Techno time warp Lostwax get interactive BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Modern dance has often used text as well as music to accompany movement, but with the aid of sophisticated technology, text can actually guide the movement. It does that and much more in a piece titled Rest/Less, to be presented by Lostwax — a group who has performed in New York and Boston and has now relocated to Providence — on March 4 and 5 at the Carriage House Stage (call [401] 273-9009). Rest/Less was originally scheduled for January 21 and 22 but the show on the 22nd was cancelled in the face of the blizzard, so here’s another chance to see this unusual multi-media piece.

Lostwax was founded by choreographer and Buddhist teacher Jamie Jewett and dancer/visual artist Aaron Henderson; together they created several complex pieces based on "exploring the dramatic relationship of live performers to the saturated image-world of digital culture and the human imagination." Currently, Jewett heads the company, and he collaborates most often with poet and author Thalia Field, who teaches creative writing at Brown and is married to Jewett.

"Lostwax" refers to the lost-wax process in which a positive form in wax is cast with a heat-resistant material, such as clay, which can then be later cast in metal. The wax is "lost" in the baking of the first mold.

"The name resonates with a lot of alchemical or Older World points of view," explained Jewett in a recent phone conversation from his East Side home. "It’s an ancient process; it speaks to a multi-layered, multivalent process, where something, for example, narrative might be non-linear or slightly obscured or not directly beating us over the head, but more environmental in the nooks and crannies of the piece."

Jewett, 36, received his undergraduate degree in movement and Buddhist studies from Naropa University in Colorado, founded by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa; his MFA is in dance and technology from Ohio State University. He brings many strands of modern dance into his work, including the Japanese avant-garde movement called Butoh; the "release-technique" developed by Trisha Brown and other New York-based dancer/choreographers; and contact improvisation. In addition, he spent a year in Indonesia, studying with a master of dance and absorbing many aspects of ritual performance and traditional movement. He is also a certified dharma arts teacher.

"Dharma arts is a theory and a practice of creative process that resonates with the lost-wax thing," Jewett reflected. "It’s like the Jungian idea of letting the sub-conscious come forth in a different way than top down. It’s more bottom up, like water seeping in to fill a cavity.

"In certain ways, my work is at once going backwards toward a more traditional and ritual-based aesthetic," he continued, "while at the same time it’s going forward into a world of very sophisticated technology. I’m using very contemporary and cutting-edge tools to talk about very essential questions: ‘What is community? Spirituality? Being? What is emptiness and how is that manifested? If you look at Zen calligraphy, what would that be in a dance?’ "

For Rest/Less, Jewett was considering a way to Web-publish an 87-page book that Field had hand-drawn and written. She had made grids that were two cells high and four cells wide and inscribed a different phrase on each line. In Jewett’s words, "reading the book becomes this physical and non-recursive journey, with a quality of restlessness or traveling." It occurred to him that this non-traditional "book" could be transformed into a performance piece.

Thus, Jewett set up a stage space 20’x16’, with 4’x5’ cells on it. Whenever one of his five dancers crosses any of the lines that form the grid, the phrase that’s written on that line is projected and also vocalized; approximately 30 of the 201 grid phrases from the book are used in the show. Added to this is a sonic environment that is computer-generated with virtual "wind chimes."

"The movement itself has a quality of restlessness," Jewett noted. "It starts with quoting an airport or a bus station, a sense of travel. There’s also a sense of community in the piece. The dancers start as disparate entities and slowly a little community is formed.

"I think my work tends to be very, very dense," he readily admitted, "and the meaning is entwined in that density. I’m interested in creating environments that dance inhabits, in creating a world that the audience enters and participates in."

Jewett hopes that audiences will take away a sense of the tones and colors that Field’s writing evokes — "it’s funny and introspective, quirky, with a whole lot of flavors." Another layer in the piece is to show the sophistication of what the dancers are thinking while they’re dancing.

"Basically, what you’re seeing or experiencing simultaneously," Jewett observed, "is the movement performance but also you’re watching thought and then the interactive environment is being used to help propel that sense."

If all of these verbal explanations of something that is essentially surround-sound plus surround-vision make you, well, "restless" to take part in this multi-media work, head to the Carriage House next weekend for Lostwax’s Rest/Less.