Don’t Call It Aussie

When the Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre goes on tour in Europe and North America, Tankard’s elegantly crafted, sometimes circus-influenced pieces inevitably inspire the same questions: “Is what you do particularly Australian?” “How much do you think you were influenced by your years with German choreographer Pina Bausch?” And, more specifically, “Why do so many dancers in your pieces end up flying on ropes?” The latter strategy is used extensively in Tankard’s “Furioso,” a lyrically athletic ode to the pleasures and possessive pitfalls of love, coming to Royce Hall at UCLA on Friday and Saturday.

Not surprisingly, Tankard doesn’t find it easy to answer these questions directly as she speaks on the phone from Sydney, where her Adelaide-based troupe has just performed, a few weeks before coming to Los Angeles. Instead, they remind her of high points and turning points in a career that started as a corps dancer in the Australian Ballet, moved to Germany’s angst-ridden dance theater scene, eventually boomeranged back to her native Australia, where she started making her own work and now has an unsettled future.

Given her background, it’s probably not by chance that Tankard’s pieces contain a classical rigor as well as ironic quirkiness and passionately aggressive movement. An International Herald Tribune writer once said that her appetite for idioms and images has made her “a mistress of the serendipitous.” In previous works such as “Songs With Mara,” for instance, dancers sing stirring Bulgarian folk harmonies while briskly performing what looks like whimsical calisthenics. And “Aurora,” Tankard’s version of “Sleeping Beauty,” offers soaring pure dance sections as well as men in tutus and fairy princesses in tap shoes.

“I don’t know if what I do is Australian,” Tankard says. “It’s funny, when I performed [with Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal] in Adelaide in 1982, everybody said, ‘Oh God, it’s so German.’ And I got so angry--I said, ‘No, we’re talking about universal things.’ Then after I was living in Australia again, I’d see Pina’s work and say, ‘Oh, it’s so German. We don’t have that kind of angst in Australia.’ ”

At least one critic has noted that Tankard’s work can be seen as specifically Australian: Theater scholar Adrian Kiernander has written that aspects of Tankard’s work reflect trends in Australia that he calls “a new tradition of Australian carnivalesque post-colonialism.” For instance, her irreverent reinvention of European monarchy in “Aurora” (the royal palace becomes a kitchen-garden) is a down-home alternative to British and French formality. Likewise, Kiernander points to Tankard’s occasional use of distorted or grotesque movements as “writing back against European myths of classical perfection.”

However, North American audiences watching the currently touring “Furioso” may not detect signs of Australian-ness. Instead, the work contains hallmarks seen in much of new dance--bold physical feats, bodily impact, limpness, longing and lashing out. Tankard doesn’t spend much time categorizing her work in terms of national characteristics: “When I’m abroad, people like to say I’m so Australian,” she says, “but when I’m at home, I’ve often felt so foreign.”

Looking back at her early classical training, Tankard, 43, thinks she more or less fell into ballet as a child. “At the time in Australia, it seemed to be the only form of expression that used the whole body,” she says. “And it was such a challenge; it was something I had to conquer. But when I actually got into the ballet company, I looked at the principal dancers and thought, ‘Is that what I want to do all the time?’ I didn’t think so.”

In her third year in the corps, Tankard was encouraged to contribute to a choreographic workshop and made a piece with dancers on swings and doing the cha-cha to South African music. “It was bizarre, but the audience loved it,” she recalls. Soon after, she won a travel grant to see European dance companies and broaden her horizons. Days before returning home to another year’s contract at the ballet, she was urged by an Australian member of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal to audition for the dance-theater diva herself. Tankard was hired on the spot.

For the next six years (1978-83), Tankard collaborated in the creation of Bausch’s marathon dance landscapes, often contributing her own emotional memories. “I was just watching everything: the way people improvised, the way Pina worked,” Tankard says. “I learned a lot from just watching this woman who seemed so shy on the surface, but she was really tough. Her pieces were difficult, sometimes quite violent.”

Eventually, Tankard became exhausted performing 3 1/2-hour pieces on tour in countries she never really got to see, and overusing her untrained voice (Bausch thought any formal vocal training might make the dancers sound artificial). In addition, especially when Bausch incorporated Tankard’s childhood memories in a dance, she got homesick.

“I remember in one scene, I was describing a landscape, where I imagined hills and rivers and trees,” Tankard says. “I’d say, ‘But it says don’t walk on the grass’--because there are signs everywhere in Europe, it’s verboten--and then I’d say, ‘But I’m a foreigner, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ I thought that summed it up; I was used to the space and the freedom that we still have in Australia.”

It wasn’t easy to leave Wuppertal--for one thing, you have to give nearly a year’s notice in German state-funded theater, and for another, Bausch, who was used to unswerving devotion from her dancers, wouldn’t speak to Tankard for six months. In the end, they parted amicably, and Tankard occasionally appeared with the company in the following years.

Based again in Australia, Tankard freelanced for the next several years, choreographing for operas, performing her own solos and appearing with the Tanztheater Wuppertal in the cultural program of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. At one point, she had her own Australian television series, about two out-of-work dancers living on a pig farm. Eventually, she formed her own company of women in Canberra, and in 1993 accepted the directorship of the Australian Dance Theatre. Making contemporary pieces with both men and women for the first time, she thought she might be tempted to reproduce the violent gender conflicts that surfaced so often during her Bausch years.

“Although I considered Pina my master in so many ways, I tried desperately at first not to do any movements like hers,” she says. “That’s where the idea of using ropes first started. With ‘Furioso’ I thought, ‘Well, if I put myself in the air, I can’t use her vocabulary, because I’ve never danced in the air, and I’ll have to push myself into another area.’ ”

Another thing that helped her to develop a choreographic voice was her relationship with her partner of 14 years, Regis Lansac, a French-born photographer whose slides and backdrops appear in several Tankard dances. Lansac affected her outlook in another way as well: “I started thinking that maybe women are not struggling all the time. That was what bothered me sometimes about Pina--that relationships were often so negative, nothing worked. I think sometimes it does work.”

In “Furioso,” there is definitely conflict--the piece was called “a fiercely emotional hourlong mating rite” by the New York Times’ Anna Kisselgoff. Says Tankard: “A lot of people have said it’s a battle of the sexes, but for me, it’s about making love. The men and women aren’t really fighting each other; they just really need that love and don’t know how to go about it. I think it’s lyrical, actually. One couple who saw it came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go home; we just want to make love.’ I think it’s positive.”

For the last several years, Tankard’s company has enjoyed good houses, successful tours and positive critical response at home and abroad. In fact, Tankard says, “I think the company is reaching a peak.” And all was going quite well--right up until a few months ago when she was forced out by the company’s board. Since the Australian Dance Theatre is a company that existed before Tankard was hired as artistic director, it retains the power to end her contract--about 18 months before it was due to expire.

Issues surrounding the incident seem to revolve around the amount of international touring done compared to time spent at home--the company is heavily funded by the state of South Australia, and the board may be thinking, as Tankard put it, “provincially.” She says she had no warning and wasn’t asked to make changes before being ousted.

Catherine Taylor, an arts writer who has covered the controversy for the national newspaper the Australian, explains that, “The board has maintained a watertight silence over the whole issue, so it’s impossible to know their side, but the press has been almost overwhelmingly supportive of Tankard. . . .” Tankard says she may end up back in Europe, where she has a number of offers to make dances and perform (which she has done less as an artistic director). And she is now meeting with Australian filmmakers about an idea she has of making a ballet in the desert.

Stunned to be effectively forced out of a company she’s had so much success building, Tankard nevertheless insisted on doing this last tour, since her presenters had already put so much work into it. Afterward, since her dancers have all refused new contracts, the Australian Dance Theatre will not only lose her name in its title but will have to reinvent itself almost entirely. Since the internationally known Tankard was said to have revived a company that had previously been--as one critic put it--”limping towards box-office oblivion,” it will surely be their loss.

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MERYL TANKARD AUSTRALIAN DANCE THEATRE’S “FURIOSO,” Royce Hall, UCLA. Dates: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $20-$30. Phone: (310) 825-2101.