Creativity hatches in `Nest'. (Presstime News).

Christopher House, artistic director and choreographer of Toronto Dance Theatre, has made some sixty-odd dance works since starting to choreograph in the late 1970s. It was only in 2000, however, that he made his first full-length piece--Nest--which TDT will perform at Manhattan's Joyce Theater January 22 through 27.

A meditation on the creative process, Nest takes inspiration from science, literature, art, and film, using spoken texts to create a relationship between ideas evoked through language and movement. "This was the first time I was able to integrate my intellectual side into my choreography," says House, who has degrees in political science and dance. It was also the first time that he had worked in a collaborative fashion with his twelve dancers. "Because the work is about process, I developed a new comfort level with using their movement material," he says. House also collaborated with set designer James Robertson and sound designer Phil Strong. "Both James and Phil had a major effect on my thinking about dance as one component of a larger visual/aural theatrical experience," he says.

TDT was founded in 1968 by co-directors Peter Randazzo, David Earle, and Patricia Beatty, with the aim of bringing Martha Graham's technique and style to Canada. When House joined the company in 1979, they immediately encouraged him to choreograph. "They were wonderful mentors," he says. "There was never any pressure to work in a particular way. A lot of energy went into my early works around not doing Graham."

At the outset, his choreographic interests were largely formal. "When I began, I had a desperate need for each piece to deal with a different issue. I was interested in dance in relation to architecture, to different kinds of music, to space. I was also interested in the power of ambiguity in nonspecific gesture: how movement can be rich in meaning yet abstract, as it is in Balanchine's or Cunningham's work."

He continued to work in this way after taking over the direction of TDT in 1994, but by 1999, felt he had come to a crossroads: "I realized it was time to figure out a different way of working with dance." The result was Nest, which will mark TDT's fourth appearance since 1993 at the Joyce. "What I love about being there," says House, "is that it's a dance theater and a dance audience. Whether they like your work or not, you know they ate discerning and are seeing it in a broader context."