Pure movement Steve Jobe and Three Dances mix it up BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Growing up in Rhode Island with musician parents who had a wide circle of musician friends, choreographer/ dancer Brinsley Davis, 26, has been listening to Steve Jobe’s compositions her whole life. So when she and two friends in Minneapolis, where she’s based, began to choreograph together, she brought in a well-worn cassette of Jobe’s music to accompany their very first piece. They’ve since become the experimental dance group Three Dances and Jobe has written a lot more music. Together they will present a show of live music and dance, Happy On Our Sinking Ship, this weekend at the Carriage House Stage.

Though she majored in English at Goucher, Davis, who had danced with Festival Ballet from the time she was four, continued to take three dance classes each semester and to perform in college dance concerts. After graduation, she learned that Minneapolis is one of the most vibrant modern dance communities in the States, and she picked up and moved to the North Country in 2000.

There she met Jamey Leonard and Suzanne Wiltgen in a choreography class, and they quickly agreed that "the pieces we made together were a lot stronger than the ones we made on our own.

"Our stuff is considered avant-garde," Davis explained on the phone from Minnesota. "It’s very character-based with odd costumes and a lot of humor. People sometimes look at our work and say, ‘Gosh, those people have no technique at all.’ Actually, we’re all highly trained professional dancers, but we just think it’s more fun to fall down and to push each other over."

Once Davis told Jobe that they had set a piece to his music, he began to send them more of it. In 2001, he asked them to come to Rhode Island to participate in the first installment of what he calls a "work-in-progress," titled Bosch’s Harp.

For Sinking Ship, they have reworked the three pieces from Bosch’s Harp and added three new pieces. The dancers have expanded their vision of their characters in the 2001 pieces and have thereby modified the movements. They also have different costumes and a different dancer (Haley Lasché) will take Davis’s role in one of the pieces.

"Bag," Bumbble," and "Fleurs sur merde" are from Bosch’s Harp. "Pretty Pretty Princess," "Ballet Box, Compartment 2," and a still untitled piece to a composition of Jobe’s titled "Chihuahua" fill out the evening for Three Dances. "Pretty Pretty Princess" has "outrageously kooky little-girl dresses with about 8000 yards of tule in them," according to Davis. "Ballet Box, Compartment 2" has been adapted to a duet between Leonard and Davis, from a longer piece by Leonard.

"This duet is a comedy, kind of a punk rock ballet," Davis described. "We’ve taken ballet movements and reinterpreted them, essentially making fun of them."

The "Chihuahua" piece is not as character-driven as some of Three Dances’ other work, according to Davis: "We wanted to do a fairly literal translation of the music through dance — it’s like pure movement modern dance, with three dancers and three musical lines, so each of us has a different count."

Rhode Island native Jobe is in the process of moving back here after sojourns in Arizona and Ohio. Though he majored in viola at Rhode Island College, he’s played everything from mandolin to bassoon; performed everywhere from Trinity Rep to the Pan-Twilight Circus; and composed all kinds of folk and medieval-sounding music, including the 1993 opera Jeanne D’Arc, in which he used a wheel-fiddle, with a perpetual bow, and a set of large glass bells, both of which he constructed.

For this program, Jobe will present a new work for string quartet and voice called Four Movements, with a live ensemble that includes violinist Laura Gulley, vocalist Ellen Santaniello, bassist Margie Wienk, and bassoonist Jim Morgan. A group of up to 12 musicians, including Jobe on hurdy-gurdy, will perform another new work, titled Three Movements, which includes the aforementioned "Chihuahua," plus "The Lithuanian Fragment" and "St. Francis" — inspired by early morning outdoor yoga, surrounded by birdsong.

"These newer pieces have a fiddle-tune quality," Jobe noted in a recent phone conversation. "I tried to stretch the melodies and the texture in different ways. In Four Movements, one piece sounds like a Bretonne melody, another like a circus waltz."

"There’s so much personality in his music," Davis added. "In several of these dances, the music is the character as opposed to the dancers."

Jobe mentioned the "connectedness" he feels about the music he writes, and Davis stressed that "the dance we make is really popular with people who do not consider themselves fans of modern dance — they don’t feel like our art is something so esoteric that they have no way of connecting to it."

So, make the connection . . . with Steve Jobe and Three Dances.

Steve Jobe and Three Dances will perform on Friday and Saturday, May 20 and 21 at 8 p.m. and on Sunday, May 22 at 2 p.m. at the Carriage House Stage, 7 Duncan Avenue, Providence. Admission is $15. Call (401) 831-9479.