Audience, too, moves with 'Alice'

Since it was published in 1865, Lewis Carroll's

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

has gone through the psychedelic rigors of Disneyfication in the 1950s and being turned into an X-rated musical flick in the '70s.

It has had a Broadway revival and been adapted as Japanese anime (

Fushigi no Kuni no Alice

), a

Sesame Street

special, and a German opera with Tom Waits music.

But Philadelphia choreographer Nichole Canuso's Wandering Alice still stands out, as a highlight of the fall's Live Arts Festival and, this week, as part of Canuso's first benefit cabaret.

The audience-participation dreamscape piece by the Nichole Canuso Dance Company offered crowds a liberating walk through the looking glass (lots of ascending/descending stairs at Christ Church's Community House) as the enigmatic tale of a girl looking for her notebook unfolded woozily.

Written, directed, and choreographed by Canuso (with Suli Holum) Alice/Canuso's moves and those of her dancers seemed improvised, but were in fact sharply defined.

"In all my work, there are repeating themes - isolation, desire, and the fabulous mystery of human warmth at its intersection with the cold logic of existence," says Canuso. "Alice follows this line of research, but includes the audience more directly."

Canuso's softly expressive face, agile body, and propulsive movements were part of a strange, gently weary dream, as were the dancers who took her through it, along with audiences whose activities were pure chance.

"We create dance to explore and expose the complex beauty of seemingly mundane behavior," says the Canuso company's manifesto. "These dances celebrate the awkwardness, humor and surprise in human experience."

After more than a decade as principal collaborator with Headlong Dance Theater, as well as cofounder/director of Moxie dance collective (1999-2004) and then head of her own company, Canuso found the planned accidents of Wandering Alice to be a defining moment for her exploration of naturalistic, everyday expression - physical, psychological, and emotional.

"I'm alternately tickled and moved by the complexity that exists in simple glances and shrugs," says Canuso, 35, who revels in the nuance and behavioral patterns of the commonplace, whether in clown dance work in Pig Iron Theatre's comic Flop, trance-like displays in Headlong's Car Alarm and Explanatorium, or her own company's We Spar Down the Lane and the simply beautiful Fail Better. The gestures are spare and subtle, the movements calm, then cascading, heaving.

"The timing, rhythm and intention of an action say so much more than the shape of the action itself. By asking an audience to zoom in, you invite them to see in a more detailed way. My desire to highlight the small things crashes up against my passion for exploding, exaggerating and following momentum."

Child of local stage royalty (director, actor and Theater Exile artistic manager Joe Canuso), wife of composer Michael Kiley (whose band the Mural and the Mint played onstage in Wandering Alice), and herself an ace collaborator, Nichole Canuso keeps each beat of her past nearby.

"I still perform T43 regularly," says Canuso of her 1995 pre-Headlong professional dance debut piece. "It's only seven minutes long, but says everything it needs to in that time. It is performed in silence so the rhythm and timing of the actions build their own tension and logic."

Canuso, aboard since 1996, is the most senior member of Headlong - a 25-year-old troupe with 40-plus dances under its belt. Like Moxie and her own company, Headlong - led by David Brick, Andrew Simonet, and Amy Smith - has an informal performance style that lets audience and performers become one in such pieces as Britney's Inferno and Hotel Pool.

"I give myself over to Headlong's ideas and choreographic concerns, offering movement material and ideas without the pressure of tying it all together," says Canuso. "It's freeing as a balance to running a company - I wear one hat when I'm with Headlong and 12 when I'm NCDC-ing.

"Plus, Headlong's always growing and changing, so it's a fertile respite full of unexpected investigations."

As career highlights, she points to Headlong's '70s-fan-boy tribute St*r W*rs ("it was so damn fun") in 1998, her own company's Fail Better (2006), and her 2002 Pig Iron Flop clown-trio with Lee Etzold and Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey. But she genuinely lights up when discussing how choreography figured in the birth of her son, Simon, now 4.

She took little time off while pregnant and "just got creative about scheduling," doing Flop in Edinburgh once a day for 30 days in her seventh month. Simon began accompanying her to Headlong rehearsals at six weeks and "was such a big presence, codirector Andrew Simonet put him in one of the dances. It was amazing to perform with my son strapped to my chest."

Fail Better was Canuso's first choreographed work post-birth and, unable to stop thinking about Simon, she created a work that drew on his spirit.

"I collaborated with director Jennifer Childs [of 1812 Productions], who also had a young child at home, and Jen helped me channel the strange logic of parenthood into the stark puzzle of a Samuel Beckett play," says Canuso of cribbing Beckett's Act Without Words I as a springboard for Fail Better. The newness of motherhood found a place to breathe and soar onstage without devolving into a sappy show about her baby.

Wandering Alice also was influenced by Simon. "It's literally and figuratively a journey in which all of the little things matter," she says. "These are things Simon highlights for me every day."

Most of 2008's original cast and collaborators - famously fringe-y Philadelphians Mike Kiley, James Sugg, Matt Saunders, Kate Watson-Wallace, Dito VanReigersberg, and Kim Carson - will be on board for the cabaret performance tomorrow night at Johnny Brenda's (details at www.nicholecanusodance.org). She loves collaborators as family - richly appropriate, since Wandering Alice combines choreographic concerns of her past work: clowning, partnering, storytelling, improvisational dance structures, and as icing, interactive design.

"My collaborators created a vivid environment for a performer, me, to interact with, and together we designed landscapes of ever-changing rules and made it so our crowds could interact with us, too."

Canuso and her cast understood the delicate demands of Wandering Alice's structure and performed as though they were offering a gift to the audience. "It gave me chills," she says, "every time."