U.S. PREMIERE FOR `LA GUERRA D'AMORE'.

La guerra d'amore, a dance-theater piece for twenty dancers and nine singers that opens this month, will introduce American audiences to a unique blend of opera and dance while also providing a more complete picture of the talents of Joachim Schlomer, La guerra's creator. The work and its ensemble of performers will make their U.S. premiere on November 16 and 17 in Berkeley, California.

Schlomer is not among Germany's better known dance theater exports. But judging from the raves the Cologne-born choreographer has garnered wherever he has worked for the last decade or so--Ulm, Weimar, and, since 1996, Basel--Cal Performances, the presenter bringing the work to the Bay Area, may pull off a coup. La guerra could be the surprise hit of their upcoming dance season, which also includes the premiere appearance of the Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre and a new collaboration between Mark Morris and Yo-Yo Ma.

Schlomer is probably the most musically literate and theatrically savvy of today's practitioners of Tanztheater, casting his net far and wide in works with strong narrative elements that stretch the concept of the art form. His broad-based theatrical instincts have led to invitations to create dance sequences for operas (a common enough request for European choreographers associated with state-supported opera houses), but also to jobs directing entire operatic productions such as Orfeo ed Euridice, Das Reingold, and Idomeneo. On the other end of the spectrum, this past May he created Die Nervenwaage, a very well-received piece of physical theater, in which he directed actors, based on early texts of Antonin Artaud for the Burgtheater in Vienna.

If the name Schlomer rings a bell among American audiences, however, it will probably be because he danced with the Mark Morris Dance Group while the ensemble resided in Brussels and because of his association with the White Oak Dance Project, for whom he choreographed Blue Heron, among other works. "Misha came to see my Pierrot Lunaire at the Ulmer Ballet, and he loved it," Schlomer explained on a stopover in the Bay Area before taking off for Russia to set a new piece on the Provincialnye Tanzy company in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in July.

But next month California audiences will be treated to a Schlomer work that steps beyond the boundaries of dance. "It is operatic," says the choreographer. Set to Claudio Monteverdi's eighth book of madrigals, performed live by singers and baroque music specialists under the direction of Rene Jacobs, La guerra takes on the subject of love, refracted through Monteverdi's music and some very contemporary, casual-looking choreography. The work received its world premiere under the auspices of Schlomer's Tanztheater Basel at the Innsbruck Festival of Old Music in August of 1999. It has been uniformly praised for the sensitivity and intelligence of its integration of music and dance.

Schlomer left Basel at the end of this past season to freelance, but says he's not worded about reprising La guerra in a new country as an independent artist. "It's not a problem," he explained. "When I left, the dancers did too. Most of these performers have been with me for many years." Almost all of the musicians Jacobs assembled in Basel will reprise their parts in Berkeley, as well. In fact, Schlomer says he'll only need two weeks and four new dancers to launch his opus in California. The company should be in fine shape for its November premiere--good news for dance and opera buffs alike.