FAMILY : One Blue Palm for Kids, Another for Adults

Subversive, avant-garde, postmodern, sensual . . . children’s entertainers? There are two sides to Blue Palm, the dance/theater team of Jackie Planeix and Tom Crocker, and both can be sampled in two upcoming events, one for adults, one for family audiences.

First, the real-life husband and wife performers are opening in “Ooh, Baby, Baby!,” their intimate adult comedy about “love, gender and morning sickness,” at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood on Sunday. It’s based on the couple’s recent entry into parenthood.

And, from Sept. 16-24, Planeix and Crocker will open at the Los Angeles Children’s Museum for eight performances of an excerpt from their off-beat children’s show “Blue Palm Startles Little Red Riding Hood, Eats Hansel and Gretel, Then Dances With the Sleeping Beauty.”

They’ll be doing “Hansel and Gretel” with an outrageously wacky twist: The witch gets even for her oven demise with a spell that forces a rotund Hansel and Gretel to gobble goodies nonstop until audience volunteers--and “Ziggy Freud”--lend a hand.

Have parenthood and a children’s show tamed these edgy dance artists?

“There’s a playfulness in our work, even in the adult work,” Crocker said, “that we have always fueled ourselves with. It’s not as if all of a sudden because we’re doing a show about babies, we’re going to fall into a mainstream mode of expression. We’re going to draw from dance, theater and performance as we always have.”

“Ooh, Baby, Baby!” was inspired by Planeix’s pregnancy that Crocker describes “as a sort of a psychological and emotional boot camp,” a time for confronting concerns and fears about the impending event together, “so when the miraculous and joyous intruder comes, you’re fighting from the same trench.”

“It’s not something we knew, this parallel world of kids and having kids,” Crocker said. “We discovered it summons up deep stuff, from dream life, to relationships with parents and one’s inner child, to an awareness of death.”

The dances in the piece “take over where words stop, [serving as] a kind of fleshing out of the emotional reality that goes on.”

The couple, who met 15 years ago in Brussels as dancers in Maurice Bejart’s “Ballet of the 20th Century,” have been together ever since. Because of their years-long “professional and personal partnership,” the decision to have a child “was a big, big deal for us,” Planeix said.

“I think even people who don’t work together are up against the same thing. You’re aware your life is going to change and that you’re letting another human being into the equation.” Above all, she noted, “you’re thrown back to very gender-specific considerations. The woman’s body is going through the pregnancy, the man is not. How does this new very gender-related thing change your relationship?”

Planeix and Crocker refer to what they do for both child and adult audiences as “intelligent play” and having a child--their daughter is not quite 2--has “solidified” that creative identity, Crocker said, “because you’re looking through a child’s eyes.”

“It makes you more focused,” Planeix added. “We really, really love this child and we really, really love being on stage together. It has made us more determined to hold on to what we love in life.”

* “Ooh, Baby, Baby!,” Theatre/Theater, 1713 Cahuenga Blvd., Sundays, 7 p.m., Sunday-Nov. 19, $15; (213) 660-8587.

“Hansel and Gretel,” Children’s Museum, 310 N. Main St., Sept. 16-17, 23-24, noon and 2 p.m. Free with $5 museum admission; (213) 687-8801.