The Dance Of the Fruit Fly

The fruit fly -- speck-size victim of endless experimental mutations -- is taken for granted in the genetics lab, but in Liz Lerman's dance studio it's a star.

Lerman, the MacArthur Award-winning modern dance choreographer who has created works about dogs, shipbuilders and immigrants, has had a career-long affinity for the average Joe and his overlooked heroism. In her newest production, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome," which runs tonight through Sunday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, she delves into the field of genetics and its implications for all of us. And for the fruit fly.

At a recent rehearsal in the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange studio in Takoma Park, a frenetic klezmer party tune plays as a chorus of dancers whiz about with arms cocked and shoulder blades flapping. One dancer wiggles through a comically wry solo that ends in a slow, suggestive runway strut. This fly is nobody's lab rat. He's . . . pretty fly for a fruit fly.

"It's funny, but it's not," Lerman said of this section, her eyes squinting with intensity under wisps of hair that have escaped from her unruly updo. "By anthropomorphizing the fly, we get to who we're sacrificing for this."

This is the leading edge of genetic research, the science that proposes to treat and cure diseases and bring about myriad life-altering changes by tinkering with our DNA, the instruction book that lies within each cell. Genetics sometimes gets a bad rap in the popular view -- its specialists seen as the scary forces behind genetically modified food and cloned sheep, the search for the gay gene and the looming ability for a chosen race to arise should babies bear physical traits of their parents' design. But Lerman, who spent five years consulting with scientists as she worked on the piece, says she has tried to steer away from misconceptions about the field. Instead, she focuses on the miracles of molecular life -- including the choreography taking place within each cell, as divisions and traffic patterns are managed with exquisite timing.

"Ferocious Beauty" also explores how genetics proves connections among all living things: As one of the Dance Exchange performers put it, we share "something like 65 percent of our DNA with a banana." And Lerman draws out the similarities between science and art.

"I got very attached to the passion and curiosity of the scientists," she says. "In many ways, they're not unlike artists. Their sleeplessness and restlessness, the coming up against a wall and trying to get around it, the questions of meaning, making leaps of imagination."

But the driving force throughout her piece, she says, is the inescapable reality that advances in genetic research pull us all into unknown territory -- whether you're an easily mutated drosophila, as the fruit fly is known in the lab, or whether you're someone carrying the gene for Huntington's disease, an incurable and debilitating illness.

"The technology is new," Lerman says. "But the question of what are we going to do about knowledge is as old as Adam and Eve."

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How do you make a dance about DNA?

"Initially I had some apprehension," says Kathy Hudson, who directs the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. "It doesn't strike you immediately as a match made in heaven." But Hudson ended up consulting with Lerman, won over by the choreographer's enthusiasm and her out-of-the-ordinary approach.