MOSES PREMIERES SOLOS BY KING, JENKINS, NELSON, AND SHELTON MANN.

SAN FRANCISCO--Award-winning choreographer Robert Moses is putting himself back in the role of dancer. As part of the fourth annual season of Robert Moses' Kin at Theater Artaud, March 4 to 7 and 11 to 14, Moses dances the world premieres of solos by four of the Bay Area's most acclaimed choreographers: Margaret Jenkins (Margaret Jenkins Dance Company), Alonzo King (LINES Contemporary Ballet), K.T. Nelson (ODC/SF), and Sara Shelton Mann (Contraband).

Each solo is a minibiography of Moses, a product of each choreographer's impressions of him as a dancer, performer, and person, and colored by each one's unique relationship with him. For example, Nelson and Moses danced together with ODC/SF for nine years. When Moses asked Nelson to create a solo for him, she decided to mine their friendship and what she knew of Moses' past to generate the movement.

"This piece is about going back into his past and sitting with the darker memories," Nelson explains. By focusing on the deeper, lonelier aspects of Moses' internal life, Nelson presented Moses with a challenge--to go against his natural tendency to entertain by approaching the dance with a more inward concentration instead. "Robert has a strong ability to make things dramatic in an entertaining way," she explains. "I'd like him to make things dramatic without being aware at all of the outside world."

Shelton Mann saw Moses in performance and was moved to work with him. The two explored the word ancestors and came up with "an archetypal black cultural iconography," says Mann, who considers the piece a collaboration. "We met in the middle on movement, working from improvisation to an aesthetic, almost like a jazz performance piece."

Jenkins suggested having a conversation with Moses, from which he would make a solo. From their initial talk, Jenkins identified five topics for Moses to respond to physically. Moses then produced five short responses, five minutes in total length, which he showed Jenkins over the course of five rehearsals.

Each choreographer pushed Moses in different ways, which was precisely the point. "I felt a need to stretch myself and was looking for folks who could challenge me in different ways," says Moses. "It has really been a sort of clinic for me, which has made me more determined to speak with my own voice. They've opened so many doors, it's hard to look through them all."

The March performances also feature four new group works by Moses and the repertory works Doscongio (1998), Untitled Solo #4 (1998), and This State of Annihilation (1997).