Sci-fi dance. (News).

Choreographer Charles Moulton has done complicated before, most famously in his reworked 1979 work Nine Person Precision Ball Passing, wherein eighteen seated and standing dancers pass balls among themselves in a series of complex rhythms. That piece, he said, best prepared him for the larger challenges of creating a dance for the new film The Matrix: Reloaded, a sequel to the visually arresting 1999 sci-fi actioner. As challenges go, this one was really big--in eleven days, with the help of eleven assistants, Moulton set a futuristic piece for 1,000 dancers.

Oakland's Moulton, a former Merce Cunningham dancer and a co-founding director of New York's experimental venue P.S. 122, has left his choreographic stamp on dance companies worldwide. But he admitted that he hadn't been interested in commercial work until he got a call from lighting director David Finn, whose mother, a Los Angeles casting director, had said the Matrix directors, Andy and Larry Wachowski, were looking for a choreographer. Finn suggested Moulton take a meeting. The directors envisioned a kind of war dance, which Moulton found intriguing: "They gave me a script and said `Here's what we're interested in--the future and the way cultures have blended,' "he said. "The choreographic problem was interesting to me."

Aided by members of local dance companies including ODC/San Francisco and Alonzo King's LINES Ballet, Moulton guided the dancers through the thirteen-minute piece, dubbed "City of Zion" and filmed inside a hangar on a naval base in Alameda, California. The film's stars, including Keanu Reeves, aren't in it; they worked primarily with Yuen Wo Ping, who did kung fu scenes for this as well as the first Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Moulton used Bay Area dancers, some costumed in body suits covered with small round reflectors, others sporting faux tribal tattoos on their faces. Many of the dancers came from hip-hop and the ethnic dance community, and Moulton incorporated those influences in the movement--his idea of how dance might evolve bucked the science-fiction cliche that in the future, people would become more mechanical. "It had to be something that people could understand and learn and want to dance," he said of the choreography, which he describes as "futuristic pictograph dances." It's a mix of learned phrases, partnering, and improv movement, done in different groupings to make different dance mixes.

Moulton and his assistants taught the choreography to groups of 100 dancers at a time, experimenting with tempos from three different rhythmic musical tracks. "It was like making a dance for a whole city," he said of the process, which he only half-jokingly likened to chaos theory. Assistant Monique Strauss, of ODC, agreed: "It was this massive, epic thing," she said, "like being in an underground club with hundreds of people." Fellow assistant Michael Cole, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, said teaching specific movements to huge crowds was tricky enough; the dancing, on uneven surfaces covered with an ashy powder, posed additional challenges. "I had high lifts with the woman I was dancing with--I had to be careful lowering her," said Cole. "During the course of filming, we were encouraged to make the dancing as wild as possible. It was very bacchanalian and crazy."

The dancing was shot three different ways: live on the set with a variety of cameras, some swooping out over the crowd; against a knockout screen; and with a motion-capture apparatus, a kind of enormous aluminum cage covered with cameras, which captures 360 degrees of the dance. When the various filming methods are combined, the 1,000 dancers will look like 100,000 dancers. "The sheer size of it has impact," Moulton said. "The staggering size of the images is epic, larger than life."