Alex Ketley

DANCE

Landscape used to be such a lovely, simple word. It referred only to topography: hills and vales, streams and meadows, horizon lines and scraggy mountaintops. But no longer: Today, landscape also refers to political, social, cultural, and linguistic realities. So if someone wanted to make a work about California's landscape, how would they go about it? That's what Alex Ketley — a recent choreography award winner from the Princess Grace Foundation — set out to discover. For his latest work, Lost Line, he and three other dancers took a yearlong trip around the Golden State. They explored small towns, Los Angeles, deserts, the sea, and the lives of folks who have migrated here. "I love this place," the Maryland transplant told me about his traveling. "It's a state that is young but powerful." Ketley, the codirector (with Christian Burns) of the Foundry, explains that the piece also came out of his recent experiences of choreographing for a lot of other companies. This moved him away from the Foundry's original mission of presenting dance within a video context. Lost Line, he says, "does have lots of video images, but it is also full of dancing." For the foundation underneath his 40-minute work, Ketley is using Arvo Part's mesmerizing Te Deum. (Rita Felciano)

ALEX KETLEY Headlands Center for the Arts. Fri/24, 8 p.m.; Sat/25, 7 p.m.; Sun/26, 2 p.m.

944 Fort Barry, Sausalito. $10. (415) 331-2787, www.foundryprojects.org