Martha Clarke puts accent on movement in ART's 'Midsummer'

CAMBRIDGE - As if in slow motion, Paola Styron jetes across the stage, smiling beatifically. Her arms float up. And her body follows, a couple of inches off the ground.

This is no macho acrobatic leap high in the air, but more of a gentle, sexy, aerial glide, thanks to the pulleys to which she is harnessed.

Director Martha Clarke watches intently from the front row of the Loeb Drama Center here. She stands up - her Pomeranian Sofie on her hip - and calls out flight instructions. ``One leap, two leap, twist.'' Styron nods and then turns to the guys onstage pulling the two sets of ropes that help her swing and lift off.

``I need to be down a quarter inch,'' Styron calls out. They shift slightly, and now her toes can grip the floor better. Later she'll leap lightly onto another actor's back or spring off his upturned palm.

The American Repertory Theatre's production of ``A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' in which Styron plays a fairy, is the third show involving flight that the director and actress have worked on. Clarke likes flight; it's another way to show emotion through physicality, she says, an aerial version of the dance work she's done over the last 30 years.

Clarke blends movement, text, music and song into a whole new form. She's choreographed for top dance companies, directed operas around the world, and collaborated with writers on new productions - work that has won her worldwide acclaim and numerous honors, including the MacArthur ``genius award.''

Now she's taking on her first Shakespeare play. Is there anything fresh to say about this tale of young lovers and mistaken identity, magic potions, and turmoil in the fairy kingdom?

Clarke thinks so, and it's much more than just about flying. ``The play embodies all the nuances of love and how transformative it can be - for better or for worse,'' she says.

It's the day before the flying rehearsal, and Clarke has two feet on the ground in ART artistic director Robert Woodruff's office.

Her take on the play reflects her comfort with multiple artistic disciplines: ``It is airy and spacious. And it's got a lot of pendulum swings in it, a lot of different notes to play.''

Some of the notes may be darker than people are used to. Like the Royal Shakespeare Company production of ``As You Like It'' that closed recently, love in ``Dream'' is viewed as something perilous and momentous.

That's reflected in her choice of music for the show: Chopin's Nocturnes - ``very melancholy,'' she says. ``Happy love is not interesting on the stage. All the major characters have very high stakes. It's about survival and getting what they want and being understood, and not being understood.''

Clarke looks exhausted as she sips take-out chicken soup, with Sofie and her other Pomeranian, Pie, next to her on the couch. While she rehearses ``Dream,'' she's also developing a new work about Toulouse-Lautrec for Lincoln Center Theater and one based on Luigi Pirandello stories for the New York Theater Workshop, talking with the Martha Graham company about a new commission, and teaching at Juilliard.

Despite her fatigue, she is merry (or maybe punchy), frequently erupting in Carol Burnett-like peals of laughter.

``I'm having the time of my life,'' she says. ``But if I just want to put my head on `sleep,' I watch re-runs of `Sex and the City.'''

Her production of ``Dream'' could be Shakespeare's version of ``Sex and the City,'' only with costumes from the late 19th century, plus some undershirts and tulle.

Sexuality, she says, ``seems to be a subject I've investigated many times. This play has erotic potential, but it's more raw than that. It doesn't simmer so much. Everything's in a state already.''

How much of a state are we talking about here? ``Bottom (played by Thomas Derrah) and Titania (Karen MacDonald) have a very lusty go at it. It's not the Royal Ballet,'' she says, laughing.

She emphasizes that she isn't imposing choreography on the actors, that the movement comes out of the text and what the actors are feeling. But she does choreograph the fairies in the air.

``It's about space, it's about rhythms, it's about coming together and going away,'' she says. ``And it's about using depth and width. Abstract space itself is a tool in storytelling.''

ART dramaturg Gideon Lester says, ``She comes out of the world of choreography, but unlike most contemporary American choreographers - Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris - her work has always told stories. They tend to be about deep human emotions - love, death, sexuality, grief. It's never been about pure form, the shapes of bodies as they move across the stage.''

Clarke, he says, has created a hybrid form that's greater than its parts: ``She brings to her dance a sense of theatricality and brings to her theater a sense of dance and choreography. She paints pictures of relationships by the way the characters stand, where they stand, how they move in relationship to each other.''

The director begins the process of working with her actors by improvising, she says, in order to ``learn the personality of each individual player. I take notes of what their instincts are, because nothing is as honest or as fresh as the first go at it. It's how I learn who they are as people, as well.''

She likens the process to going to a cocktail party: ``I take the energy of the day and the chemistry of the room in the moment. I like to keep the atmosphere very, very playful until the third week, when you've got to be serious. Then I begin to make a gridwork that they can rely on, whether they're feeling well or not, whether they feel like acting or not. I try to build an armature so that they have safety and freedom simultaneously.''

This production of ``Dream'' is the first time Clarke has directed a play by a nonliving author. She was a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theater and Crowsnest, and she choreographed for the Joffrey Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, and Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. As a director, her original productions include ``Vienna: Lusthaus'' and ``Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited), '' which was recently revived off-Broadway, and ``Garden of Earthly Delights,'' which ran at the ART in 1985. Her operas include ``The Magic Flute'' and ``Cosi Fan Tutte'' for Glimmerglass Opera and Tan Dun's ``Marco Polo'' and Gluck's ``Orfeo ed Euridice,'' which were performed at the New York City Opera.

While dance or movement have always been major elements in her work, lately, she says, the emphasis has been shifting toward more text and language.

But because she has never done Shakespeare before, she enlisted the help of Deborah Hecht, a voice and speech consultant who teaches at New York University. She had Hecht work with the actors for a week on ``diction, nuance, intention, freedom, meaning,'' she says.

Clarke has developed a trademark style over the years, one she describes as spare, concise, and unadorned. It's partly because she works with the same people over and over, among them Robert Israel (who does sets and costume design here) and composer Richard Peaslee. Peaslee was the composer for Sir Peter Brook's ground-breaking 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of ``Midsummer Night's Dream.'' Styron has worked with Clarke for 20 years.

``I think in time, if we survive, we get a kind of fingerprint, no matter if it's Shakespeare or Pirandello,'' Clarke says. ``There's a certain point where I think, ```Oh, that looks like a Martha Clarke show.' The way I use light, the way I use music, the way I use space. I have a style now. I've been doing it long enough. I began as a dancer when I was 13, and I've never stopped, really. And I'm going to be 60.''

She dissolves into laughter. The dogs lift their heads and bark at something. Clarke edges out the door, eager to get to ``Sex and the City.''

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.