Kiyon Gaines leaping from dance to choreography - with a little nudge

How is a choreographer born? In Kiyon Gaines' case, it was through the intervention of his peers at Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Gaines, a PNB corps de ballet member since 2001, has been choreographing for three years. His latest work, "M-Pulse," will make its world premiere as part of the company's "New Works" repertory evening opening Thursday. Making the leap from dancer to dancemaker came, he says, with the help of some gentle shoves from his friends.

In rehearsals, Gaines said, he always had fun toying with new work that the company was learning, noodling around with the steps, trying something different. "I would ask my friends in the back of the studio, 'Try this for me, do something that looks like this,' " he recalled. Then, when the company's annual Choreographer's Showcase came around in 2005, "a bunch of them came to me and said, 'You have to create a piece.' " He was initially reluctant, knowing that he could come up with fragments but unsure that he could put the puzzle together. "They assured me it would be OK, so reluctantly I signed up."

Since then, the 26-year-old Baltimore native has participated in every annual showcase, as well as contributed new works to the company's Celebrate Seattle festival ("{SCHWA}") and Bumbershoot ("Interrupted Pri'si'zh'en"), and he participated in the New York Choreographic Institute earlier this year. There, he met composer Cristina Spinei, who would become his collaborator for "M-Pulse."

Originally, Gaines said, he'd planned his new work to be a baroque piece, set to Bach. But at dinner with Spinei, she suddenly offered to write him a new score. Excited by the idea, Gaines got approval for a commission from PNB artistic director Peter Boal, and Spinei got to work. The result was a Brazilian-inspired, three-movement orchestral piece, about 15 minutes long, which Spinei titled "Impulse" — "because she said it was an impulsive idea for us to work together this way." Gaines added his own phonetic spin to the title, and created a few movement phrases that suited the music.

The rest of the work has been created in the studio, on 11 PNB dancers whom Gaines calls "the people who sort of cultivate creation for me." He and the dancers build the work step by step, with the easygoing Gaines showing his cast his ideas and letting them play with the movement, shaping it under his gaze. In a recent rehearsal, a dancer struggled with a step and turn that flowed into a lift. She tried several variants, then suddenly the movement clicked, causing Gaines to jump up and down in glee. "All of a sudden, it was there," he said later, "and it was exactly the picture I had in my head."

Gaines, who lists George Balanchine and Nacho Duato among the dancemakers who inspire him, looks forward to a long career as a choreographer. (He's already at work on his next piece, to debut with Seattle Dance Project in early 2009.) "But as much as I love to choreograph now at this moment in my life, I still love to dance," he said. "There's something that you can't get from choreography that you can get from dancing. That giving of a part of you to the audience, and letting them respond to it."

"M-Pulse" will be presented along with the world premiere of New York City Ballet dancer/choreographer Benjamin Millepied's "3 Movements"; the PNB premiere of Mark Morris' 2001 work "A Garden"; and William Forsythe's "One flat thing, reproduced," previously performed at PNB last spring.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com