A choreographer takes an opera to heart

'Two hours is a long time for a dance," Robert Ashley intoned laconically, early in his opera Dust. But when choreographer Megan Bridge first heard the original 1999 recording, she didn't think so. It made her want to "jump, flail, arch, swoon, and simply walk forward toward an imaginary audience in a straight line that extends infinitely."

She first made a short solo, and performed it last year at a Scratch Night, the free Monday teasers at the FringeArts space across from the Race Street Pier. Nick Stuccio, artistic director and founder of FringeArts, saw it and asked Bridge when she'd have the entire opera choreographed.

Bridge had never thought of doing the whole piece, but she took a deep breath and blithely said, "Oh, by early 2015." For some people, when you say something, you have to make it happen.

Dust is only 90 minutes long, so when Ashley, who died in March 2014 at 83, gave her permission to use the 1999 recording, she went all in. (There is a newer recording on YouTube with staged video.) This danced Dust will receive its world premiere at FringeArts Thursday through Saturday.

Stuccio, a big fan of Ashley's, said, "I think Megan has a deeply engaging presence on stage that I love. Dust is a tremendous work. This is a case where there is great synergy between these two very smart makers - different generations, different genres - but a very nuanced melding of artistic perspectives. Megan's sensitive interpretation of this work is brilliant."

In an interview when Dust premiered at the Kitchen in New York in 1999, Ashley said, "It's about five homeless people who live in a park someplace around the world, probably in front of my house." That would be Tribeca Park at West Broadway and Beach Street, where Ashley lived for decades with his wife, Mimi Johnson. Johnson founded Lovely Music at the American Thread Building on the corner and you'll find Ashley's music, along with other giants of 20th-century new music on that label.

The date of that first showing was March 3, 2014, and, unbeknownst to Bridge, Ashley had died that afternoon. Her pleasure at being asked to make a full-length piece was dashed by the news.

During a run-through at FringeArts several weeks ago, it was clear she used that sorrow to make a moving paean with simple four-beat phrases that don't so much externalize the melancholy yet wryly amusing text and music as color them softly or underline them bitingly.

Dancers Christina Gesualdi, Beau Hancock, Greg Holt, and Michele Tantoco alternately represent four of the five "homeless" people (the chorus) and Bridge takes Ashley's role, so to speak. Peter Price's video design uses commercially available infrared sensors prompted by the dancers' movements.

"I have been listening to it for so long . . . in the car, on headphones, in my kitchen," Bridge says. "Even still, now that I'm working on it and listening to it constantly, there is so much in this piece of music, so many layers, that I still hear something new every time."

Bridge, who is 36, has danced and mentored with Deborah Hay and Lucinda Childs, which helped shape her spare reading of this music. Just as Philip Glass' music became an agency for Childs' choreography, Bridge's affinity with Ashley's propels hers. Her choreographic tone skims purposefully along its tragic irony, its staggering emotional buildup, its dubiousness and incongruities.

"I think there is something about Ashley's music that is folksy and hokey, self-referential and self-deprecating in a humorous way. And I think it's really satisfying sometimes for an audience, after being confronted by abstract, pattern-based or even abstract but expressive movement, to finally see movement line up with the narrative."

Composer and videographer Peter Price is Bridge's long-term collaborator and husband, "and in a sense he is the behind-the-scenes dramaturge for every project I do," she said. "Peter introduced me to Ashley's work, and to Dust when it came out in 1999, and he met Ashley several times over the years."

"In fact, this whole project was initiated by an e-mail that Ashley sent me in 2012. He was trying to track down Peter because he wanted to quote from Peter's book Resonance: Philosophy for Sonic Art, in a new libretto he was working on." When she linked Ashley to Peter, she also asked if anyone had ever choreographed Dust. "He said no, and gave me the go-ahead. But anyway, Peter has a history with this music."

"Each section has a different kind of harmonic rhythm," Price said. "In other words, the pacing of the chord changes is different in each. Harmonies are notated in the score in the same way they would be for jazz, so Blue Gene [composer and pianist Blue Gene Tyranny on piano and synthesizer] is responsible in the same way a jazz musician improvises."

As part of Philly Tech Week, audience members who arrive by 7 p.m. Saturday can get on stage and interact with the sensors.

"It's a cumulative thing," Price said. "As the chorus of dancers mark out that underlying rhythmic structure, the color loops of video are mixed, processed and controlled, all in real time."

Joseph Franklin, with the then-new Relâche Ensemble, introduced Ashley's music to Philadelphia audiences with She Was a Visitor around 1979, and later brought his The Wolfman to Philadelphia schools. Ashley last appeared in Philadelphia at International House in 2011 and drew a substantial crowd.

Mimi Johnson, who also managed the careers of choreographers Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Laura Dean, told Bridge that Ashley's music didn't need dance.

But," Bridge says, "my dance needs Bob's music."

DUST

8 p.m. Thursday to Saturday at FringeArts, Race Street at Columbus Boulevard.

Tickets: $15-$20.

Information: 215-413-1318 or www.fringearts.com