If It Bruises, It’s Working

The dances of Mehmet Sander regularly send writers scrambling for new words to describe the sound of bodies hitting hard surfaces--slam, ram, bam, crash, thud, thwack. Critics talk of “grueling group gymnastics” that “mortify the flesh,” “bone-crushing” body bruising and “masochistic free-fall acrobatics.” Vanity Fair settled for calling Sander’s work a “Bataan death mambo” fashioned by a “prince of pain.”

Sitting in a restaurant that’s located between his loft home and his studio in Long Beach, Sander, 30, shrugs. “I don’t find my work violent,” he says.

He laughs when he’s reminded of the “prince of pain” line. He thinks it sounds like a name for a leather bar in San Francisco, not for a serious choreographer. And ever since he saw the Merce Cunningham company at age 14, back in Istanbul, Turkey, he has wanted to be a very serious choreographer.

He calls himself subversive and “very stubborn”--indeed he’s almost as well known for his combative politics, especially gay politics--as he is for the physicality of his work. But he now considers the point that he’s “HIV+ and a Queer Choreographer From Istanbul”--which used to be prominent in all his publicity--to be made. Today, he’s not wearing his “Dead Bigots Don’t Bash Homos” T-shirt, just a plain gray one with tight black shorts and black boots. He is short and powerfully built and has a gentlemanly manner, a combination that might account for the fact that people find him--as he puts it--”intimidating but only at first.”

The same goes for his work, he insists. Sipping an iced tea, he says that it might look painful at first, but it’s not about pain, it’s about risk-taking, speed, pure movement and survival. For Sander, bodies must go faster, stop harder and not show emotion to be in his world.

“But OK,” he eventually acknowledges, gesturing with an arm that has a speeding bullet tattooed on it, “I understand that my work can be seen as violent, but to me, the universe can be violent too, if you think about earthquakes or volcanoes or other galaxies starting and bursting out.”

Pointing to a scientific formula tattooed next to the bullet on his arm (F = M x A, or force equals mass times acceleration), he’s moving into one of the areas he likes best lately--drawing parallels between dance and forces of nature that involve velocity, trajectory and collision. In the past, Sander has often cited architecture and mathematics as influences--many of his pieces take place inside and around geometric structures. But now he talks mostly about quantum physics.

“When I choreograph, I treat it like I’m a scientist in a lab, experimenting with solid facts that are reliable, like the laws of physics. I think about my dancers as colliding atoms and molecules crashing into each other. I call my dancers animate objects.”

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The latest dancer-objects to take on this role for Sander are not part of his own small eponymous troupe of weight-training, calisthenically correct performers but members of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago--better known for their mastery of the pirouette than the push-up. Sander’s 1992 piece “Inner Space” will appear on a mixed program during the company’s engagement this week at the Ahmanson Theatre. “Inner Space,” the first of his works to be added to a major company’s repertory, puts a trio of dancers inside a Plexiglas cube and features suspensions, balances and the trademark slamming and thudding. As in all Sander pieces, the score consists of only the amplified sounds of impact and breathing.

“I was mesmerized when I first saw it, and I made up my mind right away to have it,” says Joffrey Artistic Director Gerald Arpino. Arpino encountered “Inner Space” in 1994 at a Cal State Long Beach appearance of the Mehmet Sander Dance Company, and finally acquired it for the Joffrey last year. Next fall, the company will also present Sander’s solo “Single Space,” and there is talk of commissioning an original work sometime in the future.

Like Sander, Arpino doesn’t think that bodies crashing into one another, the floor or the wall transmit a message of pain or violence. Instead, when he sees thumping and slamming, he thinks of the heart beating with high adrenaline and how “the emotions take on this inner sound when we fight to release ourselves in whatever way.”

Arpino also notes, with some resort to stereotypes, that men have been drawn to “Inner Space” more than women.

“It’s the piece the men gravitate to,” he says. “I think it’s because it organically captures the male. It suddenly becomes what America’s about. It’s strong, it’s powerful, it’s athletic. Through its forms, its shapes, it’s something men can relate to--not in an elitist way, like an abstract Balanchine work or Martha Graham. In this, they see the power of man within his own space and how he uses that space and releases himself, like a metamorphosis.”

The idea of bouncing powerfully off surfaces, as well as Sander’s use of severe architectural props--confining structures, a heavy platform, a pole--are all part of the reason Arpino calls Sander “a choreographer for the 21st century; it indicates a new direction of innovative, creative, abstract ideas for me.”

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Born in Germany to Turkish laborer parents with artistic inclinations (his father wrote poetry; his mother painted), Sander grew up in Istanbul without dance aspirations until his teenage encounter with the Cunningham company. He trained a bit in ballet and more in Graham and Cunningham technique and had started to perform professionally and choreograph by the time he was 16. At 18, Sander won a scholarship to London Contemporary Dance School and also studied in Germany, but as he recalled: “Modern dance seemed to me completely made in the USA. I thought, ‘If I’m going to study, I should really go to the States.’ ”

California appealed to Sander because, he says, “it seemed like there was so much vast space never ending. That was my image, which was true.” Sander studied for two years at Cal State Long Beach before forming his own company in 1990. He also studied briefly with Elizabeth Streb, another highly physical East Coast choreographer, to whom he has been compared. He says, however, that his movement style was established before he met her.

“What I’ve done over the years is basically an intellectual elimination of what I felt was not pure in dance,” he says. “I wanted to find vocabulary that’s core, very simple and completely abstracted. So I thought, ‘Well, what is dance?’ Basically it’s movement art, and moving is about human bodies racing in space, within and under the laws of physics and gravity. I try to do profound movement that hasn’t been done before.”

As a dancer, Sander still performs, both with his troupe and in solo concerts, which tend to have an autobiographical bent, with narrative touches, not found in the more abstract company pieces.

Whatever his influences, Sander says about his work: “It’s about proving the fact that there are no limits in life. The more you push the limit, it just keeps stretching the limits, encouraging people to try new things.” He’s great, he says, at talking people into doing things they don’t think they can do.

Todd Stickney, a 23-year-old Joffrey dancer who will appear in “Inner Space” in L.A. and will learn the Sander solo “Single Space” for next season, recalls the choreographer’s training process:

“It was almost like a boot camp thing. We would do push-ups, crawling across the floor on our elbows, and one of my favorites--going into a handstand 20 feet from a wall, walking over to it, then doing handstand push-ups against the wall.

“He’d make people stand in a semicircle, then you’d have to run and fly through the air and leap backwards with people catching you. At first I didn’t know why we were doing this--just to build up strength maybe. But as I performed the piece more, I realized that he was also preparing us mentally for the trust you need in other people inside the box. It’s a very intimate environment, and if you don’t trust and work well with these people, there’s a very high chance of injury when things go wrong.”

The need for synchronization and extreme caution is clear in most of Sander’s work, whether performers are running, falling and rolling like well-drilled circus acrobats, trying to mimic the flight of a bullet or just hanging around upside down. For “Inner Space,” Arpino initially had fears that his ballerinas might find the physical challenge too tough, but two women have now danced it successfully (the piece is danced with two men and a woman at the Joffrey). Regarding possible injuries, Arpino now has no concern, he says.

Sander believes that all dancers can build up the right muscles to protect bones, as well as learn to distribute their weight in a way that minimizes impact. Stickney, however, says that each Joffrey dancer in the piece sustained at least a minor injury during rehearsals--a sprained ankle, bruises, a neck problem from falling headfirst.

In performance, the Joffrey cast has been fine, Stickney reports, and Sander says his own dancers do not get hurt. But Sander also relates that when he teaches workshops, the participants--all of whom he urges to go beyond their limits (Sander believes in mind over body)--often show him their bruises.

“I tell them, ‘Those bruises are your medals, “‘ he says, smiling.

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Sander’s company has performed in many European dance festivals, as well as in Brazil, but the Joffrey connection has brought the choreographer to a new kind of prominence. Does such institutional approval impress Sander?

Not really, he says: “It was a great joy to work with the Joffrey, but I don’t need other people’s approval, and I’m actually really hard on myself.”

Although he attended the May 1996 Joffrey “Inner Space” premiere in Minneapolis, it wasn’t until the company got to the Kennedy Center that same month that Sander let himself feel a thrill of accomplishment. Another high point came a year later, again in Washington, when he was included in a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institution. Arpino talked about the Joffrey, Sander about his process; then “Inner Space” was performed and discussed.

Afterward, Sander spoke to the Turkish ambassador. “He told me he was so proud of being Turkish when he saw my work,” Sander says. “That was nice to hear.”

Equally as exciting for Sander was a conversation with a scientist from a space laboratory after that same event.

“He thought I had stretched the limits of the way I’ve used physics to defy and demonstrate gravity,” Sander says. “So he thought it would be a great idea for me to choreograph a piece in zero gravity. His colleague said I should be the first man to dance in space. I really like that idea.”

The concept of a Sander piece minus the speed and impact is certainly an innovative one. Gentle floating seems out of place for someone who says he likes being called a “kamikaze choreographer,” because it means you are “really taking a chance for life and death.” Sander also liked being called a “terrorist onstage.” He says, “It’s a compliment for me, because terrorists destroy what has been done and create something new.”

What made him mad recently, though, was when a woman called him romantic. It happened at a post-performance discussion in Brazil, where language differences presented their challenges--to explain the title of his piece, “Ricochet,” for instance, Sander had bounced a water bottle against a wall. The woman insisted on the word “romantic”; he argued. It means “sentimental and unrealistic,” he says, still angry. According to Sander, all dance that involves emotion is self-indulgent. Science is the way to go. Lately, all his friends are science teachers--”but the eccentric ones,” he says, “the ones who like modern dance.” He expects their information exchanges to lead to new things.

“The biggest desire, my wish, is one day at the end of my life, I’ll look back and I’ll think that I really gave something new to this art form. I have the passion to do it.”

And at least a few of the formulas.

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Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and next Sunday, 2 p.m. Sander’s “Inner Space” will be performed Friday, 8 p.m., and Saturday, 2 p.m., along with choreography by Robert Joffrey, Pilobolus and Laura Dean. $20-$55. (213) 365-3500.