New Koresh ballet explores primal love

Do people ever really change? Observers from psychologists to advice columnists have weighed in on that question. Now, let's hear from a choreographer.

"In 3,000 years, nothing has changed," asserts Ronen "Roni" Koresh, who, as director of his eponymous dance company, turns social commentary into movement.

"Go to a club at 2 a.m. People are primal. They will take off their clothes - they would be naked if they could."

Yet modern society frowns on that sort of thing, "so you wear a nice suit, deodorant, makeup," he says, over coffee at La Colombe, where he pauses to wave to someone every few minutes. "But we have the same issues as 3,000 years ago."

Koresh "investigates the primordial glue that sticks people together" in ev-o-lu-tion, his new ballet for Koresh Dance Company. It premieres tonight at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, along with Pieces of 9, by Netherlands-based choreographer Paul Selwyn Norton.

It's a timely topic as we mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his On the Origin of Species. And while the dance is not literally about Darwin's theory of evolution, at rehearsal in the sultry Koresh studio one recent day, dancers in sweats and tank tops performed animalistic leaps, stomps and scratches along with more balletic moves, to music by Schubert, Pete Nemlok, Fariborz Lachini, Greg Smith and John Vosbikian.

At La Colombe, Koresh points to a poster advertising the performance, and notes that if you flip the first four letters of the evolution, you get love, which was the point of conception for his piece: He wanted to examine how early humans expressed love before they had words.

"Language allows us to be liars," he says. "Words can mean anything. It's very difficult to lie when you're looking into someone's eyes."

Earlier this spring, in the midst of creating ev-o-lu-tion, Koresh revisited his own origins. He took the company he formed in 1991 to perform in his native country, Israel, for the first time.

For him, it was a wish fulfilled. "It was a very emotional thing, the first time we went there," he says. "It was also a little scary. 'Are they going to like what I do?' "

One thing he didn't worry about was his 11 dancers, a strong, diverse, expressive group, which he calls "already 50 percent of the success."

For the dancers, touring in Israel made something click.

"Everything kind of feels whole," says Melissa Rector, a dancer and Koresh's assistant artistic director. A founding member of the company, she was a college student when Koresh grew out of a University of the Arts performance group.

She says she recognized her company's director in a lot of the Israelis she met, and now "I understand him completely - the personalities, the way they talk to each other. It's like a huge family."

The performances were special, dancer Alexis Viator adds, "knowing that we got to perform in his home," Tel Aviv, where he and his four siblings trained with their mother, a folk dancer in the Yemenite tradition.

Koresh also studied with Batsheva, the modern dance company started in 1964 by Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva De Rothschild. He continued dancing there during his three years in the Israeli army.

In 1983, he moved to New York to study at the Ailey School, and a year later came to Philadelphia to dance with Shimon Braun's Waves Jazz Dance Company. He also began teaching at University of the Arts.

Money to sustain the company has always been tight, Koresh says, which is why he keeps his day job teaching at the university and at Koresh School of Dance at 20th and Chestnut, where the company rehearses. The school helps finance the company, Koresh says, and touring anywhere and everywhere pays more of the bills: "We're known in every hole in the wall, and then we've been in beautiful theaters, too."

Just since January, for example, the company has performed in New York, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Indiana, as well as Israel and Turkey.

Like most arts organizations, the company relies on grants. Norton's ballet, for example, was commissioned in the expectation of a grant that later was denied without explanation.

Norton decided to come anyway.

"I thought, 'OK, I won't put bread on the table with this one,' " he says. "But my contact with them has been very, very warm. It's so life-affirming."

Koresh was able to get Norton a paying gig at University of the Arts, setting a piece on students, to help offset the loss of the grant.

A latecomer to dance, Norton was trained as a physician and discovered in an Amsterdam nightclub. His work is cerebral; Pieces of 9 is like a puzzle, in which legs and arms can move only in accordance with certain rules. Danced in socks to make the stage more slippery, parts of it look like a series of poses, set to music by John Cage, Jose Luis Greco, and Elmer Schonberger. Some sections of the music have no beat to guide dancers, so they need to know it intimately.

Coming to Philadelphia was worth it, Norton said - both to work with Koresh and because this was his first American commission. And he's not sure when an opportunity like this will arise again. Born in England, he was raised in Zambia and Jamaica, and now is planning a move to Australia to pursue a doctorate in dance - and study marine biology.

"I love to throw myself as a silhouette against different cultures," he says.