DANCE : Signs O’ the Times : In less than six months, the Joffrey Ballet’s ‘Billboards,’ four ballets choreographed to the music of pop star Prince, has become as popular as, yes, the troupe’s annual ‘Nutcracker’

SAN FRANCISCO —  Midway through a performance of the Joffrey Ballet’s full-evening rock extravaganza, “Billboards,” the audience in the War Memorial Opera House hears the introduction to Prince’s “Purple Rain” and explodes in whistles and cheers.

This ovation comes during a blackout, so it can’t be mistaken for a tribute to the “Billboards” dancers or choreographers. No, it signals the sense of identification and expectancy of young ticket-holders lured to a ballet event because it celebrates and interprets their music.

“This is like a rock spectacular of some kind,” says Charles Moulton, one of four choreographers selected by Joffrey artistic director Gerald Arpino. “People feel free to scream and shout, and I think that’s great. It brings a different audience to the opera house and it also shows people that ballet is a very malleable form--there’s no point in being afraid of it.”

Afraid of it? Not to worry: Less than six months after its premiere in Iowa City, Iowa, “Billboards” has become something of a warm-weather “Nutcracker,” attracting capacity crowds, generating new bookings and affirming the Joffrey’s original identity as an all-American, 20th-Century ensemble.

It has also shifted the emphasis away from star dancers or choreographers toward the star composer--in this case, reclusive rock icon Prince Rogers Nelson, 34, who discovered classical dance at a Joffrey performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion two years ago and lent an album’s worth of songs to the production.

They range from the early “For You” to the recent “I Wanna Melt With U,” 14 in all--one of them (“Gett Off”) cut to just a fragment, but another (“Thunder”) heard in an expanded version composed for the Joffrey.

“Billboards” brings the Joffrey to the Pavilion for five performances starting Wednesday,then three more at the Orange County Performing Arts Center starting July 27.

All the choreographers involved previously created one-act ballets for the company and recent phone interviews revealed their shared interest in Prince years before Arpino conceived the project.

None matched the world-class hyperbole of Los Angeles Festival artistic director Peter Sellars, who has called Prince “a modern Mozart and one of the most important figures in the history of music.” However, Moulton came closest with enthusiasm-unto-reverence (“He’s like a saint”).

Below are their comments on Prince, their approaches to his music and the “Billboards” project as a whole. (Prince himself has reportedly not seen “Billboards” and declined to be interviewed.)

Charles Moulton

“I’ve always been a Prince fan,” Moulton says, “and I did a lot of dancing to his music in various clubs and party situations. He’s great. He’s this pop composer but he also has a strong sense of structure. He really knows what makes rhythm work, he’s got a fantastic idea of melody line and there’s an interesting mind there. It was very challenging for me to look at his music from my own point of view.”

Moulton’s part of “Billboards” begins with Valerie Madonia as a kind of errant Eros goosing Adam Sklute with her magic wand and leading a series of grotesque sexual encounters set to “Thunder.” It finishes with an emotional solo for Elizabeth Parkinson (in “Pagliacci” drag) to “Purple Rain.”

Moulton, 38, sees these sections as “two sides of the same coin. Here’s this ‘Thunder’ piece with all these people running around essentially manifesting sexual excess, an almost mechanical sexuality: highly costumed, highly posed, highly stylized. It’s very profane, intentionally so. Part of the world is that.

“In some ways we are getting to the point at the end of this century when a lot is going on, not just with sexuality but in our culture, that is intolerant, unconsidered. Think about radical polarization, the rebirth of racism, the bigotry against AIDS, the suppression of the arts. This is a dark time and certainly ‘Thunder’ reflects that.

“But the flip side is this single, vulnerable person on stage with a sense of dignity and continuance--seeing the world and being hurt by it.

“I would say that a simple message for my work is that individual dignity is the responsibility of everyone. That is what I hope the ‘Purple Rain’ section stands for.”

Making a ballet to a song as widely known as “Purple Rain” was “very loaded, very tough,” Moulton says, “because I did not feel like making an easy piece, an MTV piece. To me, the song is really opera, emotionally charged ballad opera--an aria almost. So I interpreted it as an operatic statement.

“I wanted to challenge people to find new meaning in the music,” he says. “If audiences go away from ‘Purple Rain’ with some new way of having that be meaningful, that’s really the point.”

Such statements may not sound as if they belong to the creator of the Joffrey’s irreverent “Panoramagram,” but Moulton hasn’t exactly abandoned his basic instincts. “This (piece) is really out there for me,” he says. “It gave me an opportunity to grow and I feel that, in some ways, it’s a start, a new beginning. I would love to continue working in this vein.

“However, I think that one of the main issues of my work is entertainment. My father was a vaudevillian and my grandfather was a vaudevillian and I grew up in musical theater. I am interested in structure and in larger issues, but I’m also constantly interested in giving people a way into something. I feel that a lot of work takes itself too seriously. So I always try to have a sense of humor about what I’m doing as a (so-called) ‘serious postmodern artist.’ ”

Moulton credits the success of “Billboards” to Prince and to “Jerry (Arpino) picking these unusual people. I mean, Laura Dean making choreography to Prince ? But it works, it works great. He chose these very different individuals, and the whole evening works because of that. I don’t think there’s a common sense of what Prince is or what the music is. But there’s an awful lot of skill out there.”

Laura Dean

Where Moulton admitted that awareness of Prince as a performer influenced his choreography (“I can definitely see him doing the ‘Purple Rain’ solo”), Dean says she “worked with Prince as a composer--period. If I make a dance to music by Steve Reich, am I going to think about his sexuality? Of course not. It’s the same with Prince.”

The bottom line: “He’s a very good mover,” Dean says. “I’d like to choreograph for him. I think he needs a choreographer. But I’m only working with his music, and it’s the way I work with any composer.”

Well, not exactly. Dean, 47, concedes that “Billboards” proved unusual for her because “what was important to me were Prince’s lyrics, even though when you’re watching dance, you don’t usually think of the words right away. But he’s a wonderful writer and I wanted his words to be apparent. That became the most important focus for me.

“As far as his actual music goes, years ago somebody said my work was a cross between Little Richard and Mozart and I thought that was right on, and so I was already in his neck of the woods because of my own music. I found it very compatible.”

The best-known of the “Billboards” choreographers, Dean described herself as “somewhat familiar” with Prince’s music in the past. “I don’t usually listen to music in general,” she says, “because I like listening to silence as much as possible. It’s just the way I am. But what I did see were his films ‘Graffiti Bridge’ and ‘Purple Rain.’

“This was years ago, on my own, and I just thought they were terrific. Because here was a person very much like me: I do the music for my own company, I do the costumes, I do the choreography. And here was a fellow artist who was involved with the writing of the scripts, what they looked like and the music. And both of those films have a unique feeling: sort of semi-fantasy, semi-reality.

“I watched each of them twice. I also appreciated his message, I think. There was a wonderful innocence about it, playful yet also quite serious at the same time.”

For “Billboards,” Dean says she “listened to everything he ever wrote, and I kept going back to a song called ‘Sometimes It Snows in April,’ about a friend of his who died. The lyrics are quite beautiful, and I somehow wanted to respond to that song. Especially in light of the AIDS epidemic which is becoming much worse and is affecting most people’s lives.

“Now Prince lives in Minneapolis and sometimes it does snow in April there, but that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that things happen in our lives that we just can’t control. So that’s how my section opens.”

Anyone who has seen Dean’s five previous ballets for the Joffrey, or the repertory of her own modern-dance company, will recognize the formal group structures in her choreography here, the costumes that glitter and gleam like diamonds and pearls, the lush flow of movement across the stage.

“All good things, they say, never last,” Prince sings in this section, and Dean creates a vision of perfect order to counterpoint his words. Then she shifts gears radically with a series of partnering tests to “Trust” (from “Batman”) and a full-out ensemble showpiece to “Baby I’m a Star.”

“What I was thinking about there was how all the Joffrey dancers are stars,” she says. “I love working with these guys. I consider the Joffrey part of my family.”

Margo Sappington

Sappington, 45, is the only “Billboards” choreographer to have previously created a rock ballet for the Joffrey--”Weewis” in 1971--and she says she found herself “very much at home” in the new assignment: “I felt I was doing something that I really do well--choreography to rock ‘n’ roll.”

She’s been a Prince fan long enough to boast that she has “all his records--not CDs or tapes, but the actual 33s . When Jerry (Arpino) spoke to me about the ballet, I already had songs in mind that were my favorites.”

However, Sappington had more difficulty over her choice of music than any “Billboards” choreographer. “We had to submit songs for Prince’s approval and all mine were from ‘Purple Rain,’ ” she says. “I got back word that Prince did not want any of us to use songs only from one album. He wanted each ballet to be a mix. So I regrouped and chose songs from other albums as well as from ‘Purple Rain.’

“One of my first ideas was to take Prince songs that other artists had recorded--for instance, Tom Jones’ version of ‘Kiss’ and Sinead O’Connor singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ but it just got too complicated rights-wise. It was not possible.” In the end, Sappington used “Computer Blue,” “I Wanna Melt With U,” “The Beautiful Ones” and “Release It” (co-written by Prince, but performed by Morris Day and The Time).

“I feel there’s a very sensitive side to Prince that one doesn’t always see,” Sappington says, “and I wanted that to come across, not just the sexy Prince. Often he uses themes of he-never-gets-the-girl. So I decided to do a ballet that didn’t have a traditional male/female pas de deux in it. And I started putting limitations on myself.

“I was not that familiar with the dancers in the company anymore, and I found that I was more interested in the men than I was in lots of the women. So I chose to use three women and eight men.”

The quasi-narrative result finds Tom Mossbrucker cast as a brooding central figure caught between what Sappington calls “men who are proud of themselves and show it,” and women so unreachable that sometimes they seem to be dancing in another dimension entirely.

“To me, it’s the chasm that has developed partially because of feminism,” Sappington says of her theme. “It’s a woman who doesn’t want to be touched. She likes thinking about it but she doesn’t actually want to be touched--what goes along with being touched. And what that does to a man who might want to touch her, his feeling of frustration, how that burns him.

“When I was choosing my cast, I said I wanted Tom Mossbrucker and I didn’t know why. But it proved to be a wonderful collaboration. I’m crazy about Tom. I think he’s a fabulous dancer, very sensitive and astute. He understood when he watched me do something and he would catch the nuance and really make it his own.”

In San Francisco, Mossbrucker’s non-communication duet opposite Beatriz Rodriguez earned “Billboards” its first-ever boos. PC feminism, perhaps, or someone unhappy with Sappington’s view of sexual relationships? Sappington is bemused by the response and denies that her section is downbeat about sexuality. “I feel it’s very sexy,” she says. “But I’m not throwing it in everyone’s face.

“What I think I’m relaying is that men are sexy, women are sexy and they don’t necessarily have to be in bed together to be sexy. They can be sexy standing there alone or dancing with their own sex or dancing in a mixed group. They don’t have to be coupled with a partner of the opposite sex in order to be sexy. They can be sexy all by themselves.”

Peter Pucci

Possibly the most talked-about moment in “Billboards” comes during the final, Pucci section, when Philip Gardner sinks backward on the floor and looks up longingly as Jodie Gates stretches her leg toward him and inserts her scarlet toe shoe in his mouth.

Pucci, 37, says the idea “came out in the studio, when we were goofing off. It’s sexual, sure, and I knew we were taking a chance--that some people would hate it. But Prince’s music provokes and that’s probably why I chose to do it.”

Prince-as-sexual-provocateur also partly inspired Pucci’s use of same-sex couples alongside his central, Gates/Gardner partnership. “Prince is very androgynous sometimes,” he says. “Earlier he was that way and sort of contradictory in what he did as a performer. So I put men together dancing and women together dancing instead of only the basic male/female thing.

“(Earlier) I did a piece called ‘Love Duets’ for my own (modern-dance) company, and I used the same idea: two women dancing together and then two men and then a man and a woman. They were exactly the same duets, back to back, and the feeling was the same. Only the bodies changed.

“It’s something I feel strongly about--that we just have to get over this stuff about gays-this and lesbians-this. People are people. There’s too much intolerance in our country and it’s too puritanical. I didn’t want to hit people over the head with the idea, but I decided to use it again in the Joffrey piece. I thought that a larger audience would be able to see it here.”

Pucci chose “For You,” “The Question of U,” “It,” “Willing and Able” and a smidgen of “Gett Off” for his section, then followed his instincts in developing a dance style. “I don’t go to clubs, so I don’t know what goes on there,” he says, “and I hardly ever watch MTV, but I got in the studio for months and worked with this music.

“It was very basic: Put the record on, just move to it, see what works. It’s me, moving like I do, keeping what I think will work, what feels good to me to dance.

“I made some material before I went into the Joffrey (rehearsals) but I tried to mold it to the dancers. I wanted it to fit them as individuals because a lot of the kids knew the music and were very, very hot to do it. I wanted them to feel like it was their movement.”

Pucci previously choreographed the all-male “Moon of the Falling Leaves” for the Joffrey, so “Billboards” found him exploring pointe technique for the first time. “I was a little insecure about it at first,” he admits, “but the possibilities were interesting and I feel like I’ve just touched it. With some of the steps, I tried to get fast pointe work that still had a social dancing look to it. I tried to combine them.

“I’m a modern dancer, and to have another vocabulary and another outlet was a very freeing experience. For starters, I don’t normally get to work with a large group. And I want to be able to do that again.”

Regarding the impact of “Billboards” on audiences, Pucci says he’s “excited about it for the dance community in general. It was a brilliant move on Mr. Arpino’s part to get people into the theater. There’s a lot of young people coming out, as they did for (Arpino’s 1971 rock ballet) ‘Trinity’ and (Robert Joffrey’s 1967 rock ballet) ‘Astarte’ that don’t normally see ballet.

“There are 19-, 20-year-old kids watching it, and they go away saying, ‘Wow,’ and I’m for that--getting people excited about dance.”