Dawn Cooper Barnes, Howard Community College professor and artistic director of the Aurora Dance Company -- considered one of Howard County's premier dance companies -- is in a bit of a hurry.

She is constantly on the go, moving to her own beat. Finding a few minutes to talk to Barnes, 40, is sometimes tricky unless she can schedule it between her many daily appointments, meetings and rehearsals.

In addition to her solo dancing career, there are her responsibilities as Aurora's choreographer and her tight schedule at HCC, where she teaches courses on film, dance, English and mass media.

The Columbia resident also has a list of extracurricular activities a mile long: host of "On Location," an arts showcase on Cable 8; maker of a documentary about the history of her homeland, the West African nation of Liberia; and educator about African life and culture.

In her down time, she works as an unofficial cultural attache to the embassy of Liberia in Washington and dabbles in acting. She and her husband have been married 20 years and have four sons.

"Dawn is very cool," says Ellyne Brown Downs, a Baltimore veterinarian and one of two Aurora dancers who have been with the company the longest. "Her energy is contagious. Seeing her do so many different things has helped inspire all of us in the company to try other things, too."

Seeing Barnes perform is an education, says Doris Ligon, co-founder of the African Art Museum of Maryland in Columbia.

"You see her dance and you end up getting out of your seat. She just has that kind of charisma," Ligon says. "It's not easy to start a small dance company -- and in the suburbs -- but she's done it. She has the commitment" to see it through.

Barnes founded the Aurora Dance Company five years ago -- "Aurora" is the name of the Greek goddess of dawn -- as a group that performs a mix of jazz, modern and African dance styles.

Barnes throws everything into her choreography pot: Irish step dances, tangos and waltzes, folk dances and black dance forms that were adaptations by slaves of their masters' dances.

Her love of all kinds of dance, particularly African, inspired her to form Aurora. The company focuses on showcasing the history and poetry of world dance styles.

"African dance seems very relevant to me now," she says, "and you've got to do things that are relevant to keep people interested. Live dance companies cannot be sustained solely by the upper classes. You have to access new audiences.

"Aurora's popularity has grown because we go in and have fun," Barnes says.

Still, Barnes says it has been a challenge to run a small dance company in Columbia.

Orchestrating rehearsal and performance schedules to meet the demands of the dancers' full-time jobs and families can be tricky.

"It's crazy sometimes when you think about going to rehearsal after work," says Downs. "Sometimes you're so tired that you want to just go to sleep. But you do it anyway because you know that when you perform, it will all be worth it."

Barnes' love of movement and her desire to teach American audiences about African folk dance can be traced to her childhood in Monrovia, Liberia, where her family -- descendants of freed slaves from South Carolina who returned to West Africa in 1821 -- had settled.

As a child, Barnes was encouraged to try her hand at drawing, painting and dance. By the time she was 6, she was studying ballet with a British expatriate, Kathleen Kemp, and then explored folk and traditional dance at Liberia's National Cultural Center.

While ballet taught her discipline and structure, Barnes remembers that there was another kind of dance that pulled at her soul strings.

"All the while I was taking ballet at this young age, I was having these fantasies about tribal dances and African cultural dance," she says. "I was very, very interested in learning the folk dances. I was equally happy to do both traditional dance and the tribal form."

By age 13, Barnes was enrolled in boarding school in Geneva and ballet was put on the back burner. Instead, she performed original routines and choreographed African dance pieces for fellow students.

She came to the United States in 1975 at age 16 to attend the University of Michigan, where she focused on dance.

Although her family was deeply involved in the arts while in Liberia, Barnes says her parents were "very traditional and were not having this vanguard stuff. They would have been very happy for me to go to medical school. But that was never my path."

She studied for a master's degree in theater at Hunter College in New York City, mostly so she could take classes at the Alvin Ailey studios. She and her husband, who married as undergraduates, returned in 1980 to Liberia, where she intended to establish a national dance troupe.

Four months later, civil war broke out and Barnes returned to America with her husband. She got her doctorate in cinema from the University of Maryland, College Park.

There are still new challenges and conquests, Barnes says. Ballroom and Latin dance look like fun. Aurora and its dancers still need guidance and dedication. Teaching new students keeps her blood pumping.

And hearing the beat of African drums still makes Barnes get up and move.

"Oh, no, I'll never stop dancing, though the way I dance might change," Barnes says. "There's always something new to experience and you keep relearning. I'm a dancer who happens to teach dance and a teacher who happens to perform. Always something new."

With that, Dawn Barnes hops into her little white sports car and is gone.

Pub Date: 3/11/99