Dance

IT MAY BE difficult to see the "bun head" – the affectionate nickname by which young ballet dancers are known – in the athletically built Alma Esperanza Cunningham. But a ballet class in her native Novato is exactly where one of the freshest voices in Bay Area dance began. Cunningham went on to study for eight years, following – at first very reluctantly – two older sisters to Marin Ballet for those never-ending pliés, tendus, and arabesques. The experience left a mark on this coolly smart artist. Today she draws on ballet's clarity and discipline with the same passion she applies to pop culture.

In The Hello Show, a septet for her four-year-old Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement, Cunningham dissolves and highlights commercial images of female beauty straightforwardly and with cheeky wit. Punk confrontation and balletic reserve naturally cohabit in Cunningham's PILEdriver, a duet inspired by a score based on sounds from the San Francisco dump. Run, originally created for the Yerba Buena Gardens Choreographers Festival, is clearly inspired by fashion models' poses. The deliberately awkward Door Jam allows two tomboys to discover each other and themselves.

At this point in her still-young career, Cunningham already mixes movement vocabularies in service of a voice that's distinctly her own. Her dancers perform from a high center of gravity, relying on fast and precise attacks and a controlled use of space. There's a pretend mechanical quality about them that renders the choreography disarmingly casual; at times they look like puppets or like they're on stilts. The choreography is full of non sequiturs and unexpected twists and turns – specific, very recognizable gestures pop up like corks. During a recent rehearsal, for instance, an arabesque, that most traditional of ballet moves, collapses onto the floor with the dancer dragging a leg behind like somebody who had fallen out of a wheelchair. "I like these gestures," Cunningham explains afterward. "They remind us that we are people."

When she was 15, Cunningham quit dancing to develop, as she puts it, "more of a social life" than ballet's demands had allowed. She didn't return to dance until eight years later, engaging in the usual mix of modern, jazz, hip-hop, and summer classes at the Alvin Ailey American Dance School in New York. She spent five years there, then returned to the Bay Area in 2000. Why? "I wanted to be close to my family." Show dancing – performed during business conventions and marketing shows – also probably left its mark on this serious but refreshingly unpolemical choreographer. "It's cheesy," she admits, "but so much fun."

Pop culture is Cunningham's birthright, in part because her El Salvador-born mother adored Madonna. At the same time, she's remained wise about its more egregious excesses. "There is something magical about something that is so widespread and that is so all-consuming for so many people," she says. "Just think about Las Vegas, for instance. So much creativity devoted to building a whole world for just a year or two." (Rita Felciano)