A suburban dance asks questions

As a young dancer taking the express bus into the San Francisco financial district, Paul Zmolek noticed the people working there had their own ritual costumes and lived in a world he wasn't part of.

If the community of the financial district had ritual dances like primal cultures do, he wondered, what would they be?

The result of that kind of question, co-choreographed by Zmolek's wife, Josephine, is "Landscaping for Privacy." Inspired by the response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the 33-minute dance also asks what Americans are willing to give up to have all the things we have.

"Landscaping for Privacy" is one of six original dances in the "Full Tilt" concert to be performed tonight and Saturday night at Rose Theater. The concert is presented by the Department of Theater and Dance at Southeast.

The dance is set in suburbia, a phenomenon of the '50s, when men went to work, women cared for the home, and television became the fire the family gathered around.

The Zmoleks choreographed the dance together after discovering they independently were investigating similar ideas. A Ph.D candidate in mass communications at SIU, she was exploring men's and women's roles in daily life. "What is it about those roles that keeps people from saying what they want to say -- if they want to say anything," Josephine asks.

He was listening to early electronic music composed by band leader Raymond Scott in the 1950s, when Scott became well known because his songs were quoted in Warner Brothers cartoons.

Recordings of Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs reciting his writing, Scott's electronic music experiments and new music by Eve Beglarian with a pastoral feel provide the sounds the 11 student dancers move to. The women are in house dresses and aprons. Seated in a green chair, a young man in a tie and white shirt stares at a TV throughout the dance. Television is the dance's central metaphor.

Another Zmolek San Francisco memory: A man in a pub talking about how happy he was to get out of his house and go to a bar every night. He was an alcoholic, Zmolek knew. "But he said, It's better than being stuck in that damn green chair every day."

"Landscaping for Privacy" looks like and feels like the '50s, complete with commercial jingles and the threat of the Bomb.

"It's really just a day in the life of these people on stage," Josephine says.

But the ideas it addresses -- the "Ozzie and Harriet" surface with the McCarthy hearings underside -- are not foreign to the young dancers, he says.

"They were Reagan-era babies and into Clinton... There is a lot of commercialism and a lot of accepting of the way things should be. There are certain parallels going on now with the tragic events of 9-11."

The lack of discussion about the actions taken in reaction disturbed them. "It was what we perceived to be a spiral of silence effect," Josephine says, "a throwback to the Cold War mentality."

He compared the impulse to safeguard ourselves that is so attractive now to the 1950s concern when Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev promised Americans "We will bury you."

"We have to be careful we are not giving away what makes America so wonderful in order to protect America," he says.

The Zmoleks have a point of view, but "Landscaping for Privacy" was created to provoke thinking, not furnish answers, he says.

"If you're providing answers, then what you're doing is propaganda."

Two numbers in the dance concert, "Someone to Watch over Me" and "Silence is Golden," have been choreographed by Dr. Marc Strauss. Strauss will dance solo in "Someone to Watch over Me" to accompaniment by Dr. Marc Fulgham on trumpet and Becky Fulgham on piano.

In "Silence is Golden," students dance only to occasional sound effects and no music. "They must use their internal clocks," Strauss says.

The evening also includes three pieces choreographed by students: Maria Foster's "Primitive Fire," Jennifer Hembree's "Staccato's Theme" and Laura Brazer's "Commissioned.

Costume designer Rhonda Stilson-Weller and technical director Ken Cole, both of whom work with theater productions, are in on "Full Tilt," too. That is one indication of how rapidly the intermingling of faculty and students is occurring in the university's new Department of Theater and Dance, Strauss says.

"Sometimes we're not sure who's a dancer and who's a theater person. The changes happening so quickly."

Theater formerly was part of the Department of Speech, Communication and Theater, which is now the Department of Communication. Dance formerly had only program status.

The crew on "Full Tilt" is composed of both dance and theater students.

Paul Zmolek said, "We really like working in dance theater. It isn't just dancing to music but has a theatrical element to it."

Josephine Zmolek will teach dance at Southeast beginning in the fall while Strauss is on sabbatical.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182