Raised Arches and Flatted Fifths

In her Los Angeles dance studio, Pat Taylor stands still, offering no outward sign that her head is full of motion. She stops the music, works out a choreographic kink, then reveals her solution in the half-verbal, half-corporeal language of dancers.

The next day, hundreds of miles away in San Francisco, composer Mark Shelby laughs softly when he hears about the rehearsal. “They’re going to be shocked when I show up Sunday with major abbreviations and additions.”

But that’s the way it works in the Jazzantiqua Dance and Music Ensemble.

For five years, Jazzantiqua has mingled the worlds of live jazz music and modern dance. The composer and choreographer agree on a theme--often inspired by art or literature--and each goes to work. The music and dance develop on parallel tracks, merging in the final weeks of rehearsal. The process requires a steady stream of communication--and a lot of flexibility.

“It’s not like it’s my dance company and he writes the music,” Taylor says. “We really try to keep it on an even playing field. He really is involved with everything from the beginning. So we phone and fax a lot.”

In recent weeks, the company has been fitting together the pieces of “The Soul Never Dwells in a Dry Place,” a three-part program they will perform Saturday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. Its segments are connected by the idea of legacy, according to Taylor, and the notion that all artists are empowered by those who came before them.

Most clearly illustrating this theme is “Night Train . . . for Lester, Alvin and Miss D,” a homage to choreographers Lester Horton, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham. In rehearsal, the dancers glide from the athletic style of Ailey into the African-informed movements of the Dunham method. Swaying, seductive hips are punctuated by dramatic wrist gestures. But the whole piece embodies that indefinable element of jazz: It swings.

Another premiere on the Ford program is “The Ballad of Josh Gibson,” about the legendary player for the Negro Baseball League. Filling out the concert will be segments from “Midtown Sunset,” a piece inspired by Romare Bearden’s art and Langston Hughes’ writing that was the first work Shelby and Taylor created together in 1992.

The careers of Taylor and Shelby--who are co-artistic directors of Jazzantiqua--were wildly divergent until their paths crossed in Leimert Park in 1991.

Shelby, 31, is handsome and soft-spoken--”stoic . . . but very sensitive,” says Taylor. He was born in Alaska and lived all over the country before coming to Los Angeles in 1990 to take an electrical engineering job with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He couldn’t give up the bass, though, and eventually quit engineering and enrolled at CalArts. He’s now the leader of the straight-ahead jazz quintet Black/Note, whose players often overlap with Jazzantiqua. He moved to San Francisco last year, though he keeps an apartment here.

Taylor, who is 38 but could pass for 25 with her close-cropped hair and round eyeglasses, is a product of Los Angeles. She was introduced to dance at age 9 through the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. “My brother played Little League on Saturdays and my mother was looking for something for me to do,” Taylor says. “Dance classes took place at the same time.” She studied through high school with R’Wanda Lewis and her Afro-American Dance Company and majored in dance at UCLA. She then got a scholarship to study at the Inner City Cultural Center. Two years later she was running their dance program.

But it wasn’t until she went to Europe in 1985 to teach and choreograph that she truly discovered jazz. The music feels human, she says. Listening to jazz, she sees people and places; she hears conversations.

You can see that connection in Taylor’s own dancing, says new company member Elaine Wang.

“The way she dances is very sophisticated,” says Wang. “It’s not about high legs and complicated turns. It’s very subtle. She dances within the music--and that’s what’s so difficult for us to capture.”

When Taylor returned to Los Angeles in 1991, she established the Dance Collective, a studio in Leimert Park, and met Shelby at the World Stage, a jazz club across the street.

The two have connected so strongly that even the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is bridgeable. They have their own way of talking--using colors and feelings to get at what they want to create. They each research a subject, discuss the themes they want to draw out of it, and then find stand-in music that captures the proper tone.

So back when Shelby was drafting the real score for “The Ballad of Josh Gibson,” the eight male dancers--five of them guest artists--practiced to Earth, Wind & Fire.

Dancer Charles Zacharie says he’s had to learn to stay open to the music, which will change once the band arrives. Taylor constantly reminds the dancers: “This is the feel, but don’t get it locked into your body.”

The music is, in fact, never locked in. True to the tradition of jazz, every Jazzantiqua performance incorporates improvisation--a staple for musicians, but not at all routine for dancers. The dancers have to adapt to instrumental solos--which change with every performance--and have to improvise solos of their own.

“I have to tell you, I’ve lost dancers over the idea of improvisation,” Taylor says. “Dancers have a real need to know that they’re doing the right thing--making the right line, the right movement. . . . Improvisation requires you to invest part of yourself. It’s really you, and you’re going to be affected--just like the musicians are--by whether you’re mad or tired or your paycheck didn’t come in.”

The dancers who have stayed around have learned to trust Taylor’s instincts. When she announced that they were going to adapt “The Odyssey” for a 1996 show at the Ford Amphitheatre, some thought she was crazy--including member Bruce Nelson.

The dance-drama that resulted, “Odysseus Suite,” was provocative and ambitious, translating Homer’s epic into contemporary African American life. Times dance critic Lewis Segal wrote that what could have been a novelty “achieves genuine stature: the richness of one epic odyssey superimposed on another.”

“That’s the kind of thing people get commissions to do, spend a year researching and then take another year to do it,” Nelson says. “And Pat, she says in winter, ‘We’re going to do this in the summer. Let’s go.’ ”

As chaotic as it may sound--sweeping visions, last-minute reworkings, improvisational music--Taylor provides a highly organized core. When the company starts a new project, each member receives a three-ring binder containing articles, schedules and fliers.

Jazzantiqua performs only half a dozen times a year, so each show has to count. The sheer scale of some pieces--”Odysseus Suite” had a corps of West African dancers, “Josh Gibson” has those five guest performers--prevents frequent restaging. And money can be tight. Sometimes there are grants; sometimes it comes out of Taylor’s pocket. Always the dancers hold out the hope that the company is on the verge of making it to the next level.

“This does require a lot of work and time and people,” Taylor said, “but each time we’re hoping this will be the thing that will jump-start and attract the presenters to us.”

Indeed, the fact that Jazzantiqua--with its eight dancers and five musicians--still exists after five years is testament to how much the members believe in the group’s mission: to create an art that fuses the best of jazz music and dance.

“She’s very centered, balanced. Can you imagine trying to organize a rehearsal with 16 or 17 people?” Shelby says. “The things that we’ve tried to do could easily have been defeated years ago because it takes so much money and so much sacrifice. But Pat’s spirit and creative force have kept things not only going, but succeeding.”

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JAZZANTIQUA PERFORMS “THE SOUL NEVER DWELLS IN A DRY PLACE,” John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $15-$20. Phone: (800) 209-5277.