Ballet GOES HIP.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Pink Martini and dance go together like whiskey and sour, rum and hot butter or crumpets and tea.

"When people are dancing in front of us at parties, the band always plays better," bandleader

Thomas Lauderdale says. "They are breathing with the dancers. You can tell when something is too fast or too slow. You are watching the movement of whoever is dancing."

When Pink Martini comes to Eugene this weekend, it will be breathing right along with classically trained ballet dancers. The 12-piece band performs Saturday and Sunday at the Hult Center with the Eugene Ballet Company for the ballet's final show of the season.

"The band is going to play better because it's a visual performance," Lauderdale says.

Pink Martini has been terrifically popular with live audiences since Lauderdale started it in 1994 as a way to add better music to liberal political events. Combining sultry Latin rhythms with an honest nostalgia for melodic music of the past, the group has transcended those humble activist roots and become a star attraction in its own right.

Pink Martini played at the grand opening of the fabulous new Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and it has returned for New Year's Eve shows there.

Among bookings around the world - the band enjoys touring in places such as Turkey and Lebanon - it has played at the Hollywood Bowl, at the opening of the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas and at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

But Lauderdale still enjoys playing at small venues in towns such as Roseburg, Astoria and Cannon Beach.

"It's great to play in these sort of communities," he said. "They tend to be more conservative than audiences in Portland, but just as warm."

Lauderdale was a classically trained pianist who hated pop music when he was a child.

"I grew up never considering any popular music whatsoever," he says. "And I can remember riding the bus to school in Indiana, feeling hostile toward the disco being piped in on the school bus."

He began to lighten up, musically speaking, as an undergraduate student of history and literature at Harvard University, where he lived in Adams House, the artsiest of the college's dozen or so undergraduate residence halls.

"At Adams House, there would be these parties where people would get naked and dance every Friday and Saturday night," Lauderdale says. "That was very liberating."

Adams House was where Lauderdale met China Forbes, the band's seductive singer.

"She was the queen of the dining hall," he says. "She would always hold court and entertain everybody who was at her table. There was always a mad scramble for that table. She was always so funny and so glamorous and so beautiful."

Lauderdale talked Forbes into joining Pink Martini. She flew out at first for an occasional appearance, but soon she was racking up the frequent flier miles from New York. Now, she lives in Portland.

If fans have a complaint with the band, it's that the group has released only two CDs in 14 years.

"Sympathique" came out in 1997; "Hang on Little Tomato," named for a Hunt's Ketchup ad from Life magazine in 1964, was released in 2004.

Lauderdale says the band is half done with album No. 3, tentatively titled "Hey, Eugene." And, no, it's not about our Eugene, but a friend of Forbes'.

Eugene Ballet Artistic Director Toni Pimble is known for enjoying artistic collaborations, so working with Pink Martini was a natural move.

`The band is known for their inspirational compositions drawing on eclectic world music," she says. "The challenge choreographically has been to create an evening of dance and music working with the band and the dancers to create a ballet inspired by each unique composition and to draw the whole together into a cohesive work."

Dancers will perform to Pink Martini favorites ``Bolero, Andalucia,'' ``Una Notte a Napoli'' and ``Dansez-vous.'' Also to be performed is Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasileiras." Forbes will sing the Portuguese lyrics while four couples and one woman dance as the exotic Brazilian birds of the Amazon.

Lauderdale had planned a collaboration with Oregon Ballet Theater in Portland, but it fell through.

A piece he wrote for piano and cello for that planned collaboration, "Eine Leben in Walde," also will be on the Hult program.

The ballet will open the evening with dancer Melissa Nolen's ballet, "Idyll for Eight," which is staged in five movements to "Idyll for String Orchestra" by Leos Janacek.

DANCE PREVIEW

Pink Martini

What: The ultrahip Portland ensemble provides the music, while Eugene Ballet dancers dance; the troupe also does Melissa Nolen's "Idyll for Eight"

Where: Hult Center's Silva Concert Hall, Seventh Avenue and Willamette Street

When: 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $20 to $47 through the Hult box office, 682-5000

CAPTION(S):

The music of Pink Martini has been known to inspire movement, and the dancers of Eugene Ballet take that fact to its logical conclusion. Dubraskha Arrivillaga will strut her stuff while Pink Martini plays.