FANTASTIC FOUR Julia Mayer, center, and dancers join forces.

Julia Mayer is the kind of dancer who was born to be a soloist. Even when she’s standing still, her slender six-foot-tall body emanates mystery. When she folds her long legs to get close to the floor, it’s like a stork or flamingo bending its impossible-looking knees. Born soloist or not, though, her new work is a quartet.

“I began to get curious how to convey [to other dancers] what I was discovering in my solo process,” Mayer says. “I wondered if it was possible to translate my ideas or if what I was discovering was just idiosyncratic to me.” Fortunately, a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum provided support for her to take on her experiment. The result, reLISH/relâche, premieres Saturday 14 in a church hall in Lincoln Park.

Mayer has traveled a long road to arrive at this work. “Certain [dance] techniques and approaches to movement…literally don’t fit on my body,” she says, recalling her days in the master of fine arts program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late 1980s. At the time, her dance teachers included Linda Kent—a five-foot-tall, 90-pound sprite who formerly danced with the Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor companies. “I’m not trying to stray from technical dancing. I’m trying to move into a dance that is authentically mine, not just inherited from others,” Mayer says.

She’s also not the kind of dancer who dreamed of this career from girlhood. She arrived in Chicago from Michigan in 1982 to study linguistics at the University of Chicago. This field of study still informs her approach to dance: “I wanted to speak a language that I can speak [as a dance artist],” says Mayer. “Even in dance, I always wanted to get the right ‘word.’_”

In 1998, she traveled to Washington state to participate in the Solo Commissioning Project with Deborah Hay. A former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a member of the radical Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, Hay is known for choreographic methods that involve improvisation and making choices in the moment. “Her work is so much about paying attention,” Mayer says. “It’s really about developing an ‘attentional’ practice, rather than learning and perfecting certain movements.”

Once back in Chicago, Mayer practiced and performed O, the Hay solo she’d learned. She also developed some ensemble works that were performed at venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center and Links Hall—and concentrated on raising her son, Micah. After a few years, she wanted a new strategy to balance work and family responsibilities with her own, creative process. In November 2005 she started a weekly solo practice at Links Hall.

Every Friday morning she went to the Wrigleyville performance studio.

“I put myself through a fairly strict schedule of meditation, free-writing and warming up that awakens that day’s dance,” she says. In July 2006, she opened this session to the public once a month, calling it Coffee Dance.

This practice formed the rehearsal template for reLISH, in which Mayer is joined by dancers JulieAnn Graham, Margaret Morris and Jules Hopkins. Even the title, reLISH/relâche, can be seen as a mini word-choreography by Mayer. (It also echoes Foray Forêt, the title of an acclaimed 1990 work by one of Mayer’s idols, the postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown.)

“In my solo work and in my work with dancers I want to cultivate a feeling of relishing dancing—tasting it, savoring it,” she says, adding that she wanted to shift the accent to the second syllable because “it’s more musical.” Relâche, she says, is French for “release, let go, relax—which I think is an important part of being able to really enjoy something.”

Relish reLISH/relâche Saturday 14 through June 29 at Bethlehem United Church of Christ.