personality," says artistic director David Nixon. "Sometimes choreographers, to get work, try to produce what they think a company wants. We, as directors, need to stop trying to make choreographers fit into holes. Kathy's been around a long time, and because of that people tend to look past her. She's at a point where people need to look at her again."

Hartford Ballet was the latest to perform Stepping Stones, at ,the Bushnell (March 25-27). Posin is also collaborating with composer Jodi Falk on a new work that is part of Hartford's effort to connect with the tough but colorful neighborhood surrounding its studio and offices; a number of neighborhood kids will participate.

Posin's strangest dance is Bach's Lunch, which begins as a zany comedy about ballerinas' obsession with food: a delivery boy bringing a pizza to a dance class gets swept up into the corps. Then the ballet takes a sudden dark turn; the male choreographer's rough partnering browbeats the childlike ballerina until she undergoes a transformation in her fierce solo.

"Kathy can drive me nuts--she'll never take no for an answer," says Basil Thompson, Milwaukee Ballet's artistic director. "But without that kind of spirit, she wouldn't be Kathy. She's so inventive, so alive. She uses ballet technique and line but she doesn't allow the boundaries of classical dance to hold her back. She breaks through them somehow without destroying ballet."

Bridge of Song, worked out on advanced students at Milwaukee Ballet's summer school last year, is a tossed salad of ballet, folk, and street traditions, Postmodern in the best architectural sense, it uses gestures from far-flung idioms brought together by an underlying design. Such form is characteristic of Posin's recent work, along with the use of pointe and demanding athleticism. "I've become more and more engrossed by the ballet idiom," she says. "Since I'm so far off the center line in just about every way you can think of, I need that center line to become more complete. I always expect ballet dancers to get the movement righter than I can get it. I study the dancers. I take class with them. I see who they are in their bodies, because their bodies is all my dance will ever be.

"Ballet dancers give me a purer palette. Their bodies take a shape that I give them and apply three hundred years of tradition to it. I'm more interested in the shape that they give back to me than in the shape that I give them."

As an itinerant choreographer, she is in a vulnerable position, but that doesn't stop her from airing her opinions. "Everyone walks into the studio and decides to be Balanchine or William Forsythe," she says. "If they'd done something besides dance--if they knew something about the harmony of classical music or semiotic theory or visual art or physics--wouldn't that give them a better chance to go into the studio and do something besides copying someone else? That's why I want to get to these dancers at the Joffrey School and the New School before they join companies."

Posin's passion for bringing a stimulating academic component to the studio is inherited. Her father was a physics professor at the University of Chicago, and she flourished in the heady climate of the university's Laboratory High School. By the time she was fourteen, she had read Nietzsche, Goethe, and all manner of literary fiction, in addition to Isadora Duncan's autobiography. "My parents are both liberal intellectuals who went to the University of California," she says. "My father used to illustrate points by doing handstands on the counter in the lecture hall. He was an inspired performer and educator. My mother is very intelligent and in touch with the spiritual side. She drove me to tap and ballet lessons, and she taught me that my fantasies were worthwhile. I still have my parents, and they're still behind me. I'm very lucky."

An unexpected assignment to teach world dance during a residency at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sparked a burning interest in dance from other cultures. "At UCLA, I used to peek into Allegra Fuller-Snyder's dance ethnology class and see films of dirty little pygmies dancing around shaking funny little objects," she says, grinning wickedly at her deliberate political incorrectness. "Then I ran across this sentence in a course description: `Encoded in a society's dances are its values--religious, economic, sociologic, psychological, and political.' I became obsessed by that statement. Ever since then--for eight years--I've been reading about and looking at world dance, in my haphazard way."

That's how Bridge of Song came about. Posin describes it as "ballet with a little hip-hop and a little Mongolian this and a little Cambodian that and a little Balinese-Finno-Baltic other." The Milwaukee summer gala audience went wild over it, although she admits, "I worded for a while about authenticity. I imagined some ethnologist coming up to me and saying, `Well, you know, Kathy, in Finland the girls never hold hands when they dance,' or, `In Cambodia, men never put their elbows in like that.' And then I thought, Why can't I just do what I want? I know that I love world dance, and I know that I don't want to do it. I looked at everything, then forgot everything, then did this piece. It's spontaneous and intuitive. It's appropriate for broadening the language of ballet and the language of seeing."

Posin's career as a modern dance choreographer and director of Kathryn Posin Dance Company was a struggle of the sort routinely endured by midlevel modern dance people. That struggle breaks and embitters many artists and drives them from the field. Not Kathryn Posin. She is tenacious, but no mere hang-on-to-your-dream tenacity pulled her through to what promises to be an unusually golden maturity. She is still around because dance remains, for her, a thrilling physical and intellectual adventure. She recalls, "On the night Bridge of Song premiered, a woman said to me, `I like ballet because it's hard.' So do I."

Tom Strini is music and dance critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.