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Repertory Dance Theatre opens the 2014-15 season with "Portal," a title meant to entice audiences to peer in closely at the similarities and differences in methodology and inspiration among the four works on the program.

Dance artists Noa Zuk and Ohad Fishof were in Salt Lake City a few months ago as guest teachers for RDT's summer workshop and to choreograph the world premiere of "By the Snake" as part of the "Portal" program. The husband-and-wife team from Israel have been working together for 14 years; they are former members of the world-renowned Batsheva Dance Company and practitioners of its famed Gaga movement language.

Gaga has no connection to pop superstar Lady Gaga; the self-exploratory dance method was developed over the past 20 years by Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin, whom Dance Magazine crowned "today's most widely worshipped guru of modern dance."

Some call it a language, a practice, a methodology, but when talking to Gaga purists, don't call it a style or a technique.

"Gaga is just the training," Zuk said. "The work is about the changing qualities in the movements, it is not a style or a technique. We connect feelings and then start to build the section [of choreography]. It doesn't come from a story, it comes from instinct: You react to what you have."

Dance audience members are often preoccupied with understanding the story or unlocking the meaning, as if choreography were a code to crack. Fishof offered a helpful explanation.

"When we see dance, we see shapes and energy and form and intensity of forces; we see all those abstract things, but it's always through people," he said. "Whenever there are people and action, stories are inevitable. Stories will spontaneously arise. But as creators, the stories are actually elements and we decide which element, which story, to turn up the volume on — or turn down the volume on — we direct it."

Although the discovery process is unique to each choreographer, teasing out movement, making choices about connecting the movement and finding a creative arc to the piece are things many dancemakers ponder.

For "Portal," choreographer Stephen Koester, a professor and chairman of the department of modern dance at the University of Utah, is restaging "Fever Sleep," a work he choreographed after winning RDT's "Sense of Place" national choreographic competition.

When Koester entered the contest in 2004 and learned about the thematic requirement of place, he neither stared longingly at the Wasatch Mountains nor meditated in redrock country.

"For me, the one place from which there is no escape is the mind," he said. "And especially the mind on the edge of dementia. 'Fever Sleep' taps into those times when your mind is going a million miles an hour and things keep repeating — and it doesn't necessarily make any sense."

Koester is not himself struggling with dementia; far from it: His whip-quick mind is more open than most, and his self-deprecating humor and willingness to discard an idea as quickly as it arrives — before it becomes too precious — are anything other than stalled in a loop of thoughts.

Restaging a work that is 10 years old forced him to confront the quickly changing styles and techniques of movement that become second nature to dancers of any given decade.

"It's very hard to re-create dances," Koester said. "I am sort of asking the dancers to do the opposite of what comes natural to them right now. And I'm thinning the piece out a bit. While staying true to the intensity of what a fever sleep is, the audience might need a break, a resting point."

An especially important ingress for the audience's appreciation into seeing the similarities and differences among "By the Snake," "Fever Sleep" and the other two pieces on the program will be this very young company's ability to adapt and communicate those contrasts and likenesses.

Four of the eight dancers are new to RDT this year, three new last year, and one joined in 2012.

"This is a repertory company, so they are used to adjusting to different ways of moving," Fishof said last summer. "Their versatility and effort will come through."

"And remember," Zuk added, "the idea of Gaga is finding the freedom to have pleasure in dance." —

Repertory Dance Theatre's 'Portal'

The program: "By the Snake," a world premiere by the Israeli creative team Noa Zuk & Ohad Fishof; "Fever Sleep," a 2005 RDT commission by Stephen Koester, described as a surrealistic landscape of the mind, creating logic out of illogic; "Duets to Brazilian-Indian Music," 1998, by Zvi Gotheiner, who uses haunting Brazilian music to frame six sensuous duets; "Passengers," a 1970 RDT commission, inspired by Merce Cunningham's "chance" philosophy and structured by choreographer Viola Farber to allow the performers to make spontaneous decisions and explore movement variations.

When • Thursday-Saturday, Oct. 2-4, 7:30 p.m.

Where • Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, 138 S. 300 West, Salt Lake City

Tickets • $30; http://www.arttix.org or 801-355-ARTS (2787) or toll-free at 1-888-451-ARTS (2787)