Dancing in a Great Circle.

Sean Curran blends Irish dance traditions in a postmodern manner in this month's performances at Manhattan's Joyce Theater.

Choreographer Sean Curran refers to his Irish roots during his Folk Dance for the Future in the brief section when his dancers form a circle. Generally, he moves them through solos, duets, and small groupings in winding reels or sends them flying across the stage in diagonals--all to the diddley-diddley rhythm of traditional Irish mouth music (sung gibberish, with the voice treated as an instrument). But when the dancers join hands, with no discernible breaks between them, Curran's manner of structuring his life becomes embodied in dance, the expressive conduit through which he presents himself to the world.

As a performer, choreographer, and teacher, Curran talks about where he's been and where he's going in terms of circles. Included are families on both sides of the Atlantic. There is the professional family of dancers he knew and loved during the ten years he performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and there are the dancers of his own company; all are combined into patterns of opening and closing. It's as if the opportunities now coming his way are so many starting points on a circumference, just as his company members in Folk Dance for the Future are bound together, regardless of how far they travel on separate trajectories.

When Curran brings his company to the Joyce Theater January 5, to open the 1999 Altogether Different Festival, he will personally complete an orbit that had a painful beginning. "I left Bill's company five years ago," says Curran. "I left on a Thursday just before its Joyce engagement. I was crushed and devastated that the company would go on without me. I said I'd make it back to the Joyce on my own. So it's five years later, and I'm back at the Joyce. The new work for my company is called Symbolic Logic, set to East Indian music, to premiere at the Joyce. I think symbolic logic is a philosophy term. I love titles. However, I'm a choreographer. I always make the joke that I'm a choreographer, so English is my second language. The whole idea of using Indian music is because so much of the classical Indian dance styles, bharata natyam and Orissi, are about the gods, to the gods, so this is my way of making a dance that's a prayer but also a dance of thanksgiving."

Curran can count his blessings in many ways. As a first-generation Irish-American son of a devoted family, he is enriched by the traditions of his heritage. This past autumn he created a new piece for John Scott's Irish Modern Dance Theatre, based in Dublin. (Curran had set pieces on companies in Denmark and Sweden before this first residency in Ireland.) After the rehearsal period, he spent part of November on tour as a guest performer with the company. The title of the new piece, That Place, Those People, refers to his connection to the country where both of his parents were born.

Growing up in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, Curran heard his parents' conversations about Ireland, or "home." They talked about the Irish, calling them "those people." "It's just a personal little joke, seeing as I've gone back to Ireland to make this work on a group of Irish dancers," says Curran. "The irony for me is that my dad came to this country to work, to send money back to Ireland, so something's come full circle." After performances in Belfast and Dublin, Curran danced in Cork City on November 18 and 19 for an audience that included his parents, who flew over for the event in their native town. Also in the audience were his grandmother, who still lives in Ireland, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins.

As a child, Curran studied Irish step dancing, becoming self-confidently fleet of foot with a twinkle in his eye. The movement he makes for himself and his dancers often features wildly flinging arms and legs that work off an uptight center, in homage to his boyhood spent in maintaining an uptight torso. As for the sense of darkness seeping through much of what he does, well, that was a later legacy.

In keeping with the fashion for everything Irish, the 1997 Celebrate Brooklyn festival commissioned Curran to make a work based on Irish step dancing, which became a big hit. "They wanted me to do something specifically Irish," says Curran, "along the lines of Riverdance or Lord of the Dance. I explained that that's not really what I do anymore; that's what I did as a kid. However, I was sharing the evening with an Irish band. That's when I made Folk Dance for the Future, using traditional Irish mouth music. It's a dying art form. The most different music, and my favorite, was a recording by an older woman. The style she was singing was used for bouncing a baby on your knee.

"I didn't want to do any step dancing, but there's a woman who's very important to me--Heather Waldon, who used to dance with Boston Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. She's become a close friend and my assistant. I showed her videotapes of people doing traditional Irish step dancing and my brand of Irish step dancing. I had her improvise three sections in her bare feet."

Folk Dance for the Future, which was repeated last spring at Curran's Dance Theater Workshop performances, will be revived for this month's Joyce visit. The work captures the joyous whirlwind that is Irish dancing without the actual steps, as if to evoke the spirit but not the kitsch that has crept into the genre. Curran admits to taking a poke at Riverdance and Lord of the Dance along the way, also making something of a political statement in a segment for three couples--two men, two women, and a man and a woman--each with a baby of a different color. "These three couples have appeared in a lot of my group work," says Curran. "My dancers joke and call them the homos, the lesbos, and the heteros. Arnie [Zane] would say all work is political; even your omissions are political."

Curran has a way of studding his conversation with references to Jones and Zane in a "he said" and "he told me" manner. It's clear that the years he spent in this company were not only a period of growth from acolyte to artist but also the rite of passage that turned the protected child into an adult. The summer before Curran's last year in the dance program at New York University, where he completed his undergraduate degree in 1983, he saw Jones and Zane perform at the Harvard Summer Dance Center. Curran knew that Jones was slated to set a work on the seniors and he wanted to check him out. (Fourteen years later Curran would return to Harvard for two summers on the faculty of the Dance Center, which also presented his work--yet another circle completed.)

Jones worked with Curran that year at NYU and was impressed enough to invite him to apprentice with their fledgling company, but Curran declined. He thought that he was headed for Broadway. "I always said that I wanted to be Ben Vereen or Joel Grey," Curran recalls. "As a kid I loved Gene Kelly, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton." Broadway, however, was not looking for a "chunky kid, not very flexible, with a punk-rock haircut" (Curran's description of himself at age twenty-two). While he always made the callbacks from auditions, he never got the job. He was working at Urban Outfitters to pay the rent when Jones and Zane came in to buy some luggage. Jones remembered him and said, "You should be dancing."

Curran joined the company in 1984 and soon moved into Zane's roles. "I moved quite a bit like Arnie," he says, "and I fit the costumes. I showed up to apprentice and stayed ten years," a decade spent touring the world, winning a Bessie award for his striking performance in the Jones/Zane Secret Pastures, and beginning to choreograph and teach on his own.

I was also a time when he watched Zane sicken and die of AIDS and a period marked by Curran's addiction to alcohol and substance abuse--both now licked ("I've been sober for five years"). Curran says he was fired from the company in 1994; Jones tells a different version, that it was time for Curran to leave. "It became so difficult in the end," says Curran, "when I realized that I wasn't so useful anymore and Bill wasn't so interested in me, and I knew I was bottoming out in alcohol." Those years inspired two of Curran's most pungent solos, Am I Yet? (1989) and Average Tragedy (1997). The former is a hybrid that allows Curran to dance, sing, and tell stories about the death of three different people, including Zane.

The work opens with Curran on his back, inching his way along the floor in a fetal position, in memory of the dance of death that was performed on a hospital bed by fellow company member, the late Demian Acquavella. The repertory of solos that Curran has made for himself taps deeply into his emotions.

"I feel that I owe a great deal to Bill," says Curran, "but I'm haunted by him. I wanted to make a dance about the past, so I made Average Tragedy, my door dance. I thought about the metaphor of a door. It comes from an Irish thing. In the olden days, Irish houses were built right on the dirt or cement. To do Irish step dancing, you'd need a wooden surface for your tap shoes. They would actually take the door off the hinges and put it on the floor, and you could do your step dancing on the door. So I thought, I'll make a dance with a door, a symbol of the past. I carry a door around in the dance. I thought, I'll literally put Bill back there, in my mind, behind the door. Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of him."

For his part, Jones replies, "Since he left the company, our paths have taken us far afield of each other, and I have had few opportunities to observe his development, although we stay in constant contact and I suspect are mutually dependent on each other as markers of sorts. He has always been smart, generous as a performer, and the possessor of an effortless sense of style."

A long-term involvement with the off-Broadway musical hit Stomp came as an unexpected blessing when support was needed. Just as he was leaving the Jones/Zane company, the casting director from Stomp remembered him and looked him up, leading to a four-year stint that provided a steady income while allowing time to choreograph and teach. Curran is a favorite on the college circuit and at summer dance festivals, including Harvard Summer Dance Center during its last two seasons, the American Dance Festival in New York, the Bates Dance Festival, and the new program at Boston Conservatory Dance Theatre. "Stomp was a gift from the dance gods, another thing to be thankful for," says Curran.

Curran's 1998-99 teaching and residency schedule includes Texas Women's University, Roger Williams University (Rhode Island), 171 Cedar Arts Center in Corning (New York), and the Kingsport (Tennessee) Symphony Orchestra, where he will choreograph and perform in a production of Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale. In addition, there is a two-week workshop for dancers at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and company gigs in Cincinnati, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and at the Bates Summer Dance Festival. In August this year there will be a company commission from the National Dance Project, to be premiered at Jacob's Pillow. This work will reflect Curran's Irish-American background but will be wholly postmodern and will emphasize movement invention. Curran plans to commission a score from contemporary composer Seamus Egan. Kieran McGonnel will design it.

The next challenge is finding as many days of work for his company as Curran has on his calendar. "I work every day of the year myself," he says. "Bringing the company along is the next big step for me."

As for the choreography, he says that he tends to recycle, "not ideas so much, but phrases of movement. But I feel almost like a painter who paints in series like Monet and his haystacks. I feel that where one dance ends is where another begins."

Iris Fanger is a contributing editor of Dance Magazine.