Esplanade/Redux: former Taylor dancer Mary Cochran teaches Berkeley dancers a Paul Taylor classic muscle by muscle.

SAARA EISIN IS BREATHING HARD AND counting. "Five-two-three, six-two-three," she whispers to herself, her hands on her hips, her head nodding with the beat of Bach's violin concerto. She edges past the sidelights and hangs in the glimmering darkness, tensely counting the music until her next stage entrance. Seven other dancers echo her as they wait to enter the third and most relentless section of Paul Taylor's 1975 Esplanade under the exacting eye of former Taylor dancer Mary Cochran. [] The sprightly redhead sits halfway up the steeply raked theater of Zellerbach Playhouse on the University of California, Berkeley campus, taking notes and calling out corrections. After four months of rehearsal, she is still transmitting her fiercely etched style to the eight dancers of the Bay Area Repertory Dance group, or BARD (the university's touring ensemble), which is midway through its lighting tech and only a few days shy of its spring concert. [] Rewind. It's a cold, wet February evening, and the dancers and their understudies are in an L-shaped studio wedged below Zellerbach Hall. They spend every Tuesday and Thursday night trying to work Esplanade into their bodies, the way chefs might knead butter into pastry dough. The students are tired, and they have to steer clear of the building's large, structural pillars, but they are obdurate and work with self-possessed focus to find a way to meet Paul Taylor through his movement. Most of them knew little about the modern dance master before they began, and their bodies, shaped by the dance department's Graham technique, have to learn to let go and find new impetuses to move.

"At first I'd go home and go over the steps and try to write the movement down," Elizabeth Schwitzer said, chuckling. "But I found that I'd have trouble remembering if what I wrote was supposed to be a turn to the diagonal or full front!" Schwitzer, who trained in creative dance through childhood, said she soon canned the notes and relied on her own memory and the infallible eye of fellow dancer Pearl Wang to help her clarify direction and counts. Cochran taught them quickly and systematically. Their job was to remember and endure. In the end, Schwitzer said, they also had fun.

Around the country every year, dance departments search for ways to deepen students' understanding of modern dance history, styles, and techniques. On large campuses, nationally renowned choreographers whose companies perform nearby often present master classes or weeklong residencies. But Marni Thomas Wood, professor and head of the dance program in UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, reasoned that setting masterpieces on young dancers would offer something even better, giving a select group, predominantly college seniors, a sharp and bracing taste of the concert stage.

"With the touch of someone like Mary, the students have a chance to rise above what they thought they could do," explained Wood, who with her husband, Professor Emeritus David Wood (both former Graham dancers), launched the dance department at Berkeley more than thirty years ago. "I feel very strongly that this is the kind of inspiration students should have. I've known Mary since she and my daughter Regan were in the Taylor company together, and Mary as a dancer is an ideal choice to work with young, enthusiastic students. She is so skilled at developing talent in young people, and when she explains movement to kids who haven't been trained the same way, she has the ability to instill Taylor quality in them."

Taylor quality is an alchemical mix of brutally elemental movement (walking, running, skipping), unabashed drama (death and love) and a plump athleticism (killer jumps and falls). Esplanade, which is the name of an open area for walking, first began to take shape, the story goes, when Taylor saw a woman running for a bus. The dance is full of this sort of joyous naturalism, but, as in a painting by the Italian Caravaggio, such relaxed, vibrant, and balanced form is the result of lots of sweat and extraordinary skill.

"In a dance like Esplanade, they are bumping up against what is real and immutable," Cochran said. "If it's on six counts, you have to do it on six counts--you can't change it to nine. I push so they also have the experience of learning a lot fast. But Esplanade is so demanding you have to rehearse the hell out of it. You start with the idea of transferring your weight on the beat. Then you go about learning the whole form. It makes the dancers a lot more sophisticated as performers, and it also requires a lot of courage, because there are no triple pirouettes to hide behind or fancy footwork. They are naked up there!"

A dance masterwork, Cochran said, gives dancers intense exposure to the logic and beauty of line, form, dynamic, coloring, and musicality the way a Bach suite trains the ear and soul of a musician. Students get to feel the timelessness and spontaneity of great art, she said, while realizing that to perform well, they have to bring out the same paradoxical force of timelessness and spontaneity in themselves.

COCHRAN JOINED ALWIN NIKOLAIS'S COMPANY at 18 rather than attend Juilliard, and two years later she began her twelve-year career with Taylor. For BARD's Esplanade, Cochran arrived at the dance studio each Tuesday and Thursday after a full day of teaching on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, where she is an assistant professor. As encouraged by the UC dance department, she coddled no one. One night the understudies floundered, and Cochran washed over them like an unstoppable wave: "Everyone makes mistakes," she said with a soft, level severity to one embarrassed young woman. "We realize that. But you're supposed to know the dance better than that. You'd be fired if you were in a professional dance company."

By the end of the month, through tough love and demanding nights, the piece began to acquire shape and cohesion, and the dancers no longer moved in a cloud of perplexity. Their brusque, Graham-style exertion had softened, and they waded deeper into Taylor's contradictory directions, moods, and tempi--that seeming naturalism undergirded by architectural rigor.

"What was hard about the process is that we had to do it in a short time, and you also had to internalize the movement," Ben Levy, the youngest member of BARD, said. "It would be easy to do the piece outside the aesthetic, and not in that superhuman Taylor way, but we were able to transform ourselves because of Mary. To see her do a fall and whip out of it! She really pushed our limits. It was great to have somebody tell us to eat up space and to push us to run as fast and to jump as far and as big as we could."

Christopher Hojin Lee saw Dancemaker, an acclaimed documentary on Taylor, before learning Esplanade. The clips of the dance, he said, "looked so easy--flying through the air, smiling as they hit the floor. But it's really hard to do difficult movement and keep smiling."

During their Saturday night performance, the group hit their high-water mark, and the dancers, according to Cochran, reached their peak. The next day, Sunday, marked BARD's last performance of Esplanade, and mistakes cropped up in places where they had never before appeared. Yet the company; danced with an abandon and affection for one another that had intensified. It was, said Lee, the knowledge that it was their last performance of the dance that gave it its bittersweet joy. "During the duet section, Ramona [Santos] came off crying," Lee said. "Then I got onstage with Elizabeth, and tears started coming. I had her in my arms and it was as though I really loved her. I felt so sad. I was never going to dance this duet with her again."

After dancing for twenty years, Ann Murphy began writing about dance in 1989. Her work appears in the East Bay Express, San Francisco Weekly, The New York Times, The Oakland Tribune, and other publications.