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Sunday, September 29, 2002

By Carrie Abels, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The kidnapping was swift.

Peter Kope, desperate to get his wife out of the house so they could leave the business of their small dance company behind for a few hours, locked the door of their Wilkinsburg home as she stood on the front porch in her bare feet.

	Since they met 11 years ago, Michele de la Reza and Peter Kope have danced together professionally, formed their own dance company and built a marriage that in many ways reflects how they work together in the studio. Here, they create a shape during a recent rehearsal. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

Michele de la Reza had gone outside that June night to take a break from writing grant applications and sending e-mails on behalf of their company, Attack Theatre. But soon she was being pushed into her Volkswagen by a giggling husband who wouldn't tell her what was going on.

"I said: Wait, I can't go anywhere, I don't have my shoes on! I don't have my bra on!" Michele recalls. "All Peter said was, 'We're going to Ryan's,' " a bar in Regent Square.

The two of them laugh hysterically as they sit in a cafe and recall their last "date."

"He ended up taking me to Jenny and Sid's house, and we had a glass of wine and talked," Michele says. She adds wistfully: "That was a fun date."

Kope and de la Reza, two hard-working modern dancers who married in 1999, know what a relationship needs to survive -- and it's not just a "kidnapping" now and then. Their marriage is continually tested by the stresses of running a small arts organization: exhaustion, frustration, financial uncertainty and hardly any free time.

But their understanding of relationships, born from years of artistic collaboration, has in turn inspired their artistry. Many of the innovative pieces Kope and de la Reza choreograph reflect the struggles and intimacies between men and women.

"What they do so perfectly is combine sensuality with brutal muscular energy," says University of Pittsburgh professor Peter Machamer, a friend and fan of their work. "I like the sheer raw energy they carry, and their intellectual curiosity."

It's not always so serious, though. Michele and Peter once orchestrated a massive public kazoo performance and performed in a busy street intersection while audience members watched from behind a storefront window. Over the past few years, their multidisciplinary, site-specific approach has enlivened the Pittsburgh arts scene and even gained them some international recognition.

But still, "People always ask us, 'How can you stand it? How can you stand living together and working together?' " Michele says.

It helps to be honest.

"Tell me what you mean!"

"Put your arm here, dammit!"

"Do it again! Come on!"

Michele surprises her husband with brownies at his 35th birthday party in March. Many friends from Pittsburgh's artistic and academic communities came to the party at the couple's Wilkinsburg home. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

Peter and Michele are wrangling in their usual forthright fashion one June night as they rehearse a dance they will perform later at the Avignon Festival in France, a prestigious annual gathering of theater, dance, circus and music companies from around the world.

The couple, both highly opinionated and strong-willed, apologize for being testy, but they are truly exhausted -- from staying up until 3 a.m. to dub audio tapes, from driving around the city picking up props, from housing out-of-town artists who performed with them at the Three Rivers Arts Festival a few days before.

"Why do you think so many of our pieces are about sleeping?" Peter says as he takes a minute to lie down on the dance floor.

At 35, he is a clean-cut blond with striking blue eyes and boyish good looks. In a piece called "A Kiss Before Sleeping," created as a tribute to Gene Kelly, he is a husband who stays up late waiting for his wife to come home. Michele, an engaging 32-year-old brunette with a warm, expansive smile, eventually returns and dances to the music of Bjork while trying to keep a sleepy Peter propped up and awake.

Critics in America and France have called Michele and Peter's contemporary dance style "restless and experimental," and lauded them for "fearless, uninhibited performances" that "break the barriers between art, dance and audience." Their sets are sparse, often centering around an everyday object, and the couple often dance in vintage clothes to express the timelessness of their themes.

Their exhaustion can be accounted for by their lack of a full-time staff and board of directors. Michele and Peter do all the fund-raising, booking and marketing for Attack Theatre, which doesn't have a salaried company of dancers. They are unable to make enough money from teaching to pay others to work for them regularly.

"They never have a moment to spare," says Rebecca Lowe, a friend of Michele's since high school who has worked as a production manager for Attack Theatre. "It's like a mom-and-pop restaurant -- there are no days off."

For that reason, there are no divisions between their married life and their work life -- friends say the company is like a third person in their marriage. And intentionally or not, the male-female relationship often surfaces in their pieces -- sometimes humorously, sometimes disturbingly.

In a piece called "Boxed In," Peter and Michele struggle for possession of a remote control. Throughout the dance, they throw up their hands at each other, storm to opposite ends of the room, hurl each other around by the arms and roll over each others' backs, pulling each other up by the hair.

	Michele engages in a yoga pose to help her focus before an April preformance at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

Then they abruptly begin to waltz, romantically sweeping each other across the floor until one of them tricks the other back into the struggle. The piece could be seen as a reflection of marriage -- in essence, a long waltz punctuated by furious struggles and bouts of playfulness.

"We don't make dances about specific events from our personal relationship," Michele says, "but the emotions on stage do come from aspects of our lives."

In 1995's "Resolution Cafe," a piece they performed at the Byham for First Night, the two are engaged in a romantic tango when Michele suddenly throws Peter off the stage and into the audience. She smiles and raises her arms triumphantly, to laughter from audience members, who are then invited onto the stage.

The intense but loving back-and-forth seen in their dances in some ways reflects Michele and Peter's relationship -- described by friends as combative but caring, playful but carefully tended, and definitely a marriage of equals.

"They inevitably disagree on things, but then they go head-to-head and figure it all out and come up with some consensus," says Lowell Brown, an artist who rented a room in Michele and Peter's house a few years ago. "I've never doubted the strength of their relationship as a couple."

During rehearsals, Michele and Peter manage to work out their irritations with each other or simply let them go. And like a couple vowing never to go to bed angry, they apologize to each other often.

"You're only allowed to argue about what you're arguing about," Michele adds. "You're not allowed to have an artistic disagreement who has anything to do with the fact that you didn't take out the garbage when you said you would."

Michele and Peter believe arguing with collaborators means not that you hate each other but that you are engaging in artistic dialogue. And when you argue in a marriage, it doesn't necessarily mean you hate each other, either.

"I think one thing that has made our marriage work," Peter says, "is that we had to learn how to collaborate artistically long before we had to collaborate in a personal relationship."

Full-time partners

The artistic collaboration began in 1991, after Michele was hired by Dance Alloy. A graduate of Juilliard, she had been dancing in New York City but "was tired of waitressing until 4 in the morning and then having to get up and dance," so she auditioned for the Alloy and was hired by company founder Mark Taylor.

Soon after she arrived, she needed a roommate to share her Oakland apartment. When she heard that a new male dancer named Peter Kope would be joining the troupe, she called a friend who knew of him.

Peter tries to focus before dancing a tribute to Gene Kelly at the Kelly-Strayhorn heater in April.

"I just wanted a character reference, so I said to Nancy, 'Do you think I could live with him?'" Michele recalls. "And she said, 'Yeah, he seems like a nice guy, he's very straightforward, and he's not at all your type, so you don't have to worry about being attracted to him.' "

Peter, a native of Cleveland, moved in, and for two years their relationship was casual. He had come to Dance Alloy after performing with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and the touring show "Men Dancers: The Ted Shawn Legacy." Unlike Michele, who danced throughout her youth in Houston, Texas, Peter discovered modern dance only while earning a management degree at the University of Dayton.

In 1993, they participated in a workshop in upstate New York with Nita Little, a founder of contact improvisation. It was then they realized how well they collaborated together.

"I remember physically feeling safe with Peter," Michele recalls. "I can get very abandoned with my physicality sometimes, and I remember feeling that he was smart with his partnering, that I could throw him this crazy energy and he'd know how to channel it.

"One of the beautiful things about performing," she continues, "is that something will always go wrong -- not wrong, but different. And I remember Peter just absolutely being there in those moments and riding the wave with me rather than blocking the wave. I remember realizing, here is a performer I can trust."

Around that time, they decided to date exclusively, and over the next six years they danced on-again, off-again with Dance Alloy.

"They always seem to have a great time together, which is important both in marriage and in working together," Taylor says. "A good collaborative relationship does have elements of a good marriage."

Although they wouldn't leave the Alloy until 1999, they began developing Attack Theatre in December 1994, when they performed "Kazoo Theater" for First Night festivities Downtown. Nearly 2,000 kazoos were handed out to nearly 2,000 shivering revelers and the result was the "William Tell Overture" and other musical numbers set to kazoo.

On the videotape, Michele and Peter can be seen wearing giant kazoos on their heads, acting as if leading a clamorous kazoo orchestra were a perfectly normal thing to do on a New Year's Eve. For them, it was just another opportunity to serve as "arts troubleshooters" -- taking a challenge (in this case, what do you do with 2,000 kazoos?) and making art out of it.

Donna Goyak, a friend of the couple and vice president of First Night Pittsburgh, says "Kazoo Theater" foreshadowed the couple's interest in staging audience-friendly pieces in nontraditional settings. For First Night 2000, they staged a huge public game of musical chairs.

"They're so fun and so creative," Goyak says. "I see a lot of humor in how they address artistic challenges."

In a piece called "Typeset," Peter is typing furiously on a typewriter, a struggling novelist of sorts, while Michele, in a blond wig befitting of a femme fatale, slithers around on the side as if acting out Peter's words.

In "Some Assembly Required," a piece that has been staged at the Frick and Carnegie art museums, the audience is asked for their comments about an artwork -- what the artwork reveals, what the artist might have been thinking at the time. The couple then create a dance on the spot that translates the audience's comments into movement.

Complementing their interest in nontraditional approaches is their use of collaborators from different artistic disciplines. A New York City cellist and composer, Dave Eggar, is a frequent collaborator, and the couple have danced with jazz singers and stilt-walkers. Jil Stifel, who dances frequently with the couple, praises them for their deep respect for the people they work with.

Michele and Peter also dance with PerksDanceMusicTheatre in New York City, and in 2000 worked with Squonk Opera on the production of "BigSmorgasbordWunderWerk" that played briefly on Broadway. The charismatic couple seem to gravitate toward artists and creators who keep long hours and think out of bounds.

"The only reason we're able to function the way we do is because we involve ourselves with people who have a similar work ethic -- or pathos," Peter says.

What's next?

At times, however, the couple wonder how long they can do so much by themselves.

Forming a nonprofit company and applying for tax exemption are steps they might have to take to lessen their load. But they fear losing their freedom under a board of directors.

"You're employed by a larger organization that can say, 'You're insane, there's no way you should do that,' " Peter says, adding that the philosophy of Attack Theatre is never to say "we can't do that."

Their interest in arts education adds to their full schedules. The couple lead arts curriculum workshops for teachers, hold dance residencies in local schools and teach university-level classes. Michele, who has worked as a movement coach for Pittsburgh Opera, has a master's degree in motor learning from Pitt.

And although they have performed with such established organizations as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and The Andy Warhol Museum, when invited to create a dance for a telecommunications trade show in Geneva, Switzerland, they didn't think twice about it. They also create dances for private parties and fund-raisers.

"They feel totally comfortable doing their art in a wide variety of sectors, and they don't think it's demeaning or less important to do that," says Marilyn Coleman, head of the arts service organization ProArts. Working with educators and corporations "has also opened doors for them, so in that sense they act like their own board."

But acting like your own board means you have to tape "The West Wing" -- your only weekly indulgence -- and watch it at 1 a.m. after getting home from rehearsals or errands. It also means worse things.

"Right now, today, Wednesday," Michele said June 29, "what stresses me out and makes me mean is the fact that on Friday there are two grants due that are totally doable and that we should do, but it's very possible that we will not turn in those grants because of everything going on, and therefore we will dramatically sacrifice a project in December. If we spend time doing it, though, we won't get on the plane to Avignon."

They got the grants done, but only when they got back from Avignon -- one day before the deadline. Usually it's Michele who takes care of the administrative work -- "Peter's the forest, Michele is the trees," says Goyak -- but their roles reverse as necessary.

Since they have to survive on a limited income, it's fortuitous that both were raised to be frugal. They live in an affordable neighborhood, don't take vacations because they travel for work, and maintain a home that is full of eclectic furniture, antiques and original artwork given to them by artist friends. They stay in Pittsburgh not only because of the strong artistic community but also because of the low cost of living.

"Both of us share the same dogged will to chew the last fat off the bone," Peter says. "Well, Michele's a vegetarian, so I should say, we'll shuck the last husk off the corn!"

The next step

Asked whether they have a plan for the next few years, Peter and Michele shake their heads. Devouring the moment and obsessing about the present leaves them little mental energy for the future, although "we have to figure out the timeline of the whole baby thing," says Peter, who used to want eight kids.

"I got him down to two," Michele says slyly. "I've been negotiating for the last eight years."

Recently, the couple got an agent in France, Christelle Laurent, and hired a part-time administrative assistant. They will go to Tokyo next spring to perform a new work with the Japanese company Nibroll. And later this fall they will begin rehearsals for their annual "This Ain't the Nutcracker" show at the Hazlett Theater, which takes place between Christmas and New Year's.

Although they're busy through the end of the year, sometimes that's not always the case.

"Now and then we sit and look at our calendar and see that three months from now, there's nothing -- nothing -- written on our calendar," Peter says. "But we say, that's OK, it'll happen."

It's a characteristically positive outlook for two people who radiate optimism in the face of so many challenges in their relationship and artistic lives.

"Their love comes through in everything they do," Goyak says, "and we're all the better for it."

Attack Theatre and the Japanese company Nibroll will perform a work-in-progress on Thursday at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh gallery at 937 Liberty Ave., Downtown. Space is limited for the 7:30 p.m. show; to reserve tickets, e-mail info@attacktheatre.com