Treasuring dance

To secure a position with a dance company a dancer needs training and experience, often in more than one style of dance. But innovative contemporary choreographer Caitlin Corbett only had two criteria in mind when she began casting for her latest work, Tom's Wealth: A Dance for the Masses, last January: the dancers had to be able to count, and had to be able to get up and down from the floor with relative ease.

"And even that is subjective," Corbett says lightly. Corbett has often worked with nonprofessional dancers in the past, but for the new multimedia work she is taking the idea further: The amateurs will outnumber the pros six to one. If that sounds counterintuitive, all the better. In her 15 years of choreography, Corbett has often questioned the rules and assumptions of the dance world, earning praise from Dance Magazine, The Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, which described her work as "honest, engaging, physically and emotionally dangerous, and unpredictable."

Engaging audiences in new ways is central to Corbett's approach to dance. From her beginnings as a minimalist to her increasing interest in complex patterns of movement, she's been breaking dance down to its simplest elements and making the art accessible to more people.

"I think that people who are sitting in the audience will say, that's me!" she says of her nontraditional casting. "There's a body like mine! It really does break the stereotypes of who can dance.

"I think in my work I've always been interested in that sort of mundane aspect of our normal lives, as opposed to the dramatic, glamorous side," she continues. "That is identifiable even in my more complex work with trained dancers."

That tension between the everyday and the elaborate can be seen in the very form of Tom's Wealth, a rich, hour-long performance that spun out of a simple passage in Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain's evocative description of Tom Sawyer's store of humble boyhood treasures led Corbett to ponder simple pleasures. "That little bit of Twain's poetry really brings us back to the everyday," she explains, "and that's something I reach for in all my dance making."

The structure of the dance is based on Tom's sixteen treasures, and set to Christopher Eastburn's inventive new arrangements of familiar American tunes like "Oh My Darling Clementine." Corbett says the idea is to use "American folk songs but obscured, or given a different treatment. Chris brought a contemporary element to them."

Working with Eastburn was perhaps the most important element in the collaborative show, because Corbett began with the music and let it suggest the movement. "Chris created these very complex structures," she says, "and I'm using them fairly exactly. It's almost like mathematical structures, which I'm increasingly interested in. I'm a stickler for counts. Even offstage, my dancers will be counting.

"There was a time I was making dances in silence," she recalls. "Then I was making dances to dogs barking, then it was dance to incidental music. And now, I'm completely immersing myself in the music and I'm really loving it. I'm also increasingly interested in structure and less interested in content, so these musical structures are really exciting."

The collaboration didn't end with the music. Photographer Akos Svilvasi was at every rehearsal shooting the dancers. Because Tom's Wealth is not a narrative piece, Svilvasi's intimate portraits tell no story, except perhaps that of the humanity of the dancers. Filmmaker Ann Steurnagel, Corbett's partner and frequent collaborator, has taken the photographs and woven them into a video projection in time with the score. "The photography is just amazing," Corbett says, "and Ann has edited it into something filmic and rhythmic."

While video projection might sounds like a strangely complex form of simplicity, the photos will highlight Corbett's starting point: the dancers.

"My dancers are so beautiful and so committed," she sighs. "They break your heart a little because they're so honest. It's about simplicity and purity. I'm interested in what beauty is, and redefining the standards."

Caitlin Corbett Dance Company performs Tom's Wealth: A Dance for the Masses at 8 p.m., Sept. 19 and 20, at Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave, Boston. Tickets $12-$25. For reservations call 617.353.8725. Learn more about the company at www.caitlincorbettdance.org.