Mark Dendy: Fine & Dendy.

Postmodernist choreographer Mark Dendy is extending his reach back to Diaghilev and on to caricature.

There will be dancing in the aisles, on the stage, in the lobby, in the elevators--even in the restrooms--at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on April 10 and 11. Outside, people will be performing around the pillars and frolicking in the fountains. Everyone will be participating in Ritual, the new site-specific work for which choreographer and grand ringmaster Mark Dendy has recruited some sixty dancers from George Washington University and the University of Maryland at College Park, plus some professionals. "It involves Washington's entire dance community, as well as the entire center," says Dendy. The thirty-six-year-old postmodernist choreographer-actor-dancer usually performs his own material with his small company, Mark Dendy Dance & Theater.

Also on the Kennedy Center program are excerpts from Dendy's recent Dream Analysis, which was inspired by the life of Vaslav Nijinsky. When performed as a part of the Altogether Different series at New York City's Joyce Theater, with Dendy double cast as Nijinsky with Lawrence Keigwin, his long-time collaborator and dance inspiration, Dream Analysis convinced most people that Dendy was definitely the most altogether different spirit in the series.

Even the blase audiences at the Joyce were surprised at the antic goings-on in the ninety-minute dance-play, which invokes two Martha Grahams, two Nijinskys, a psychotherapist, a patient, and Judy Garland (personified by Scott Hess). Dendy says he experienced something like a personal catharsis working with psychiatrist Ronald L. Vereen to create the piece. He declares, "It left me spiritually drained. I felt helpless. Maybe I could never do anything again."

Such depletion did not last long. Today Dendy is fulfilling some of his more ambitious goals in a career that thrives on experimentation and versatility. "It's kind of like you never know what you're getting with me," he says. Consider the 1996 Bessie Schoenberg. Awards in New York City. A packed audience impatiently awaits the mysterious, unannounced mistress of ceremonies, who is unforgivably late. Finally she enters. It's Martha Graham!

But wait a minute. Graham died in 1991. That was Dendy up there, perfect in every inflection, intoning, "The dressing room is a very sacred place, where the magic of sacrifice begins." The audience roared. He had been doing such impersonations for years for friends and audiences who could appreciate his perfectly calibrated takeoffs. He says, "Richard Move [another Graham impersonator, who was also in Dream Analysis] and I have appeared together as Martha, including conducting her first post-mortem press conference." (He repeated his Bessie performance with slightly different material at Jacob's Pillow last summer.)

As a member of Graham's second company, he had the chance to study her up close, and would often amuse his fellow dancers in the nearby Silver Star Restaurant after class with impromptu impersonations. "I didn't want to show any disrespect, because I do honor her as an artist," he says. Life in the junior company was frustrating, however. "I felt I had gone to Graham for a certain experience," he says, "but the only thing I had gotten that was close to her was working for Pearl Lang and Yuriko. I realized that what I had gone there for was the Martha that was. I knew that even if I dyed my hair dark, which they wanted me to do, and got into the senior group, I'd probably end up holding a pole for years before I'd really dance anything. Anyway, I wanted to have my own company."

He then became a student of and danced for Poch Kaye, who, he says, "analyzed intricate movement and exploration of inner space." (He's currently reviving Swept Up, a piece she made on him, Ginger Gillespie, and some trash cans.) Dendy also studied with Ruby Shang, working on architectural, grand-scale, site-specific projects.

For all his preoccupation with the new, Dendy is fascinated with the past. It was through the North Carolina School of the Arts--he's a native-born Tarheel from Weaverville--that he first became aware of Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes. "Robert Lindgren brought Madame Danilova, in to teach a summer program," he recalls. "We went to Italy, and we had her to ourselves in this little, town, Bassano del Grappa. It was totally informal, all at the same table, rubbing shoulders. I remember sitting next to her on the bus coming back from seeing the Bolshoi' Romeo and Juliet at La Scala. She asked me what thought. I was afraid to answer, and she said, 'It's It's all tricks!'

"We had a discussion about modem dance and didn't like ballet, and she told me that modem act started with Nijinsky and his era. She felt that I should look into it. I discovered that the first person who used the turned-in position, the erotic use of the pelvis, and blatant sexual subject matter in dance was not Martha Graham. It was Nijinsky.

"I wanted to remake some of the Diaghilev ballets--my take on L'Apres-midi d'un faune and Scheherazade and Bronislava Nijinska's Les Biches. I'd hired a private ballet coach, Harriet Clark, who danced with ABT and PNB, and began reading the history of ballet because I had to know where I was coming from." Dendy experimented, eventually landing ballet commissions from Pacific Northwest, Charleston, and Nashville companies, among others.

Many were surprised at his reworking of Les Biches for PNB last season for its strong, if skewed, ballet style. This was no modern dance work interpolated into a classical ballet program. Says coartistic director Francia Russell: "I guess Lila York, who was running our experimental workshop, PNB Offstage, first brought Mark to our attention. He did Ballet One, a good exploratory work, for us first. It was a kind of wacky experimentation of what ballet dancers can do, very inventive."

Since then Dendy has been invited back to do three more ballets. "The thing I like so much about Mark is that he's willing to take risks," says Russell. "He puts himself out there--sometimes on a limb! But every work he does, he gives himself to it completely--physically, emotionally, intellectually--an interesting process to watch. Knowing our dancers so well now, he is always very respectful of their classical technique, but he wants to stretch what they can do. He asks very different things of them each time. His Symmetries was a huge success in Seattle the second time we did it and was well received when it was given by PNB in New York. (Comments Dendy: "I once had a teacher who said that if I was left to my own devices I'd put the whole world on a stage, and that's what I did with Symmetries.")

Augury, the work Dendy just choreographed for PNB to the Philip Glass Violin Concerto, has angels as a theme. He explains, "I was so taken with the glory of the music, listening to it over and over, and the images that came as a result. Instead of checking out every single picture and thing that has been done about angels, as I might have with another kind of piece, such as my Nijinskys, the research is taken from the music only. PNB gives me the chance to work with all these wonderful bodies, and I envisioned a big work, pure movement for soloists and corps."

Dendy's fascination with the Diaghilev era and the works of that impresario's Ballets Russes didn't end with his first solos, as is now apparent with Dream Analysis. "After reading up on Nijinsky," Dendy says, "I decided that I had to do this piece on such a tragic life, this idea of walking a tightrope between madness and genius."

He also felt that he had a psychic affiliation with the great dancer. "Coming from a Southern fundamentalist home, you grow up with a lot of guilt and shame," he says, "especially around sex. You're taught that being gay is the worst thing you could possibly be. I think that that's something Nijinsky had to deal with, whether he was bisexual or gay, and I empathized with him." There were also, he explains, strains of insanity in Nijinsky's family, details of which Dendy has incorporated into Dream Analysis, his most personal work, with characters drawn from his mother and an aunt who was institutionalized.

Dendy had his own dark period, brought on by the temptations of the freewheeling New York City downtown scene of the 1980s and the headiness of his early successes. Substance abuse took over, and he admits he nearly "lost it." Incidents involving drugs and alcohol put his company at risk and his career in a precarious position. Now a teetotaler, Dendy frankly credits friends and mentors such as Charles Reinhart, codirector of the American Dance Festival in Durham, and Ivan Sygoda, director of Pentacle in New York City, where he has long based his company, with helping pull him through.

Since 1982 Dendy has choreographed and written some fifty very diverse works. It has not been easy. Despite choreography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and other institutions and some funding from arts foundations, he says that he "spent every penny I had on Dream Analysis." At least now, with national press coverage, much of it favorable, there's a growing stream of assignments.

Last year Dendy was not going to attend the Bessie Schonberg Awards as either Martha Graham or himself. He had injured his ankle and had come down with the flu. "They got me out of bed on a pretext," he says, "and dragged me there, kicking--with my good leg--and screaming." But soon he was glad they had. Now there hangs on the wall of his Lower East Side apartment a plaque--a Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement to Mark Dendy "for a wicked alchemy of character and performance, a choreographic spy in the house of love whose personal theater of brilliant dancing and corrosive satire has deepened through the years that stretches from Rock to Busride to Glory."

It is a fitting tribute to an artist who wouldn't be dismayed by landing on the third rock from the sun or, for that matter, getting there by way of a mystical bus ride.