BANFF, ALTA. -- A tall man, stiff and edging toward gaunt, is teaching a dance to a Russian who doesn't seem to speak English. Wearing a sweatshirt that says "Canada" and features four bears, the choreographer occasionally prods a shoulder or demonstrates with the sketchiest of gestures. It doesn't sound promising -- a dancer without English, a choreographer too old to dance, an art form that proceeds through the body's memory, without notation. Yet the Russian, who covers his shaved head with a bandana, translates the older man's most rudimentary moves into dancerly images of loss and despair.

Later, a second man dances with the Russian, a rare pas de deux for men. Again, with minimal cues from the choreographer, they evoke a pair tentatively learning to console each other. Close to the barre, on command, a woman starts, stops and reverses Verdi's Requiem on the tape deck. A dancer wearing a grimy, long white dress, lies on the floor doing abdominal crunches. The scene, in a rehearsal room at the Banff Centre, is focused but genial, unhurried, even speculative. Hard to believe that the first public airing of a 90-minute ballet is a week away.

It's even harder to believe that nine months ago all this was an inkling in Brian Macdonald's imagination. Requiem 9/11, a work in progress that opened at the Banff Centre on July 24, involved 20 dancers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and a taped version of Verdi's music. At its full premiere at Ottawa's National Arts Centre on Sept. 5, there will be 104 people on-stage -- 80 Opera Lyra chorus members, four vocal soloists and the dancers -- as well as an orchestra conducted by Mario Bernardi.

Creations of this magnitude typically take two to three years to materialize. But when Macdonald went to the impresario John Cripton in October and told him that he wanted to choreograph a piece inspired by the events of Sept. 11, Cripton insisted that it would have to premiere around the time of the disaster's first anniversary.

The unifying thread in Macdonald's long career as dancer, choreographer and director of opera, ballet and musical theatre has been his devotion to the music at hand. He's famous for insisting that his dancers get down on the floor and eyeball the score with him, even if they can't read music. So it makes sense when he says that his first impulse after Sept. 11 was to turn to the Messa da Requiem that Verdi composed in 1874 on the death of the poet Alessandro Manzoni. Immersion in the Requiem quickly prompted a second impulse -- to choreograph, as Macdonald puts it, "dancers in mourning."

He is no stranger to the connection between bereavement and dance in many cultures, from the ancient Greeks' choreographed burial processions to the New Orleans jazz funeral, where mourners shake their way from church to cemetery. In the Scottish Highlands, it was the custom for a widow or widower to lead a dance around the body of their spouse at the wake. Beginning solemnly and sadly, it became increasingly energetic, even riotous. As a young dancer, Macdonald discussed that ritual with Agnes de Mille, when she choreographed it into Brigadoon. "We talked a lot about the power of dance in mourning," he recalls, "because it relies on the nonverbal, profoundly simple gesture. And its athleticism is life-affirming. When you see the lightest leap -- it's an affirmation."

In his own life, too, Macdonald understood the affinity between movement and mourning. When his first wife died more than 40 years ago, he kept on dancing because he had to support his young son: "But at the same time, I knew I was dancing my loss."

Macdonald decided fairly swiftly to address more than the tragedies of last September. "I didn't want to ask people into the theatre to see the devastation of the twin towers. They'd seen that within 15 minutes of its happening." While staying at a friend's apartment in Toronto, he chanced on a book about ruins. "I fell into that book," he says, "thinking, 'God has put this on the shelf for me to see.' "

That and an exhibition about ruins in Bath, England, gave him the idea of projecting images of destruction behind the dancers. Meditating on the enmities and inhumanities throughout history that had brought down entire civilizations, and the promise of healing in Verdi's funeral mass, he had a centre for his ballet. "I felt very secure once I saw an image of Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed," he says. For a while, he so immersed himself in horrors that finally he had to become slightly inured, "like a doctor in Africa."

Meanwhile, Cripton, the ballet's producer, was involving himself in the logistics of the ambitious project. The choice of the RWB, according to him, was obvious: An efficient company, schooled in the classics and modern dance, "these people have never been babied." In other words, they could handle the fast, rough ride in store for them.

The Opera Lyra chorus met Macdonald's requirement of a choir with experience memorizing music and moving on-stage. As a bonus, they'd sung the Requiem in 2001. The Banff Centre, where the ballet would be built in June and July, was another inevitable decision: Macdonald's history there stretches back to 1960, and his wife, Annette av Paul, is the director of the summer dance programs. As for the "odyssey of fundraising," Cripton struck it lucky with the Department of Public Works, which gave $200,000 out of a budget of $750,000. In April, needing to commit to the choir and the dancers as well as book airline tickets for a production that would skitter from Banff to Winnipeg to Ottawa, Cripton and Macdonald took deep breaths and decided to go ahead.

In the Dies Irae movement, Macdonald choreographed an electrifying solo for Christopher Gray, who roils his way across the stage, close to the ground, like the embodiment of evil. ("We call him the Assassin," says Macdonald.) The more extensive solo work, concentrated in the central Offertorio section, went to three dancers Macdonald knew well -- Tara Birtwhistle, Sarah Murphy-Dyson and Johnny Wright -- and the Russian, Alexander Gamayunov, who arrived in Winnipeg last October.

Macdonald saw the two men as soldiers left on a battlefield. He said to Wright, "Maybe you're dead, maybe you're wounded. You can choose. But I don't want to be aware of your muscularity. And you're going to be helped."

The helpers -- "a terrible cliché," he admits, "but true: The women of the world teach men about compassion" -- are Birtwhistle and Murphy-Dyson. Lit by Harry Frehner with an otherworldly aura and dressed by Astrid Janson in flowing white dresses, they are ministering angels whose voluminous skirts become wings, blankets, winding cloths and the traditional head coverings of mourners. The silk skirts deserve their own line in the program, since Macdonald regularly said to the dancers, "This isn't a pas de deux. There's you, your partner and the skirt. It has its own steps and movement." To Janson, he stipulated, "Not en pointe; I want quiet. And as much material in the skirt as possible." Together they agreed on white, for its associations with purity, angels, hope and mourning.

At one point, Birtwhistle covers Gamayunov's eyes because he has seen too much horror. "He wants to give up," she says, "and our pas de deux is about someone saying it's okay to feel that way, but together we can help each other." Macdonald designed the male pas de deux to suggest that men are also beginning to support each other, literally in dance as well as figuratively in life. Men are still learning when it comes to consolation, the choreographer says, adding of Wright and Gamayunov, "They're such masculine boys, so clean-cut, that no erotic impulse can be read into their pas de deux."

The soloists praise the way Macdonald makes them part of the choreography. For Murphy-Dyson, he's the only choreographer she knows who leaves his ego at the door, willing to incorporate their improvisations into the finished work. "He sculpts, and we're his clay," Birtwhistle says. Then she amends it: "Thinking clay."

Cripton, too, turns to the visual arts when he thinks of the work being done now in Winnipeg, before the move to Ottawa. "Banff was the sketch," he summarizes. "In Winnipeg, we'll get the real oil painting."

Macdonald is teaching the dancers the final movement, missing at Banff -- Verdi's uplifting and even exuberant quasi-fugue, the Libera me. Like the Highland widow's dance around her husband's corpse, Requiem 9/11 begins sorrowfully, in the aftermath of destruction, and ends in affirmation. It's a measured affirmation, that acknowledges humanity's terrifying and perennial potential for evil while insisting on the opposing forces of spirituality and compassion.

And, perhaps, of dance itself. Macdonald chose for the Banff program four lines from W. H. Auden that point to the consolations of patterned movement in a chaotic world:
The desires of the heart are

crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern: dance while

you can.
Katherine Ashenburg's book, The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die, will be published in September.