Everybody dance now, in a suburban ballet

Karen Getz is a performance polymath. She's creator, choreographer, director and a dancer in 1812 Productions'

Suburban Love Songs

, which returns to the Philadelphia stage this week, at Plays & Players Theatre, for the first time since its successful 2006 Live Arts Festival run.

A member of improv troupes Comedy Sportz and Lunchlady Doris, Getz also has danced, acted and choreographed for numerous area theaters, and directed and performed in last year's popular Live Arts Festival soap operatic podcast

The Many Men of Martha Manning

.

Ironically, I met with Getz on April 4, the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder - ironic because

Suburban Love Songs

is set in the summer of 1968, the year of the shootings of King and Bobby Kennedy, but a world away, in upper-middle class Westchester, N.Y.

"The world was exploding outside this really insular place," she explains "- there was My Lai, the riots, the Chicago 10 trial. I wanted to know what kind of changes these people were going through."

Getz classifies the piece as a "comic actor's ballet" though she is an unlikely ballerina. Possessing what she proudly calls "this Polish farmer's body, with big, broad shoulders made to pull a cart on your back," she's fascinated by the challenges, and freedoms, she discovered while creating dance for nondancers.

Suburban Love Songs

(a sequel,

Disco Descending

, will open this year's Live Arts Festival, and a third installment is planned)

features a cast of actors, several with "nontraditional" dance bodies, most with little dance experience. For Getz, this is exactly right for the campy show: "Their bodies are imperfect. You're not watching them and thinking, 'Look at that perfect body.' That's really distracting."

The difference in making dance for actors is "it's funny not because they're trying to make the choreography work, but because they interpret the movement differently than dancers. There's a certain 'human inelegance' to it. The audience can see themselves onstage because they're not watching some dancer with real technical prowess. It could be you."

She's convincing, all right - so convincing that by the time she declared during an interview, "I believe it's everybody's right to dance!", we were out the door and on our way to celebrate imperfection, with real suburbanites.

If Getz wanted human inelegance, she was about to receive it, sixfold.

Waiting nervously for us at West Mount Airy's Moving Arts Studio, a small dance space at Carpenter Lane and Greene Street, were five adventurous souls culled from Philadelphia's northwest burbs: Tina Lawson, 40, a Fort Washington attorney; Tim Oliver, 44, a Hatboro classicist and translator; Bill Neely of Willow Grove, 55, who teaches computer-aided design at Montgomery County Community College and bicycle spinning classes in his spare time; Jennifer Abramson, 39, a Huntingdon Valley attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency; and Milton Edelheit, 78, of Elkins Park, a retired salesman (and trusting soul, who, in his other occupation as my stepfather, had no idea what he was getting into).

The plan: Getz would create an original narrative dance piece in two hours and we, with our pristine lack of technical prowess, would perform it, on video, for The Inquirer Web site.

Not quite a cakewalk.

Getz arrived at the studio, flipped open her laptop, and proudly showed a few recorded scenes from

Suburban Love Songs

, prompting Oliver to comment, "So, what's the point, exactly?"

Next, she asked us to pick a song to dance to and scrolled through her playlists - funk, salsa, disco. Nobody bit.

She tried again, never losing enthusiasm, and asked us to come up with a plotline for the piece. No takers. Worse yet, we were becoming surly.

Suddenly, Lawson perked up. "How about, I'm coming home from work and I'm really tired?"

And just like that, an idea with resonance for this crowd of assorted desk jockeys and overworked parents inspired us to dance.

Getz cites many of the obvious choreographic influences - Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, Bob Fosse - that shaped her style. However, her own inspiration runs deeper than aesthetics. "I was 4 years old at my cousin's bar mitzvah, and the dinner music was - this is so ridiculous -

Fiddler on the Roof

Muzak. While everyone ate, I did a whole performance piece - 'Sunrise, Sunset,' the whole thing. . . . I was a heavy little kid and lived in my head most of the time, but dance was always in my body."

She expects the same freedom of movement and spirit from her performers. "We adjust for the actor's intent, but not for their physicality. We don't need to; if you set the bar high, people will figure out a way to get there."

Getz made no adjustments for our varying fitness levels. She had us doing the grapevine before a wall of mirrors. She taught us the cha-cha, we twirled, we shook our groove things (obviously, we had come to agreement on the song), and, magically, we shed our self-consciousness.

When we asked her "What next?" or balked when she tinkered with our moves, she laughed and assured us it would all come together in the end - which it did, maybe not gracefully or even as choreographed, but as our very own nondancers', nonactors' suburban ballet.

Theater

Suburban Love Songs

7 tonight at Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place.

Tickets: $15-$30. 215-592-9560,

» READ MORE: www.1812productions.org

Karen Getz turns real suburbanites into dancers at

http://go.philly.com/burbdance