JULIA ADAM.

CHOREOGRAPHER OF DREAMS TAKES FLIGHT

"In creating my dances, I found my voice. I suddenly know how things should be," says San Francisco Ballet dancer/choreographer Julia Adam, beaming with an alluring self-confidence. Adam radiates a bright combination of assurance and poise these days. But it was not always so. At 35, Adam has undergone a dramatic makeover as a performer, and she credits her newfound role as choreographer for the transformation. Relaxed and thoughtful in a girlish-pink top, charcoal capri pants, and sunglasses that nicely offset her striking blonde looks, Adam talked in the dancers' lounge at SFB. It was a typical dancer's day off; she had just come from a chiropractic appointment.

"Dancing didn't come easy to me. I had an inability to lose myself as a dancer. There was always a fear because I was interpreting and trying to acquire the director's voice. I also wondered, `Who am I?' As a dancer you look at the girl next to you, and you see a similar body, the same length of leg, the same breasts. How am I different from this person beside me? What makes me separate?"

It's startling to hear this from Adam, who has carved out a unique position for herself as a principal dancer precisely because of her highly individual interpretations of such dramatic roles as the dance student who gets murdered in Flemming Flindt's The Lesson and the tortured wife in Kenneth MacMillan's The Invitation. Her comedic flair has been brought to the fore in Peter Martins's The Waltz Project and most recently in SFB's spring season smash, the sexy Black Cake, choreographed by Hans van Manen.

Adam grows more animated as she explains, "The competition and discipline in ballet are so intense due to the sheer number of girls. There is a real lack of self-esteem. There's a feeling that if I get hurt, I'm replaceable. Becoming a choreographer has changed my dancing. It's helped me as a woman and as a performer. Now I have a voice." This new voice has revitalized Adam's joy in dancing. "I love portraying an actual character as opposed to dancing in abstract works. I'm an actress who dances. When I'm acting, the public gets it. I get response."

Her foray into choreography has gained her no less a response, winning the hearts of critics, audiences, and dance companies alike. Last season she was one of four San Francisco Ballet choreographers commissioned by SFB Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson to create world premieres as part of the company's Discovery Program. (The others were David Palmer, Yuri Possokhov, and Christopher Stowell.) Her ballet Night, inspired by the art of Marc Chagall, was a runaway hit then, and is now slated to be performed by SFB on its spring tour in Pads and Spain.

"After Helgi met with all of us, I went across the street to the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and asked myself, `How can I fill this space?' And I thought, I can fill this space with dreams. Night is a dance of flight inspired by lovers flying and images coming out of my own dream life." Adam carded Tomasson's New Century/New Talent concept one step further and brought in the new designer/composer team of Benjamin Pierce, also a principal dancer at SFB, and his brother Matthew. The result was a ballet full of surprises: unexpected groupings such as three female dancers embodying a three-headed woman, and groups of men portraying boats, waves, and a bed for principal dancer Tina LeBlanc. The most unusual moment comes at the ballet's end when LeBlanc is suddenly held aloft as if she has awakened from her stream-of-consciousness dream.

Adam is deeply intuitive about her work. Could she have known in dreaming up her Chagall-inspired piece for SFB that her work would then travel to the Palais Gamier in Pads, famous for its own stunning Chagall-painted ceiling? Now Adam's work is in demand everywhere. She has just choreographed for ABT II and will create works for the Joffrey and again for SFB next year.

As lofty as all this might seem, Adam's start in choreography is amusing. "In 1993, SFB didn't tour, and there was a choreographic workshop during the layoff. When the casting went up, I was devastated. No one wanted to choreograph on me. I called my mom up and she said, `Why don't you choreograph something yourself?.' So I did a piece [The Medium Is the Message] for Joanna Berman, Anthony Randazzo, and me." Looking back, Adam sees earlier influences. "While I was training at the National Ballet School in Toronto, we studied composition in art, writing, and painting. I was very focused on becoming a ballerina, but I was always interested in making things. I was good at geometry and math. My mother, Merle Adam, who studied at SAB and danced at the Radio City Music Hall, took me to Ottawa and I saw everything: Bejart, Bausch, Netherlands Dance Theater. We were an hour and a half from Montreal, where there was avant-garde dance, I have a gift, but I'm also educated.

"Then at the National Ballet School, a woman named Victoria Simon came and set Balanchine's Serenade. I really understood then that I had a sense of space. I could tell if someone way behind me that I couldn't even see was off. I understand space and how `the machine' of a dance works."

When Adam first came to SFB from Canada, she says, "I felt I had to leave Canada behind. I felt stuck there. American dance is very free, athletic, and joyful. But I brought what I learned with me--classics and big story ballets. SFB has been an unbelievable springboard for my choreography. I've danced the works of Mark Morris, Forsythe, Robbins, Balanchine. I've studied subconsciously. I see my dancing as my undergraduate work. Now I can express myself as a dancemaker."

Adam's other training has been the fertile ground of San Francisco's chamber dance companies. Before getting her chance with SFB last year, Adam took advantage of the opportunity to choreograph for many smaller companies and presenters in the Bay Area. Her work Thirteen Lullabies for the Bay Area Dance Series was noted for its Unusual clarity in composition and won Adam an Isadora Duncan Award for Choreography in 1996. For Lawrence Pech Dance Company, she created Newton: Three Laws of Motion, which seemed to apply the laws of gravity to unusual partnering. This year's Shroud explored animal movement while reflecting a medieval sensibility. Adam has also created works for the Bay Area's Robert Moses' KIN and was commissioned to make work by BalletMet in Ohio, as well as the Alberta Ballet in Canada.

Adam also pursues a variety of extracurricular activities to keep her ideas fresh. She takes drawing classes and is an avid gallery-goer and a big fan of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Adam's reading list is as diverse as her ballets: from the timeless Joseph Campbell classic The Power of Myth to Diane Ackerman's very up-to-the-moment Deep Play, a nonfiction book about the quality of play in life.

With Adam, one gets the sense of an intense focus married to intuitive ambition. She also shows lots of marketing savvy about her work. Her ability to make a work distinctly her own, but also specific to the commissioning company, is uncanny. For example, with her recent ABT II premiere, she looked at a company of Olympian young dancers, sized them up, and decided to do a piece called Won about a race. "I don't keep a file of ideas; rather, I am site-specific. I look at where the work is being performed and by whom."

Despite the buzz about her work, Adam is managing to keep her head. "In New York, with Clive Barnes and Jack Anderson in the audience, I had to wonder if I'm talented. I'm just honest with the work. When I dance, there can be little critical voices going on in my head. There's no critical voice going on when I choreograph. When I'm making a dance, everything leaves me and I just make it. It's like a cleansing. First I search for a concept and then I search for or commission music. In my work, the music drives the movement. I listen to the music until I know it intimately, on a cellular level. I also create my own score, a kind of storyboard. I draw patterns. I find the movement with the dancers. For Night, the cast was part of my dream life. Also, I like odd numbers of dancers. No tidy little packages."

One area where Adam felt she had to do extra research as a woman is partnering. "I've done contact improvisation. I wanted to do that work to get the feel of partnering. Also, dancing Nacho Duato's work or Christopher Bruce's work has helped me with counter work--women lifting men, for example. In Redha's Pavane Rouge I had a duet where I lifted Katita Waldo. I felt so empowered when I walked offstage afterward!"

For many women in classical ballet the journey to choreography is difficult and hard won. Adam is exceptional in that her path has been relatively easy. "I haven't worked with a lot of women ballet choreographers," she says, struggling to name any. "That's actually worked in my favor. Being a woman has helped me to stand out. I'm the only one."

Meanwhile, says Adam, "The work just comes to me. Word gets out. Companies call. I take the work and the work keeps coming. Now, as a choreographer, I've stepped onto the other side of things. I have much more compassion for people who are directing me. I want dancers I work with to be open to an exchange of energy with me. I think my timing is good. Ballet needs a woman's voice right now. I pick dancers who respect the art and I connect with people as human beings. I say to the dancers, `Be who you are.'"

Julia Adam is a rare mix of pragmatism and dreams. And as the ballets spun from her own dream life are danced across the world, she envisions her most provocative dream of all. "Two of my greatest influences are Mark Morris and Jiri Kylian. Mark Morris is of this plane, the Earth, and Jiri Kylian is on another plane, one of archetypes and dreams. In my work, I want to bring these two planes together."

Kathryn Roszak Castle danced with San Francisco Opera Ballet and is choreographer and artistic director of Anima Mundi Dance Company. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches and writes on dance.