Two steps up, one step back

Inspired by M.C. Escher, N.C.-born choreographer Mark Dendy returns to ADF, blending precision with passion

DURHAM -- Like I-40 at rush hour, the temporary dance floor at Duke University's Brodie Gym teems with frantic activity and near-collisions.

Colette Krogol dashes, leaps and spins in a straight line, then suddenly changes direction, coming within millimeters of several other dancers determinedly following their own paths.

Unlike rush hour, Krogol's mad patterns have a logic to them. She is doing precisely what the dancer ahead of her did, and what the lines of dancers beside and behind her are also doing, but moments apart -- like a round of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," with layer upon layer of singers starting and ending the song at any given moment.

This is what North Carolina-born choreographer Mark Dendy had an inkling of when he first saw M.C. Escher's mathematically influenced graphic art. But it has taken him more than a quarter century to figure out how to translate the artist's looping patterns and weighty themes from page to stage.

His vision will come to fruition Monday, when he unveils his dance "Preliminary Study for Depth: the upper half of high and low," as part of American Dance Festival's "Past/Forward" program, which features ADF students performing new works and re-creations of modern dance classics.

"Past/Forward" is a homecoming of sorts for Dendy, who got his start as an ADF student in the early 1980s and has performed frequently on its main stage.

His last ADF show was in 2000, after which he migrated to Broadway. He choreographed the Boy George musical "Taboo" and worked on "The Pirate Queen," and he also choreographed off-Broadway's "The Wild Party," winning an Obie Award. His next project is a London stage adaptation of Meat Loaf's iconic 1977 concept album "Bat Out of Hell," which is aiming for a 2010 opening.

Coming into his own

Theater was Dendy's first love, he says. He aspired to be an actor, but a teacher saw him freestyle dancing to a spiritual one day when he was a teen, and she urged him to put off acting in favor of dance.

He was hesitant at first. Then he saw Erick Hawkins' company perform in 1976.

"I do remember that the boys didn't have much on, and I felt like this was the place for me," says Dendy, 47. "That night, I made my decision."

Dendy was in Nashville, Tenn., at the time, having moved in fifth grade from the North Carolina mountain community of Weaverville. He returned to his home state to earn a bachelor of fine arts in modern dance from N.C. School of the Arts.

Former classmate Hunter Peebles of Raleigh recalls how diligently Dendy worked to compensate for his late start. What he lacked in formal dance training, she says, he made up for in inventiveness.

"He was one of the most creative, most imaginative people I ever met," says Peebles, who runs a dance school in Wilson. "The things he would talk about, the things he would choreograph and think about, you would just think, 'No way. There is no way that would work in a dance.' And he always made it work."

One of Dendy's most famous ADF dances was 1991's "Bugs of Durham: Are We Going Somewhere?" It featured dozens of VW Bugs "dancing" across campus with human counterparts.

Dendy also frequently wove acting into his dance, playing Amanda Wingfield in choreographer Jane Comfort's adaptation of "The Glass Menagerie" and adding autobiographical tales and real and imaginary speaking characters into his own pieces, to powerful effect. In "Back Back," he portrayed a Southern Baptist preacher, in "Bus Ride to Heaven" a grandmother, a transvestite televangelist and a crack-addicted prostitute.