Oakland Ballet: Whimsy elevates Guidi's 'Nutcracker'

In a blinding flash onstage, the human versions of the Nutcracker, the Mouse King and the Ballerina were magically replaced by small inanimate dolls. Seated somewhere behind us, a young patron of Oakland Ballet let out a decidedly impressed, "Whoa!"

It's a wonderful thing to watch a piece of theater inspire awe, and the warmly enthusiastic audience was certainly awed at the Oakland Ballet Company's "Nutcracker," which opened its six-performance run at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland on Friday.

Even if this is not the most lavishly budgeted or refined production in the Bay Area, the childlike, antic humor and whimsical storybook settings distinguish and elevate director and choreographer Ronn Guidi's intimate retelling of the oft-told "Nutcracker," which premiered in 1972.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.
(Photo by Marty Sohl)

More mugging the merrier in Ballet San Jose's 'Nutcracker'

There's a pleasantly warm, homey feeling almost as soon as you walk into the San Jose Performing Arts Center for Ballet San Jose's "Nutcracker." It's the kind of show at which a complete stranger might lean over the seat back and chat as if you'd been friends for years, and at Thursday's opening night for the company's two-week run, dancegoers of all ages were in anticipatory high spirits.

Artistic Director Dennis Nahat's staging of his 1979 ballet - with a scenario that he and the late Ian Horvath adapted from an E.T.A. Hoffmann tale - is a jaunty, colorful affair, full of bounce-and-go, enough to charm the first-time viewer or even the most jaded veteran of "Nutcrackers" past.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Students bear witness to Rwandan genocide

On seeing Immaculée Ilibagiza in person, what strikes one first is the warmth of her smile, which seems to take in most of the 700-plus people who gathered to hear her speak last month in Bishop O'Dowd High School's gymnasium. Charismatic and funny, she bubbles with enthusiasm and a lively rapid-fire manner of speaking, though it's almost impossible to imagine where that smile can come from, given the horrifying events she's lived through.

Ilibagiza is the author of "Left to Tell" and a survivor of the genocide that swept Rwanda from April to July 1994, when Hutu citizens rose up to slaughter their ethnic rivals, the Tutsi people. Neighbors, classmates, old friends, fellow workers - between 800,000 and 1 million people were killed, often by people they had known all their lives. Nearly all of Ilibagiza's family - including her father, mother and two brothers - perished in those months.


Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Choreographers take a quantum leap into physics

At first, the dancers step gingerly around the taut golden strings that crisscross the floor of ODC's theater space in the Mission. There's a low bubbling thrum in the air from musician and composer Albert Mathias' panoply of electronic instruments that gives the sense of a percolating atmosphere as Cherise Richards, Suzanne Lappas and Shannon Stewart experimentally twang and gather up various strands, nimbly threading their way through the web of bright yellow twine.

When choreographer Kathleen Hermesdorf gives the signal for the rehearsal to begin, however, the three lift fistfuls of string into a three-dimensional cat's cradle and begin marking out the twisting, vibrating phrases of Hermesdorf's latest work, "Fate + Longing =," a work that Motionlab will perform this week at ODC.

Read more on the Chronicle site.

Wherefore art thou Joffrey Ballet?

I used to wonder what exactly critics meant when they'd say that a piece of work was "wretched." I imagined scruffy dancers clad in rags, shuffling along to dirges. I have since come to what admittedly might be a completely different-- and perhaps only particular to me-- definition of the term. It is a work that makes you feel wretched. Hide your face in your hands, I want to weep wretched.

I might as well say now that this was my feeling on seeing the Joffrey Ballet during their recent run at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. And I think I also ought to mitigate what probably sounds like critical hyperbole, by saying that this was a personal reaction, based on what I had hoped to see, and what I then didn't get to see. Other people in the audience obviously had a far more positive experience that evening, if the applause and shouts at the final curtain call were anything to go by.

But I couldn't join in. Like someone looking for a piece of lost childhood only to find it's been paved over and made into a strip mall, I felt, honestly, a little heartsick.

As a born New Yorker, I'm one of those hordes of people who are terribly sentimental about the Joffrey Ballet. One of my running jokes is that whenever a dancer is mentioned in our house, I always add, "Oh, and of course she was with Joffrey."

There's a reason for that -- at one time everyone was with the Joffrey, because Joffrey wasn't just at the epicenter of American ballet, it was American ballet. Fresh, quirky, technical, but with soul, Joffrey had an idiosyncratic reputation, but kept everyone coming back because we all wanted to know what they'd do next. The rep included Ballets Russes revivals and works by fresh faces in American choreography. They did high energy populist works like Gerald Arpino's Trinity, and high drama in John Cranko's Romeo & Juliet. They did biting satire in Kurt Jooss' Green Table and broad comedy in Ashton's La fille mal gardee. It was a company that gloriously defied categorization.

So when I realized what ballets the company was planning to perform here in Berkeley, I had to wonder why on earth, with the vasty Joffrey repertoire available to them, would the company choose to bring Billboards, of all things, on this tour--its first in to the Bay Area in many years.

I have nothing against Laura Dean, and certainly Prince's music is not to be sneezed at. But from the larger than life vinyl banner that proclaims "BILLBOARDS" across the body of a sexily lounging female dancer (with a small, but legible "Gannett" logo at the hem) there was an atmosphere of slick and yet desperately dated commercialism that summed up their Zellerbach appearance.

As far back as 1996, critic Clive Barnes warned of the danger of relying on commercially viable, but artistically void Billboards as a staple of the Joffrey repertoire. In an editorial for Dance Magazine, he said presciently,

The Joffrey over the years has built up a fabulous repertoire of modern classics--from, most notably Ashton, Massine, and Jooss -- and a fascinating Ballets Russes collection, as well as many decent creations, particularly from Arpino himself. It was a company with a plan and a purpose, a national company, distinct from both New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, and a company that overseas could represent American classic ballet at its best. If to survive it has to give up the very thing that made its survival important, one wonders what has been gained.

(Dance Magazine, November, 1996)

So what's it doing on the rep of Joffrey's tour, a tour celebrating the company's 50th anniversary? And why has the company brought two of the most tired items from their 70s and 80s years? Even if these pieces might have been fresh back then, has the Joffrey acquired no newer, more interesting, more relevant repertoire since then? I catch myself thinking this is decidedly not the Joffrey that I grew up idolizing.

It's not to say that the company lacks talent in the dancers. To the contrary, the company has a number of engaging dancers in Stacy Joy Keller, Heather Aagard, Willy Shives, but there's only so much they can do in a situation where the company direction is obviously lacking.

I must admit though, that I was somewhat horrified to see that Pas de Deesses, once a staple of the Joffrey repertoire, looked so close to parody. What has happened to coaching? I had to go back to a former Joffrey ballet master to ask what the atmosphere of the ballet was supposed to be. Was I remembering it through a child's rose-colored glasses? Where was the warmth, the airy Romantic graces with the hint of gracious rivalry?

Devised by Robert Joffrey as a tribute to the beautiful Romantic era in the vein of Pas de Quatre, the dancers are meant to look as if they'd just stepped from a lithograph.

The dancers-- Kathleen Thielhelm as Taglioni, Victoria Jaiani as Grahn, Keller as Cerrito and Fabrice Calmels as Arthur St. Leon -- are lovely to look at, but seemed to have little idea as to what was interesting about the interaction between these 19th century personalities or differentiating from, even contrasting with, the style of contemporary ballet. In fact, this performance was decidedly 21st century--developpes carried the legs up to the nose and around the body 180 degrees to back of the head, eliciting gasps from the audience members behind us. All I could think was how horrified Grahn would have been at the idea of showing off her nether-regions to the audience in such an unladylike, contortionist fashion.

Unfortunately, the Tharp Deuce Coupe which followed on the program, has also not kept pace over the years, though I would argue that the fault lies in the choreography and not the coaching. Set to a Sessions Presents the Best of amalgam of Beach Boys hits, it looks even more dated than Pas de Deesses. None of its nineteen sections stays long enough to really grate on you, but the whole exercise has forced jollity, and a self-conscious coyness to it.

Against a graffiti tagged trio of walls, the men --in red spandex and Hawaiian shirts, think Freddie Mercury raiding Don Ho's closet -- slink and sidle across the stage in hip-swivelling glissades across the stage. The women-- dressed no better in Scott Barrie's unflattering short orangey-tan dresses-- bop interspersed among them, ponytails swinging.

Tharp provides no narrative stream, unless you count the subplot of Heather Aagard as the ballerina performing uncomfortable ballet class combinations in pointe shoes in the middle of the stage. The work is admittedly early Tharp, but like many choreographers, she appears here to have no idea what to do with a woman in pointe shoes except to make her stand on tippy toe or spin fast. When not performing these feats of balance, which Aagard manages admirably, she has to sidle and swivel uncomfortably next to people having a lot more fun in jazz shoes. This is an antiseptic version of Hair-- which dates from about the same period-- all pelvis, but no sex.

For a moment, I almost thought that this was her intended story -- a young virginal, sexless ballerina taking class at the Joffrey studios on 6th Ave, surrounded by the hot and heavy urban grit of New York's Village scene. But it hardly seemed worth the effort to try to figure out what was going on -- an episode would fade away before you could even register the players. There aren't many choreographers as frustrating as Tharp. You can't dismiss her, because every so often, she puts together an interesting step, but she's made much better and more worthwhile pieces since Deuce Coupe.

And thus did we arrive at the concluding work, Billboards.

If I've asked a lot of questions here, it's because I asked so many during the performance.

What has happened to the Joffrey I remembered -- a company that addressed themes and issues relevant to contemporary audiences while presenting a context of classical roots? What's with all the boppy, poppy stuff when I know there are better works at the company's command? Does the Joffrey think so little of their audiences in other cities that it chooses to present such a poorly-thought out program of minor work, or does it truly believe that this is the way to entice new dance-lovers? Is this what companies do nowadays to survive in a financially strapped arts funding landscape? Is this what American ballet has come to?

Theater Review: "Benedictus"

An Israeli arms dealer and an Iranian politician walk into a convent in Rome. No, it's not a joke, it's the premise of "Benedictus," a collaborative effort by artists from Israel, Iran and the United States, which had its premiere Monday at Potrero Hill's Thick House Theater.

Inspired by an event at the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005 - a widely reported handshake between Israeli President Moshe Katsav, a Persian Jew, and Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, both of whom were born in the Iranian province of Yazd - "Benedictus" imagines a secret meeting in Rome between childhood friends, now enemies, on the eve of an American invasion of Iran.

Read more on the Chronicle site.

Mark Morris' "Mozart Dances" at Cal Performances

Sept 21, 2007
Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley

I worry when a choreographer makes a full-evening length dance that works--one that's not a story-ballet or a polemic, that can keep an audience focussed and not fidgeting in their seats as you begin section 11 of a 12-part work.

Aw, hell, I think to myself, now every yahoo is going to think that they're as skilled as Mark Morris -- that they can pull off a whole night's worth of abstract modern dance just like "Mozart Dances," which had its West Coast premiere at Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley recently. He makes little things like organic form and reformed structure look too easy.

Facetiousness aside, however, Morris impressively leads the audience on an engaging excursion through a beautiful three-act work set to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 11 in F Major, his Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and his Piano Concerto No 27 in B-flat Major.

To call it ambitious would be patronizing. Morris is too canny a dancemaker to attempt a large scale work without thinking through the nuts and bolts and "ambitious" implies a certain amount of failure in the very word. "Mozart Dances" is not my favorite of his works-- I reserve that title for his exhilarating "L'Allegro"-- but it is both satisfying and successful on a grand scale.

The tone here is simple rituals, with shades of 18th century airs and graces, reflected in Martin Pakledinaz's black and blue-gray knee breeches for the men and diaphanous dresses for the women. Broken into a section mainly for women ("Eleven"), one mainly for men ("Double") and one for a happy intermingling of both genders ("Twenty-seven"), Mozart Dances seems to allude to everything and nothing. A wry comedy of manners? Sistahs doing it for themselves? Menacing, dangerous liaisons?

Morris famously admires the work of George Balanchine, and there's several "Serenade"-like moments of scattered throughout the evening -- the dramatic, plunging swoon to the floor, the gauzy moonlight skirts of the women during their brief interlude in "Double," the second act of the evening.

And yet it wasn't Balanchine that "Mozart Dances" evoked for me, but rather the earlier grittier "Les Noces," by Bronislava Nijinska, circa 1923. It wasn't the score -- Mozart is rather different from the pounding, earthiness of Stravinsky's peasant wedding -- but rather the look of things.

The stark force of Howard Hodgkin's curtailed, painterly brush-strokes-- writ-gargantuan on the cyc in the back-- the architectural groupings and waving of the women in "Eleven" recalled the severe austerity of Nijinska to my eye. Almost certainly, Morris had no intention of evoking a Nijinska's broadly-drawn modernist ballet, but all the same, my mind, grasping for narrative threads, settled on this one.

That there is a ritual feeling throughout "Mozart Dances" is no surprise, given Morris' mastery of the folk dance forms. The weaving patterns of the women as they wound in and out of Lauren Grant's dance in "Eleven" called up the braiding of the bride's hair in "Les Noces'" first tableau. Two poignant solos for other women brought to mind the lamenting mothers of the third tableau. And then the mixture of dreamy sentiment and manly urgency in "Double" made me think of the Consecration of the Groom scene. By the time the curtain rose on Hodgkin's final image -- this time featuring an angry red swath across the space, like virginal blood displayed on the wedding sheets -- I was sure I had the story nailed.

Am I way off-base with my Russian Peasant Wedding theory? Almost assuredly. Reviewing the "Mozart Dances" in the New Yorker, Joan Acocella reports that Morris himself cites the madcap ending of Mozart's opera buffa "Cosi fan tutte." Fair enough. Mozart's pretty far from Russia.

It doesn't stop me from secretly clinging to my theory. After all, that's the flexible pleasure of abstraction. Choose your story and run with it.

For more information, check out cal Performances' extensive webpage on the event with links to video clips and program notes.

Bausch's 'Ten Chi' will haunt your dreams

There are those kinds of artists that impress, those whose work sticks in your brain and those who can change the way you think -- and then there are those that haunt your dreams. It is into the last category that Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal falls.

I first saw her startling "Carnations" as a teenager, and I have never forgotten its bizarre, frightening and yet somehow moving imagery -- or how closely hilarity and sadness seemed to cavort together on a carpet of thousands of pink carnations. Was it absurd that she asked the audience to pretend-hug ourselves? But in the end, almost as if by magic, Bausch uncovered a deeper meaning to all of these gestures that left me feeling slightly forlorn. Perhaps underneath it all, I felt, even then, that Bausch was a romantic, and it seems over the years that her work has grown only more poetic.

With "Ten Chi," which Cal Performances presents this November at Zellerbach Hall, Bausch transports us to Japan, where she created and premiered this work in 2004 at the Saitama Arts Theater. Translated roughly as "heaven and earth," "Ten Chi" draws its inspiration from Bausch's and her dancers' experience of the Japanese culture as outsiders, the martial arts, the language, the everyday interactions.

It's a mix reflected in the wide range of musical sources, Asian and European, such as Ryoko Moriyama, Hwang Byungki, Kodo, Yas-Kaz, Gustavo Santaolalla and Rene Aubry, as well as experimentalists such as Portishead's Beth Gibbons, Plastikman (Richie Hawti) and Tudosok -- all played out in an exotically simple setting, shadowed by the tail of a giant whale sounding into the stage.

But if "Ten Chi" sounds potentially obscure, even frustrating, fear not. In the realm of postmodern dance, Bausch is the master of dance theater -- and artists from Bill T. Jones to Robert Wilson to William Forsythe owe her a debt. Dominated by powerful and extraordinary images, her works are at once grandiose and intimate, ridiculous and yet familiar, but always they have the power to reveal something you never realized about yourself. She might even ask the audience to do things that seem silly or uncomfortable, but by whatever means are at her disposal, Bausch intends to make us feel the desire to communicate, to reach out and touch someone.

I expect that my dreams will be haunted again, perhaps by leviathans in the ocean and scattered cherry blossom petals floating on the water, or maybe by the simplest of human gestures. You just never know what we might discover.

Highly Recommended

'Mozart Dances' -- The Mark Morris Dance Group returns to Cal Performances with this evening-length work, whose rhapsodic flair has engendered comparison to Morris' grandest works, such as "L'Allegro il Moderato ed Il Penseroso." Details: Sept. 20-23, Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $32-$72, 510-642-9988, http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

Joffrey Ballet -- The quintessential American maverick ballet company performs homegrown works, including Twyla Tharp's "Deuce Coupe"; Laura Dean's segment from "Billboards"; and "Pas des Deeses," created by the great Robert Joffrey himself. Details: Oct. 4-6, Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $34-$90, 510-642-9988, http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

Armitage Gone! Dance -- Once known for confrontational punk-ballet, Karole Armitage introduces her new company to the Bay Area with the grand lyricism of "Ligeti Essays" and "Times is the echo of an axe within a wood." Details: Oct. 13-14, San Francisco Performances, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, $27-$39, 415-978-ARTS, http://www.performances.org.

Oakland Ballet -- The beloved Oakland Ballet gets a new lease on life with a program of old favorites, including Nijinsky's "Afternoon of a Faun"; Marc Wilde's "Bolero"; and Ronn Guidi's "Trois Gymnopedies" and "Carnaval d'Aix." Details: Oct. 20, Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland, $15-$50, 925-685-8497, http://www.rgfpa.org.

Lines Contemporary Ballet -- Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Alonzo King's troupe is joined by Zakir Hussain and the Philharmonia Chamber Players in a special program featuring two world premiere works. Details: Nov. 2-11, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Third and Mission streets, S.F. $25-$65, 415-978-ARTS, http://www.linesballet.org.

'TEN CHI'

WHEN: Nov. 16-18

WHERE: Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley

HOW MUCH: $34-$76

CONTACT: 510-642-9988, http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

KQED's Spark: Profile of Delroy Lindo

Charismatic, versatile and eloquently formidable, the Delroy Lindo that most audiences know is a dynamic force on both stage and screen. Whether playing manic West Indian Harlem numbers-runner Archie in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" or sympathetic jazz musician and father Woody Carmichael in "Crooklyn," Lindo's sensitivity and ability to uncover what makes people tick has long been admired. A prolific actor, Lindo has been in more than 45 films and television shows as well as dozens of stage productions...

Read more on KQED.org.

Tap into annual dance fest

When I was 10, I so wanted to be Eleanor Powell.

A glamorous powerhouse with a sassy smile and a great pair of legs, Powell seemed to me to be way cooler than Ginger Rogers. No marabou feathers or froufrou ruffles for Powell -- just those little short-shorts that showed off her brilliant tapwork. Plus, she was always surrounded by hordes of adoring men, and even better, she was the equal of any guy. Even Fred Astaire looked at her with a different kind of respect and affection in his eyes, and with good reason -- she could easily dance him under the table.

There's a special kind of happy that I get from watching tap. It's a dance form that oozes joy and exuberance with every carefree scuff or teasing slide. So there's a good reason to look forward to Aug. 13-19, when the Bay Area's Stepology hosts its annual weeklong tap fiesta, with classes, workshops and free panel discussions -- even a public tap jam at the San Francisco Dance Center. It all culminates in a blowout performance at the Herbst Theatre called the Bay Area Rhythm Exchange.

Read on Contra Costa Times site.

West Wave Dance Festival's Uni-Form: Ballet Program

Dance fans can celebrate that like a cooling rainshower, the two week-long WestWave Dance Festival -- which runs through this weekend at the Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco -- has arrived to quench the summer dance drought.

The festival, now in its 16th year, has found a fresh new focus this year, with carefully plotted programs that emphasize quality over quantity. The first week’s “4 x 4 series” offered a quartet of evenings, each centered on the work of a particularly notable, up-and-coming choreographer (Kate Weare, Christopher Morgan, Monica Bill Barnes and Amy Seiwert). And this week’s shows—categorized into evenings of ballet, world dance, modern and dance theater—feature programs entirely of world premieres, surely a surfeit of riches for audiences who crave to see new work.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that this year’s festival has been enjoying sold out houses, for Seiwert’s justifiably anticipated program, as well as for the “Uni-Form: Ballet” program on Thursday. True, all is not perfect. Given the contemporary styles on view in the latter program, it felt as if “ballet” was less a descriptor and more a convenient box to place works by people who have been ballet-trained and common to almost all was moody atmospheric music of the sort that could inspire a half a dozen new onomatopoeic categories: “oopy-bloopy” music, “cricky-cracky” music, “plinky-plonky” music. Still, if most of the works on Thursday night could have done with some judicious pruning, they were on the whole well-produced and offered satisfying moments that made viewing well worth the time.

The program began with Irene Liu in Viktor Kabaniaev’s solo “Fragments of…” set to an oopy-bloopy score, created by Nicolas Van Krijdt. Dancing to sounds that evoked thoughts of undersea bubbles and phantom radio broadcasts traveling through space, Liu, who has apprenticed with Diablo Ballet, made the most of the choreography, creating effects that were both natural and disquieting with softly undulating arms and a twisting, snaking spine suspended in impossibly deep back arches.

In what was perhaps the most entertaining and polished piece of the evening, Christian Burns played out a solo “Beneath Your Sheltering Hand,” against a wall-sized video of tropical and computerized interior scenes. Looking like a man in desperate need of a tropical vacation, Burns moved across the stage in frantic stammers and starts to Anthony Discenza’s sound score of garbled marketing tropes spoken through a voice synthesizer and hawking self improvement products that prey on our modern hypochondrias.

Only one woman showed work on this program although female dancers outnumbered the male two to one —a sobering reminder that even today in the ballet world, there are plenty of women to dance, but very few who choreograph. Unfortunately, Martt Lawrence’s “Rogue,” an excursion for five women and two men was perhaps the weakest entry of the evening. Filled with much rushing about the stage, meaningful slashes at the air, and pregnant looks, it was a bit like watching a telenovela when you don’t speak Spanish. You’re aware that drama is definitely afoot, but you can’t understand a word of it.

In “Digression,” composer Les Stuck -- who according to the program note, seems to think that he is the first musician ever to attempt choreography—offered an arrangement of dance phrases created by Alex Ketley. The six women ably took on the challenge of sometimes literally bone-crunching leaps and falls to the ground set against still moments of proferred limbs and ominous fingers circling overhead, all to Stuck’s own, rather cricky-cracky sounding score, although ultimately it looked less like a structured work, and more like an assemblage of steps.

Live accompaniment from composer Jack Perla and cellist Sam Bass bolstered Mark Foehringer’s “In Fugue,” a faintly menacing and confrontational work for Katherine Wells, Maya Hey, Carlos Venturo, and Joseph Copley, as well as ODC’s Private Freeman, Brian Fisher and Diablo Ballet’s Jekyns Pelaez. Foehringer was fortunate to have such a heavy hitting list of performers, Wells, Freeman and Fisher in particular, who can express more with the spaces in between the movements than most dancers can with a panoply of technical feats.

Still throughout Thursday’s program, one particularly vexing commonality stood out – the peculiar self-absorbed “windmills of your mind” style of dance marked by impressive, yet mechanical technical feats topped with a closed-off, sightless gaze into space --that has become so popular. Nowadays, watching contemporary dance can feel like an act of voyeurism, a discomfiting glimpse into the performer’s private madhouse. Is that really what makes a ‘serious” dance now?

Choral Society gives students a venue for their talent

In cascading echoes, a wave of voices emerges from inside Lakeside Presbyterian Church, "What a handsome young man! And he's single we hear!"

The church's inner sanctuary has become the site of a sprightly English country ball as the San Francisco Choral Society cheerfully rehearses the first scene of Kirke Mechem's new opera, "Pride and Prejudice," an excerpt of which it will premiere at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday and Saturday.

This review first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Read on the Chronicle site.

inkBoat and Nanos Operetta

Boy's avian affair never quite gets off the ground

Even before the lights went down, a palpable sense of anticipation and excitement pervaded the audience at "Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird's Spine," the cabaret-style collaboration between experimental theater troupes Nanos Operetta and inkBoat, which opened a three-weekend run at the ODC Theater on Friday night. And why not? The last time that these two companies shared a stage was during Nanos' highly acclaimed "3 Drops of Blood," a series of 10 crazy sexy cool showcases.

Nevertheless, if you're an unsentimental and relentlessly literal type, "Our Breath" -- an episodic, absurdist journey through one man's impossible love affair with a bird -- may not be the show for you.

Read on the Chronicle site

KQED Spark: Benjamin Levy

With a body of work noted for its pulsing athleticism and intelligent composition, Benjamin Levy has become one of the Bay Area's most sought-after choreographers, creating a style marked by personal inspiration distilled into pure movement.

Read the full profile on KQED.org

Even dance critics love a surprise (or two)

Dance critics are such a difficult lot.

We’re constantly clamoring for new work, and then when we see it, we criticize it for being not as good as the old classics. We want to see performers break out of the mold, to tread fresh ground, and yet when they do, we gripe about how pretentious they are. We grouse about taped music instead of live, expect world-class performances on a shoestring budget and demand imaginative new methods of presentation every year.

But in our defense, I feel that what we-- like many of our fellow travelers out there in audience-land-- keep hoping for is that rush that we get when we see a performance that surprises us. As a gripe-y critic, I can say that the number of performances this past season that elicited that certain delighted grin can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But when it happens, there’s an unmistakable, gleeful tickle in the part of my brain that processes serendipity.

It’s not always about the lavishness of the production, or the international cachet of someone’s name, or even the sheer novelty of a work. It’s happened in small intimate settings as well as in the opera house – but always there’s a pervasive sense that the audience and artists were partners together in a kind of fearless adventure.

“Astonish me,” the impresario Serge Diaghilev once famously said when asked by artist Jean Cocteau what he should do in the theater. The period of their collaboration marked one of the dance world’s most adventurous eras, and not just within the confines of the Ballets Russes itself, but throughout modern dance, music, theater and art.

“Tact in audacity lies in knowing how far to go too far,” Cocteau would write later.
Sometimes the critic in me wonders what happened to all that spirit of exploration.
Regularly, my inbox is flooded with press releases for new dance works, ones about social justice, about loving and losing, explorations of the human conundrum. There’s modern dance coming up, world dance, eco-dance, dance to new music, dance to old music, dance to no music. I just hope that in some way or another there’s something in there to astonish.

Still, as I scan the list there’s a twinge of anticipation, an underlying hope that maybe, just maybe, this show might hold one of those wonderful “too far” moments. That’s why the announcement that this year’s WestWave Dance Festival presents not just a handful but a tantalizing full schedule of world premiere works, perks my interest.

Will there be half-formed, forgettable works? Probably. Will some of them land far short of the mark? Almost assuredly. But then there’s the promise of those pleasant discoveries that are guaranteed to stick in your mind. And better yet, there’s a golden opportunity to see if anyone is willing to step out audaciously and surprise us.

Now in its 16th season, the West Wave festival has already proven itself to be a worthy outlet for experimentation. I can still picture scenes from last season-- Kerry Mehling’s comic lounge-lizard video duet, Brittany Brown Ceres’ simultaneous solos for five women or Kate Weare’s pithy duet “Drop Down.”

The first week showcases singular choreographers – among them, Weare (July 19), Christopher K. Morgan (July 20), Monica Bill Barnes (July 21), and Amy Seiwert (July 22) -- each one presenting a program brand-new works on a different night. Mixed programs that highlight various genres of dance -- and feature five or six artists on each night --make up the second week’s schedule. Diablo Ballet’s Viktor Kabaniaev will present his latest work “Episodes of…” on the “ballet” evening (July 26) for instance, while you can catch Ceres and Mehling on the “dance theater” night (July 28).

It doesn’t have to cost a lot to see these works either. Tickets to the West Wave Dance Festival are $20 each – less, if you subscribe to a four, or the whole eight, performance series. In my view that not only makes the festival accessible to a wider audience, it also takes some of the pressure off of the choreographers.

Freed from the stress of self-producing and unburdened by audiences keen to get their money’s worth, and charged with giving us something brand new, there’s no need to present those surefire, ticket-selling, but mostly bland pieces.

Go ahead, astonish us.

And Summerfest Dance’s West Wave Dance Festival runs over two weeks from July 19-29 at San Francisco’s Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida Street between l7th & Mariposa Streets (415-863-9834, www.odctheater.org)

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Oakland Dance Festival 2007: Company C, ODC/SF & Jo Kreiter

Summer festivals are a great time to see what dance makers have in the pot, and a worthy entrant into the flurry of such local events is the Oakland Dance Festival, organized and presented by Charles Anderson’s Company C Contemporary Ballet. Now in its fourth year, this two weekend event at the Malonga Casquelourd Center now has all the earmarks of a regular and welcome tradition.

Joined this year by ODC/Dance as well as Flyaway Productions, Company C offered an evening-length program of six works that was a not-always-successful mixed bag. But then, what really makes festivals like this one important is that they offer a broader mix of companies – a tantalizing taste which can introduce each troupe to a varied audience of people who might not be familiar with their works.

The action got underway with Charles Anderson’s new work, “Egyptian Two Step,” which, in a bit of a reversal, put the audience members, not in their seats, but standing on the stage itself.

From off to the side, the stage manager intoned, “Dancers, places please,” and after a moment the curtain parted to reveal the fourteen members of Company C strategically scattered throughout the auditorium, on seats, in aisles. Chugging back and forth to the music of Arthur Jarvinen, they performed a jaunty little number that elicited a few chuckles from our side of the curtain.

What Anderson referred to as his amuse-bouche however, elicited an ambivalent reaction. “Egyptian Two Step,” though mildly amusing, was constrained by how many steps could be performed on stairs or over the back of a seat. Then too, it didn’t exactly turn the audience-performer relationship on its head or break down barriers in the way that, say, the audience involvement pieces of the 1960s New York downtown theater scene used to. On completion, the audience dutifully flowed up the aisles into its more usual position and awaited the next piece, making one wonder what all of that was about.

We were still grappling with that question when the curtain went up on Flyaway Productions in Jo Kreiter’s “The Grim Arithmetic of Water.” Kreiter’s work, which has included some interesting site-specific pieces, can exemplify the pleasant surprises of finding art and audience in a new locality, but in that regard, “Grim Arithmetic” is one of her more conventional “we’re on the stage, audience is in seats” sort of pieces.

With only an excerpt of the full work offered without much in the way of context or notes, the subject of the 2004 “Grim Arithmetic” is more than a bit opaque and it seems unfair to overly criticize the content. Visually, Kreiter’s aerial maneuvers have the potential to create lasting images – an illusion of weightlessness that can seem time-stopping. In “Grim Arithmetic” however, the portentous rituals, the nearly nude woman splashing and slumping in a pool in the center, the pairs of dancers swinging from water-carrying yokes looked contrived and oddly limited as dance choreography. Best were the simplest moments, in which a dancer spun through space dangling from a suspended bucket of water, as if parched and struggling towards a life-giving force.

Encompassing the middle portion of the evening were two pieces from ODC/Dance: “Scramble,” a recent premiere by KT Nelson, and Brenda Way’s witty 1994 “Scissor Paper Stone.” Perhaps because it’s a newer work, “Scramble” – a quartet for the powerful Anne Zivolich, Elizabeth Farotte, Daniel Santos and Justin Flores -- looks less polished than “Scissor Paper Stone,” which enjoys the double advantage of a winking, cinematic love triangle and Private Freeman’s wiseacre attitude. Nevertheless, that trademark ODC energy and flair punctuated both works.

Company C closed out the program with Alexandre Proia’s romance for two couples, “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Anderson’s “Bolero,” set to the famous Ravel work and newly commissioned by the Mendocino Music Festival.

The company now boasts a more solid core of dancers than ever before, although the stage at the Casquelourd Center seemed to rob the women especially of their usual attack. Pointe work looked particularly careful, rather than freewheeling or bluesy in the Gershwin “Rhapsody,” but then overall, Proia’s choreography is an awkward assemblage.

The nine dancers of “Bolero” looked far more at ease, although smooth transitions in the partnering work still elude the men. Nevertheless, if this “Bolero” was less about the driving inevitability of fate and more a Spanish-spiced fiesta, it was brought into focus by the eye-catching Beth Kaczmarek, whose beautiful lines and carriage of her back lent credibility to her every step.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

KQED Profile: Ballet Afsaneh

"Whether in a major theater, a cultural festival, museum or middle school, we are presenting this work, seeking to remind audiences and ourselves, that there is still beauty in this world that sometimes seems to have fallen in love with war."

--Sharlyn Sawyer, Ballet Afsaneh

From Uzbekistan to India, Turkey to Afghanistan, the Ballet Afsaneh Art and Culture Society brings to the stage the vibrant sights and sounds of the ancient route through Asia known as the Silk Road.

A crossroads of trade in ideas as well as goods, the 7000 mile-long Silk Road connected the empires of Byzantium, the Ottomans, of India, Persia and Mongolia with Western Europe for over 2000 years. Combining music, poetry and dance, Ballet Afsaneh's performances offer a richly textured perspective on cultures that originate in modern day Iran, Tajikstan, Uzbekhistan and Afghanistan -- an alternative to the usual news about political upheaval and war in this region.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Joe Goode's Humansville

You have to hand it to Joe Goode. With “Humansville” --which the Joe Goode Performance Group premiered on Thursday night in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum in San Francisco— he breaks open the theatrical box with a highly effective dance theater installation with a style that few can pull off.

Presented as part of the Deeply Personal Series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the hour-long, site-specific work integrates live dance, music performance and video –both pre-recorded and live--with a dazzling complexity. From a purely technical standpoint, it is perhaps Goode’s most ambitious work, sectioning part of the open Forum theater into four living dioramas, some of which display Austin Forbord’s video projections against Erik Flatmo’s scenic elements. Jack Carpenter skillfully manages the tricky task of unifying the individual scenes with lighting, and the whole space is bound loosely by the ambient score by Joan Jeanrenaud-- a founding member of the Kronos Quartet-- who plays the cello from a mobile platform that can be wheeled throughout the performing area.

Dispersed among the tableaux are the members of Goode’s current group of performers. Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello sit silently side-by-side opposite a gargantuan projection of a woman gesturing “come hithers” at us. Around the corner, Alexander Zendzian and Melecio Estrella, each in a separate tiled cell, fling themselves in synchronized desperation against the grey and blue walls. Dressed in powder pink 50’s crinolines, Jessica Swanson chats with her beau—another giant projection on the side of her wall-papered room, while in a red fuzz-lined alcove, Patricia West appears through a small window to gripe about a restaurant reservation while employing gestures that eerily mimic a weeping woman projected on a TV screen just below her.

As with any installation art there are multiple layers and points of entry. You don’t have to start at any particular place, and you needn’t stay through the end of each of the 7-minute “plays.” In fact, there’s a passageway behind the walls where audience members are free to wander and peek through cut-out windows into the back of each scene, adding both interactivity to the work plus the disturbing sense that we are all peeping Toms, constantly trying to see what the neighbors are up to. Did the audience members who craned forward for a glimpse under the ruffled valance of Swanson’s window realize that their image was being projected larger-than-life on the other side of the wall?

The combination of video with live action is highly persuasive. There is the sense of being immersed in a moment, but as with the installations of Bill Viola or Julia Scher, you also have a slightly creepy feeling that you’re being played. This is a risky and fascinating way to present questions about human nature, voyeurism, our understanding of others and of ourselves. How willing are we to cross over lines and put ourselves out there? When a projected woman holds out her hand and invites us to “touch me,” it takes several minutes for the crowd to figure out that someone has to walk forward and touch the projection before the sequence will continue, but once it becomes clear, the invitation evokes a kind of delight too, as if we’ve been wallflowers who are suddenly asked to dance.

When the piece moves into a more conventional presentation style, however, the momentum wanes. After about half an hour of roaming and peeping, of intersecting with lives that are only partially observed and never fully understood, the lights in the Forum come up, signaling the shift to the second part of the show and the audience sits down obediently in bleachers facing the blank pair of angled walls.

From here, the action moves into episodic dance segments that offer a prismatic view of some of the elements seen in the installations. The dancing is potent--particularly intense duets for Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello. Nevertheless, we glean no further information about the personalities in the boxes and even with a final series of text snippets that address empathy and human connection, it’s not clear how to tie it all together. Plus it’s not nearly as much fun as walking in and around the action.

Even so, “Humansville” is a compelling journey. The overall look is beautiful, melding together all the production elements masterfully and if Goode’s aim is to provoke, to invite us to think, then he succeeds at that-- admirably.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

KQED Profile: Erika Chong Shuch

"I want to take big questions of life that are the most intimidating and find a way to make them relatable."

--Erika Chong Shuch

Choreographer, director, dancer and teacher, Erika Chong Shuch crosses over boundaries in her works, which meld together theater, dance, science, poetry, music, video and mechanics to formulate multidisciplinary works of art-- in the truest sense of the term. Inspired by a wide range of subjects, from cannibalism to extraterrestrial intelligence, Chong Shuch nevertheless puts the focus on the drama of human experiences.

SPARK follows Chong Shuch from the earliest stages of the creative process, as she embarks on One Window, a work that explores our relationship to boundaries and confinement and which was created as part of Intersection for the Arts' year-long Prison Project.

A restless intellect, Chong Shuch dropped out of high school in San Jose at 17, yet still found her way into theater and dance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduating, Chong Shuch danced in Seattle and in Berlin with Alex B Company and Sommer Ulrickson (Wee Dance Company) before returning to California to earn a master of fine arts degree at San Francisco's New College of California, where she also co-founded the multi-disciplinary Experimental Performance Institute.



Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Diablo Ballet: The Mirror, It's Not What You Think & Taj Mahal

Diablo Ballet may be facing an uncertain future, but one thing is for sure – the show will go on. As the company took the stage for its last home performances of the season at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts last weekend, co-Artistic director Nikolai Kabaniaev offered firm reassurances that the company will continue on next season.

Diablo Ballet may be facing an uncertain future, but one thing is for sure – the show will go on.

As the company took the stage for its last home performances of the season at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts last weekend, co-Artistic director Nikolai Kabaniaev offered firm reassurances that the company will continue on next season.

With the retirement of Ashraf Habibullah from the company’s board, however, the rush to close the gap in funding is on. Thus far, Diablo Ballet has reached only a fifth of its goal and the company still faces a July 1 deadline for raising the $500,000 necessary to mount its 2007-2008 season as planned, with the announced world premieres from Val Caniparoli, as well as Viktor Kabaniaev’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and Nikolai Kabaniaev’s “Once Upon a Ballroom.”

In the mean time, Diablo has another promising choreographer on its hands in dancer Tina Kay Bohnstedt, whose debut work, “The Mirror” premiered on Friday night. In this quirky episodic piece for two dancers, Lauren Main de Lucia dances a solo to her own reflection in a mirror, only to be joined --not entirely unexpectedly—by Matthew Linzer, a sometime partner, sometime competitor. Dressed alike in Loran Watkins’ pert black mesh and green skirts, they are nevertheless, anything but cut from the same cloth.

The style in which Bohnstedt works-- low squats, pitched torso and turned-in, crooked lines that break apart in key joints – bears some resemblance to that of European choreographers such as Jiri Kylian and Nacho Duato. Often this style is meant to communicate the rawness of internal emotions, the “realer-than-real” that lies under the polite exterior.

It’s an impulse that Bohnstedt leans toward, but never fully embraces, and the choice of Erik Satie’s introspective Gymonopedies and Gnossiennes gives “The Mirror” the air of a movement study rather than a fully completed thought. Percussive strikes of a limb melt into ripples through the body, in a way that tantalizingly implies a larger significance.

But as “The Mirror” continues through solos and duets, it remains unclear just where Bohnstedt is going with the piece. Is Linzer her masculine side, her antagonist, her dream lover? Any of these options could make for interesting explorations, but, though Main and Linzer look quite adorable side-by-side, not enough is established through the choreography of who they are to each other to explore any particular avenue.

Still, Bohnstedt’s work has promise. If her mastery of structure is still under development – the timing of Main’s final solo in silence, for instance, is a jarring miscalculation that seemed to confuse the audience – nevertheless, Main and Linzer create a tone that is both suitably playful, and yet also darkly serious.

The entire company looked at the top of their game though, in the sorbet flirtations of KT Nelson’s “It’s Not What You Think,” danced to songs by Bjork. Nelson’s spirited, offbeat jaunts look appealing on Diablo’s dancers, who are joined this year by Peter Brandenhoff, a former soloist with San Francisco Ballet, where he was notable for clean dancing and an intelligent approach to even the most minor roles.

He -- along with Linzer, David Fonnegra Jekyns Pelaez and Edward Stegge – makes a fine dreamboat, dallying with the flock of women-- Bohnstedt, Main, Mayo Sugano Cynthia Sheppard and Lauren Jonas-- whose pert curlicued steps match the curlicues on Amanda Williams’ foxy little 60s retro shift-dresses.

Also on the program was a reprise of Nikolai Kabaniaev’s “The Legend of Taj Mahal.”

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

KQED Profile: Mark Jackson

From Stanislavsky to the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour --where movement intersects with drama is the primary interest of writer, director and actor Mark Jackson, one of the Bay Area's most exciting and original young playwrights.

A graduate of San Francisco State University's Theater Arts program, Jackson's brand of physical theater integrates the kind of theories of gesture and biomechanics that he studied under Gennadi Bogdanov and at the Saratoga International Theater Institute with a modern sensibility to create dramatic works that update age-old ideas of theater and present them in a fresh light to new audiences.

Jackson first came to widespread critical attention when he founded San Francisco's Art Street Theater in 1995. For Art Street, he created seven new plays in his nine-year stint as the company's artistic director, including I Am Hamlet, for which he won his first Bay Area Critic's Circle Award in 2002. Jackson's reinventions of classic plays, such as R&J and Io, Princess of Argos! drew inspiration from sources as varied as Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, but also honed a flair for perceptive commentary on contemporary society.

For his acclaimed Death of Meyerhold which premiered in 2003 at Berkeley's Shotgun Players, Jackson turned to the work of legendary and revolutionary theater director Vselovod Meyerhold to craft a powerful, and heady mix of dance, commedia, kabuki, and circus.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: Carlos Baron

A childhood in Chile marked by both the lyricism of Pablo Neruda's poetic legacy and the violence of the Pinochet regime flavors the experiences that poet and playwright Carlos Baron has brought to his writings over decades as an exile from his homeland.

After studying sociology and theater arts at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 70s, Baron returned to briefly to Chile to defend the Salvador Allende government, for which he was imprisoned. Upon returning to the Bay Area, in 1975 he helped to found the La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, a cultural meeting ground for Chilean exiles, where he was the first Cultural Coordinator. As a poet and a professional storyteller, Baron's impassioned work has appeared throughout the world at festivals in Cuba, Chile, and the US.

Multiculturalism and Latino theater remain primary interests for Baron, who was also the theater and dance coordinator for the Mission Cultural Center and founder and first artistic director of San Francisco's Teatro Latino. As a professor of theater arts at San Francisco State University, Baron has not only helped to expand La Raza and multicultural studies at the university, but also directs the University's Teatro Arcoiris, or Rainbow Theater, a multicultural theater workshop.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Smuin Ballet: Schubert Scherzo, Romeo & Juliet Balcony Pas de Deux, Falling Up, Carmina Burana

Dancing without the 'Boss,' Smuin Ballet tearfully honors its founder

The crowd was oddly quiet, even subdued in the lobby of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts before the opening of Smuin Ballet’s spring season. Ushers still smiled as they took tickets and handed out programs and old friends still greeted each other warmly but a muted uncertainty hung in the air as audience members took their seats for the company’s first public appearance since the death of their founder on April 23.

Read on the Chronicle site...

Sally Streets: 'I guess I've come full circle'

MORNINGS are quiet on the residential stretch of College Avenue in Berkeley, where Julia Morgan's elegant Craftsman-style theater rests under shady trees. From the outside, it seems impossible to imagine the few dozen dancers who are inside sweating up a storm in Sally Streets' morning ballet class.

Sometimes sharp, sometimes funny, but always plain-spoken, the 73-year-old Streets presides over the class -- a mix of regulars and drop-ins, older and younger, professional and non-professional -- with equal measures of earthy common sense and inspiration.

Nothing seems to escape her notice, from the tip of a head to the angle of a toe, but then, this is doubtless what has made her one of the Bay Area's most sought-after teachers. Perhaps her best-known student is her own daughter, Kyra Nichols, who in June will retire from after an unprecedented 33-year career in New York City Ballet.

Midway into the class, she stops all the action to give a correction to a dancer -- and it seems she's given this correction before. The young dancer is respectfully attentive, but obviously hesitant, and Streets goes on.

"You know," she says quietly, "you might just want to take what I say seriously. After 70 odd years or so, I think I know a thing or two."

Indeed, in the course of a rich career, Streets has been associated with a dizzying array of ballet companies, including New York City Ballet, Pacific Ballet, Oakland Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Diablo Ballet, and her own Berkeley Ballet Theater, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this season.

Streets took her first ballet classes though at Dorothy Pring's Berkeley studio, only steps away from where she now teaches. "It was on Forest Avenue, just two blocks away," she says with a laugh. "I guess I've come full circle."

A professional from a young age, Streets joined the legendary company of Mia Slavenska's Ballet Variante right out of high school and toured with them for a couple of years.

"It was on an old school bus," she recalls, "with the costumes stored in the back of the bus in wicker baskets. When we got to our destination, we all had to help bring the costumes in, set up ironing boards, steam the costumes, then have class, then do the performance, then get back on the bus. Sometimes we had to ride all night to the next place or late at night to get to the next place. Oh it was all over the United States. For a year you were on the bus!"

After a few years, however, Slavenska's company planned a tour to Japan and Streets learned that she would not be taken along. "Oh, I was furious. I thought, 'I'll show you!' And I went and auditioned for New York City Ballet." She laughs in amazement, "And they took me. It was just luck, because someone had hurt themselves the night before and they needed a corps person. So I just dropped into New York City Ballet."

The young company was then under George Balanchine's careful development, but Streets saw a golden era marked by stars such as Maria Tallchief, Jillana and Tanaquil LeClerq. Even so, the pragmatic young dancer only stayed for a few years, giving ballet up when she met and married her husband.

Dance was never quite out of the picture. Even after Streets had her first two children, she ran a ballet school out of her basement. Nevertheless, after eight years away from the stage, when Alan Howard called her to say he was forming a company called Pacific Ballet, she still felt compelled to sneak out of the house without telling her husband where she was going. "I just knew he'd be very upset that I was going back to this thing that consumes your whole life," she says. "But once I got back to the barre, that was it, I became hooked again."

Under the direction of the charismatic Howard, Streets came back to the stage full force, starring in exotic ballets made for the company by Mark Wilde and John Pasqualetti and honing her teaching skills under ballet masters such as Richard Gibson, who now runs the Academy of Ballet in those same studios. When Pacific Ballet closed, she turned to the Oakland Ballet, dancing for another seven years under the direction of Ronn Guidi.

With the founding of Berkeley Ballet Theater in 1981, Streets finally began a career as choreographer and full-time teacher. For Diablo Ballet alone, she's choreographed 17 new works (she's the company's artistic advisor), and she's taught all over the world.

"You ask about it, I've been there," she observes. "It was a very rich time in ballet."

Reach Times dance correspondent Mary Ellen Hunt at mehunt@criticaldance.com.

WHAT: Berkeley Ballet Theater's spring season: "Cinderella" and "Nonet" by Sarah Marcus, "Le Cirque Magnifique sans Elephants" by Sally Streets, "But Not Forgotten" by Brian Fisher and "Heartfelt" by Damara Vita Ganley
WHEN: 7 p.m. May 18, 2 and 7 p.m. May 19, 2 p.m. May 20
WHERE: Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave., Berkeley
HOW MUCH: $15-$20
MORE INFO: www.berkeleyballet.org, 510-843-4689

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

San Francisco Ballet: Muriel Maffre retires

In a weekend full of dramatic performances, San Francisco Ballet concluded its season at the War Memorial Opera House on Sunday night with a superb gala performance in which Muriel Maffre bid farewell to the company after seventeen years as a principal dancer.

If emotions ran high for the final shows of the company’s 74th season, the atmosphere for Sunday night’s celebration for Maffre--surely San Francisco Ballet’s most respected artist-- was at a fever pitch. Audience members seemed to be conflicted—torn between anticipating the unrivalled feast of seeing Maffre reinvent six of her best-known roles, and dreading the knowledge that her commanding presence will no longer grace the Opera House stage.

The 41-year-old Maffre joined San Francisco Ballet in 1990 as a principal dancer and over her tenure she has danced over 75 ballets, creating 21 of those roles-- more than any other dancer currently in the company. Her range includes everything from classical and Romantic roles like Sleeping Beauty and La Sylphide, to Balanchine works such as Bugaku, or Rubies. Known for her dedication to her artistry, and an inventive approach to her work, she is, unsurprisingly, a favorite with choreographers such as William Forsythe, Mark Morris, Yuri Possokhov, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, and unsurprisingly, as she danced many of those choreographers’ works this season, they took on an extra poignancy.

“Boy, this is really going to hurt,” one audience member was heard to mutter as we waited for the show to begin. “Do we have to start?”

Time is inexorable however, and the lights dimmed as conductor Martin West led the orchestra in Philip Glass’s portentous thrum, which heralded the excerpt of Jerome Robbins’ “Glass Pieces.” This adagio duet juxtaposes a faceless line of automaton-like dancers, who gently sway across the back of a dark stage, against the spectacularly alien couple of Maffre, partnered by a steady Pierre-Francois Vilanoba. And as with most of the evening’s pieces, it offered not only a meditative beauty, but also a chance to examine Maffre’s carefully calculated approach to her work.

Maffre falls into the category of what is commonly called a dancer’s dancer, which is to say that the level of her work draws the awe and respect of her fellow professionals. The audience appreciates the seamless appearance, the cool composure and fluidity of her performance, while other artists marvel at how neatly and intelligently the trajectory and momentum of each limb has been plotted out.

If the pauses between ballets might have, under other circumstances, seemed overlong, instead they became moments to reminisce, to process what had just been seen, and to wonder what she would offer next.

Maffre entered next-- stretching a toe forward with each step-- in George Balanchine’s “Agon,” partnered capably by Tiit Helimets. It’s a pas de deux that can have the look of circus-like contortions, but Maffre and Helimets chose instead to press every bit of drama out from each step.

Perhaps unknown about Maffre, however, is that she’s a comedienne with a sharp sense of comic timing. Partnered by a beaming, boyish and utterly charming James Sofranko, she reprised the short-guy-romances-tall-woman duet, “The Alaskan Rag” from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Elite Syncopations,” complete with perfectly timed dodges and near misses, ridiculously froufrou hat and an exhilarated smile.

Maffre’s best roles, however, are her most considered pieces, some of which have been honed over years of reinterpretation. The mood shifted back to the introverted with the second half of the program which began with her unusual ugly-is-beautiful version of Michel Fokine’s “The Dying Swan,” set to Camille Saint-Saens. Her broken flightless bird with sadly faded grandeur created an unforgettable moment marred only by the shouts of an over-eager audience member at the very end. It brought the packed house to its feet-- not for the last time that evening.

Perhaps her greatest gift, however is that, Maffre-- whose degree from St. Mary’s College has fed her interest in arts curating—offers performances that not only challenge herself and her partners, but also invite, even demand, more complex thought from the audience. Though dancers are not always considered to be the “creative force” in a new work, her performance with Damian Smith in an excerpt from Christopher Wheeldon’s “Continuum,” proves otherwise. Inventive in phrasing and execution, Smith and Maffre reconstitute this slow-moving pas de deux to the music of Gyorgy Ligeti as a series of inquiries directed at us.

To close the program, Maffre was joined by principals Vilanoba, Pascal Molat and Kristin Long, as well as most of the corps de ballet in the first half of William Forsythe’s “Artifact II.” If the dancers seemed to inject an extra measure of abandon into the piece, Maffre’s charges through space and wild pinwheels of legs in mesmerizing kinetic designs looked as grand they always have, only reinforcing the realization that she has never given a performance of this or any other ballet at less than 110%.

As an artist, Maffre is still undeniably at the peak of her powers. She has hinted that her performing days are not at an end, and if the ten minute standing ovation she received at the final curtain is any indication, there will always be an audience hungering to take part in her next challenge.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Dance community grieves for Smuin

Michael Smuin: 1938-2007

The moment was surreal, by all accounts. One minute, the dancers of Smuin Ballet were in high spirits, finishing a quick allegro combination in company class with artistic director Michael Smuin—he was even poking fun at his own choreographic invention. And then, in a flash, he was on the ground and they were struggling in vain to save him.

Throughout the afternoon, as word rippled through the dance community, there was shock at the death of Smuin, who was 68, to an apparent heart attack. In many ways it still seems laughably strange to imagine the Bay Area’s dance landscape without his charismatic, larger-than-life presence. A vital, lively force, Smuin made a buoyant and outspoken ambassador for dance as dancer, director and choreographer, and he had an undeniable impact on how ballet was and is perceived, both locally and internationally.

“It’s a profound loss for all of us, and a personal loss for me that’s indescribable,” said Celia Fushille Burke, who has been Smuin Ballet’s associate director, and now steps into the gap left by his passing. “The outpouring of love has been amazing. I’ve had calls and emails from all over the world. He was very well-loved.”

By chance-- or as some might say, with Smuin’s impeccable sense of timing and showmanship-- the Bay Area’s dance community was already scheduled to gather Monday night for the 2007 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Onstage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Amy Seiwert, along with five other Smuin Ballet dancers appeared to announce his passing and ask for a moment of silence to remember him.

But it was later at the Izzie Awards, during John Kloss’ freewheeling tap performance, that I had a moment of bittersweet memory. Smuin, more than any other major choreographer of the Bay Area’s scene, had a way of capturing the infectious joyousness of dance. And surely somewhere he had to be smiling, because more than any other ballet choreographer he understood the appeal of a good-looking guy dancing and humming along to his own inner music.

Like so many of his generation the Montana-born Smuin fell in love with ballet through the Ballets Russes. Spotted by San Francisco Ballet director Lew Christensen at the age of 15, he joined the company in 1953. It was at SFB that he would meet and marry fellow dancer Paula Tracy, with whom he had a son, Shane. And in 1973, he returned to co-direct the company with Christensen, overseeing the PBS broadcasts of his “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Tempest,” both of which won Emmy awards.

A gifted character dancer and ebullient raconteur, Michael Smuin brought his zest for telling a story as well as a mischievous sense of humor to his choreography. From his 1968 “Pulcinella Variations” to last year’s zesty “Obrigado, Brazil” Smuin’s ballets were wonderful fun. If they didn’t leave a mark with the intellectual crowd, nevertheless, you couldn’t deny that his were well-made, and entertaining dances. His fault, if it could be called that, was that he was always so eager to give that sometimes he went over the top.

Serious ballets like “Medea” highlighted the dancers’ dramatic abilities, but even small vignettes such as “The Last Song” in his Elton John-inspired “Come Dance Me a Song” offered a special poignancy. Smuin’s romantic adagios, particularly his pas de deux such as “Romanze” or “Bouquet,” remain achingly beautiful. Balletomanes who came of age in the 70s have searing memories of American Ballet Theatre stars Cynthia Gregory and Ivan Nagy in “Eternal Idol,” or Diana Weber being swept off her feet by Jim Sohm in “Romeo and Juliet.”

“He was the turning point for San Francisco Ballet,” says former SFB principal dancer Evelyn Cisneros, who joined the ballet under his direction in 1976 and retired in 1999.

Reached by phone in Southern California, Cisneros recalled Smuin as “a gifted and artistic presence. He was the beginning of a new era for the company and he helped bring it back to international status through his commitment and determination and energy.”

And yet, he never forgot the small things, or forgot what his dancers brought to his work. As a young apprentice, one of Cisneros’ earliest memories of Smuin was from the morning after the premiere of “Songs of Mahler.”

“He came into the studio before class and he went to each of the women who had been in the ballet and gave each one a flower,” she recalls, “and it so touched me to watch that.”

Unlike the stereotypical ballet director, Smuin loved for his dancers to have a life outside of the studio-- to have families and their own projects.

“One thing that set Michael apart from all the others was the love that he has for the individual,” Cisneros said emphatically, “He never saw a dancer as someone to mold – he wanted you to be the person you were. I think that’s why dancers loved working with him, you felt artistically enriched because he asked you to bring who you were to the dancing.”

After his infamous parting of ways with San Francisco Ballet in 1985, the endlessly energetic Smuin picked his dancing shoes up and moved onto a wide variety of projects, including his 1988 Tony Award-winning version of “Anything Goes” on Broadway.

“If there’s one thing he taught me,” Cisneros says, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It’s this: It’s not what is before us, or behind us, but what is within us that matters.”

In 1994, he founded his own fledgling company --Smuin Ballets/SF, later Smuin Ballet – and created new work at a prolific pace, usually two or three ballets a year.
With a brazenly theatrical flair and canny professional instincts, he coaxed in audience members who had never before even considered going to a show that had the word “ballet” attached to it. Ever the entertainer, Smuin put his dancers into new unexpected places—dancing the national anthem at a Giants game in PacBell Park, slithering through the remixed cantina scene in “Star Wars,” at the Macy’s Passport benefit.

There were no stick-figure ballerinas for his company, where the women are sexy and the men bold. The stories he wove through his dances were about real people, and starred real people. It was a winning formula that appealed to audiences who made the company arguably the most consistently popular small dance troupe in the Bay Area.

As with any loss of this kind, the road ahead for Smuin Ballet is difficult to imagine without its charismatic founder and auteur. Nevertheless, Smuin was nothing if not the consummate theater professional, and the organization he built will have no trouble standing on its own legs with Fushille-Burke and newly-arrived Managing Director Dwight Hutton, at the helm.

On Tuesday morning, at the insistence of the dancers, there was company class-- as there is every day --at 9:30 a.m. Fushille-Burke, who was out of town on Monday, flew back that night to be with the company. “We will go on,” she said early Tuesday. “That’s what Michael would want and that’s what he did want.”

Smuin’s final work-- set to the Scherzo of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony-- was mainly completed, and the company will premiere it during their May seasons at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and at the Lesher Center among other venues. Smuin Ballet still plans to tour to the Joyce Theater in New York in August.
And yet, even as they move forward, one can’t help but feel the hole left behind by the buoyant, forthright presence of the man who so loved dance, but even more, so loved to bring dance to anyone and everyone.

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

KQED Profile: Janice Garrett

Since its founding in 2001, the San Francisco-based Janice Garrett and Dancers has rapidly become one of the most respected small modern dance troupes in the Bay Area. Much of its success derives from the lively, athletic dances of Garrett herself, whose choreography is notable for as much for its craftsmanship as for its dazzling speed, musical clarity and wit.

Garrett came to dance relatively late, at the age of 23, after she had already graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford. She subsequently studied dance at Mills College, and in 1980 moved to New York. It was there that she would join the modern dance company of Dan Wagoner, an alumnus of the Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor companies.

After ten years in New York, Garrett returned to the Bay Area, although she continued to work extensively in Europe, choreographing pieces for the Scottish Dance Theatre, London Contemporary's 4D Performance Group, London Contemporary Dance School and at the School for Modern Dance in Denmark. At the London Contemporary Dance Theater, she collaborated with British director and choreographer Jonathan Lunn on a range of productions and built a reputation for whimsical, kinetic dances.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

At City College, you can dance if you want to

Affordable, little-known program celebrates its 70th anniversary

"Do you want to dance with me?" a young man in a bright orange T-shirt asks as salsa music blasts through the air. "Or are you a tango?"

Taken aback, I stammer that I'm just here to observe a few dance classes -- although ... the temptation to join the fun out on the floor lingers. Surely, no one would notice one extra student?

Read on the Chronicle site.

San Francisco Ballet: Concordia, Symphony in C, On Common Ground

San Francisco Ballet continued its venerable tradition of commissioning unusual works from young choreographers-before-they-were-stars with the premiere of Matjash Mrozewski’s “Concordia” on Program 7, which opened last week at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.

Set in a dark, vast space, “Concordia” gives the impression of a binary-star system, in which the neoclassical -- Kristin Long in Christopher Read’s smoky tutu with a prim collared tunic -- and the contemporary -- Muriel Maffre, in the same outfit, sans tutu skirt-- orbit each other uneasily. Joined by their partners, Gennadi Nedvigin and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba respectively, they etch out vaguely confrontational but largely abstracted encounters in tensile, twisting poses and snaking limbs.

Under the idiosyncratic thrum of Matthew Hindson’s music – an alternately romantic and perplexing score, which seemed to be a far stretch for the San Francisco Ballet’s Orchestra under the baton of Martin West -- a quartet of edgy interlopers--Joanna Mednick, Courtney Wright, Jaime Garcia Castilla and James Sofranko—punctuate the transitions from one couple to the other.

Structurally speaking, Mrozewski’s style is not unlike that of fellow Canadian James Kudelka, with a bit of the punchy speed and flash-forward poses of the works of LaLaLa Human Steps’ Edouard Locke. But while his assemblage of steps shows promise and his groupings and intermeshing of trios and quartets of dancers are interesting, on the whole the piece doesn’t manage to make a memorable impact.

It’s a bit unfair that he comes at the end of a season that’s seen the return of William Forsythe’s “Artifact” and the premiere of Wayne McGregor’s startling “Eden/Eden.” “Concordia” simply doesn’t come across with the conceptual richness, or texture of either McGregor’s or Forsythe’s pieces. Still, as an effort from a young choreographer, it looks like a respectable stepping stone on the way to even bigger ideas.

More revelatory was George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” – a powerhouse which comes disguised as a pretty ballet with lovely white tutus and glittering tiaras, and was notable on opening night for the number of debuts in its eight principal roles. A work of exquisite beauty, set to the music of the same title by Georges Bizet, “Symphony in C” is a true test of a company’s mettle – from corps de ballet to principal-- since its technical challenges offer no place to hide. Either you can do it with style or you can’t do it at all.

It was a tough night for the corps de ballet, which largely lacked the expansiveness that the Balanchine choreography and Bizet music begs for. In the first two movements particularly, they seemed ragged and sluggish, as if they hoped that at a slower pace no one would notice that feet were not pointing and arabesques were wobbly.

Nevertheless, leading the first movement, the rock-solid Vanessa Zahorian brought a soubrette’s charm to her pas de deux with Gonzalo Garcia, whose announcement that he plans to depart the company at the end of this season has made his every appearance on stage a bittersweet occasion.

In the sublime second movement, Yuan Yuan Tan offered her accustomed regal composure. If there seemed to be a shade of distant coolness between her and partner Tiit Helimets, it was nevertheless a refined and engaging performance.

Not so, for Molly Smolen, who was largely unsuccessful at conveying a very-much-needed graciousness in the notoriously difficult third movement. Smolen has gotten a lot of the hardest technical assignments of the season, perhaps because she gives the impression of solidity, but the swift, allegro footwork of this hair-raising section of the ballet seemed to sneak up and ambush her. To be sure, it’s never easy to have to jump side-by-side with Pascal Molat, who sails easily through two turns in the air in the time of her single turn, and elicits spontaneous gasps and chuckles from the audience. Molat does more than serve up the lofty leaps, though. His knack for phrasing and warmth shows us that dancing is not just steps, any more than an ode is just words on a page.

Also making a strong debut was Sarah van Patten, newly promoted to principal this season. Van Patten, partnered sometimes unsteadily by soloist Hansuke Yamamoto, has discovered an appealing glamour and warmth onstage that gave her steps--even faltering ones –a sparkle as she led the fourth movement.

Looking more energetic was Lar Lubovitch’s “Elemental Brubeck,” an over-long commission to three recordings by Dave Brubeck that was fueled by a jet-propelled Garcia and an easy-going sweet romance between Katita Waldo and Ruben Martin in the duet. It decently filled out Program 7, running in rep with Program 6, which features old favorites such as Julia Adams’ mesmerizing “Night” and Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” in addition to the premiere of Helgi Tomasson’s newest work, “On Common Ground.”

This last, though not one of Tomasson’s best ballets—the choreography for a fearsome quartet of Tina LeBlanc, Lorena Feijoo, Joan Boada and Davit Karapetyan, plus the trio of Elana Altman, Jennifer Stahl and Rory Hohenstein has a feel of spiky, mid-1950’s Balanchine -- nevertheless has a way of sticking in one’s mind days after the performance.

The program notes gave little hint as to Tomasson’s intentions, however the Ned Rorem score against Sandra Woodall’s visuals – blood red streaks projected on the back, and a raft of gigantic gingko leaves floating above –were striking and clearly invited further thought.

A bit of research reveals the odd fact that in post A-bomb Hiroshima, a gingko tree only a few miles from ground zero was the first thing to bloom after the war. This hardy perennial has since become a symbol of hope and renewal – an apt metaphor for our times, and a forward-looking expression for a company that now looks ahead to its 75th anniversary season in the fall.

Keeping Dances Alive

How do you keep a dance alive?

Dance is perhaps the most fleeting of all the performing arts and I sometimes marvel that we’ve been able to preserve any ballets at all. Sure, there are videos and films, but the real art of the ballet is still passed on in oral tradition and you’d be surprised how much of the ballet repertoire exists only in the memories of the people who danced it.

So, let’s say you had a hankering to put together a famous work created, maybe 70 years ago, or even a work made last year. A musician could pull out a score and set to work learning it immediately. For dance, though, things are a little bit different.

Although there are several notation systems for movement– Labanotation and Benesh are among the best-known –unlike musicians and composers, many dancers and choreographers can’t read or write in either one. Most rely instead on memories, recordings, and the feeling for movements stored in their muscles from years of doing a ballet. Trained to pick up a series of steps within minutes and retain them --plus any changes a choreographer might make – it is the dancers who keep these works alive over the years.

Even though videos and films have helped to preserve dance immensely, recordings can be unreliable—any misstep from a dancer can be carried through the years as choreographic gospel. And a film also won’t necessarily relay the inspirations or feelings that breathe life into a step.

Enter the repetiteur – the ballet master or mistress whose job it is to guard the collective memory of these works.

On a warm afternoon, in the Contra Costa Ballet studios, dancers of Company C Contemporary Ballet are still scattered about the studio readying for rehearsal when Donald Mahler, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman, enters and chats with the Company C’s ballet mistress Lou Fancher and director Charles Anderson.
“You ready?” calls out Mahler finally as he settles into a chair at the front of the studio, “You swear?”

A ballet master of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Mahler is in Walnut Creek for a whirlwind couple of weeks, during which he’ll stage “Dark Elegies,” one of Tudor’s most somber and difficult ballets on this young troupe of dancers.

As the dancers scurry into place for the opening, a sudden change comes over their faces, as if something had suddenly clouded their eyes. The mood shifts palpably and suddenly all focus is on the quietly anguished Gianna Davy and Elliott Gordon Mercer, who dance a pas de deux in the center of the room.

Austere and emotionally weighty, Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” was created in 1937 for Ballet Rambert—now the Rambert Dance Company and Britain’s oldest dance company. Tudor’s Expressionist choreography, filled with angular breaks, and twisting limbs, seems to match the wrenching music, Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” or “Songs on the Death of Children.”

Although there is no explicit narrative, the two scenes of this one-act ballet clearly paint a picture of a small community in mourning for the loss of their children. Through choreography laced with fiendishly difficult steps and jagged body angles, Tudor strives to show the inner turmoil outwardly without launching into histrionics – a balance that is a difficult one to master, and the devil can be in the details.

Only a few minutes into a run of the ballet, Mahler shakes his head.
“No, that’s not right,” he says pointing at the feet of the women corps, “That’s not right. Let’s stop. Let’s fix that.”

He adjusts the emphasis of where they’re placing their feet, corrects the direction slightly. The changes seem small and perhaps very minor, but ultimately, it makes a clear difference to the quality of their movements.

Mahler’s association with the Tudor legacy dated back to his own youth, when he hitchhiked from Syracuse to New York for his first taste of ballet in the big city.

Mahler studied with Tudor and Margaret Craske in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, then danced for the National Ballet of Canada and Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where he would later become the Director of the Ballet. Now considered an expert on the work of Antony Tudor, he spends much of his time staging the choreographer’s works for such companies as American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, Ballet West, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Alberta Ballet.

Like the most skillful ballet masters, Mahler has a mental file not only of each ballet, but also of the many variations that may have been made over the years. Mahler will not just set what he has stored in his memory banks, but he also continues to refines those recollections, enabling him to stage each work in a way that he feels will be true to Tudor’s intention, and yet still work on the dancers in front of him.

Mahler, a cheerful raconteur with numerous amusing and woolly stories, cites a section of the “Dark Elegies” in which the dancers are on their knees on the floor and then tilt backward at an angle. For years, he says, he set the tilt at a 45-degree angle backward. More recently he had an encounter with a dancer who had worked with Tudor and was certain that the dancers had leaned backward all the way until their heads touched the floor.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said, “Because no one else seemed to remember that, but then much later, I saw a very old clip of film of the ballet, and there they were, all the way back.”

Back in the rehearsal, Mahler makes indications with his hands and murmurs to Fancher, “You’ll have to have them work on that. That should be fixed.”
Fancher nods, and you can see her writing the mental note to herself. In another week, Mahler will return home, and it will be up to her and the dancers to carry it on.

Company C Contemporary Ballet performs “Dark Elegies” along with “3 Epitaphs,” “Hush,” and “Firebird” at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton on Saturday (April 7) at 2 pm and 8 pm. For more information, call (925) 931-3444, www.companycballet.org

KQED Profile: Shuji Ikeda

A native of Okayama, Japan, ceramicist and ikebana artist Shuji Ikeda originally hoped to become a film-maker. After coming to the United States in 1973 to study film at San Francisco State University, and graduating cum laude, however, he was frustrated by the challenges of breaking into the business, and in a serendipitous turn of events, turned to pottery as a means of therapy.

Now renowned for his craftsmanship and innovative methods-- including his unusual woven baskets made of hundreds of delicate strands of clay and his organically elegant dancing pots-- Ikeda has had a carved a unique niche for himself in the ceramics world and his work has been exhibited everywhere from the San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum to Gump's.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: Ronn Guidi

Passion for the art of dance is perhaps the defining quality of Oakland's Ronn Guidi, director of the Oakland Ballet Academy, and founder of the famous Oakland Ballet.

An ever-energetic mainstay of the East Bay's dance scene, Guidi created the Oakland Ballet in 1965, leading the small regional company to international attention in the 1970s with his canny choices of repertoire. Bolstered by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and ambitious world premieres, like Eugene Loring's The Tender Land --for which composer Aaron Copland himself conducted the opening night -- Guidi's enthusiasm and efforts paved the way for the troupe to become a major force in the dance world as one of the few remaining companies in the world performing the lavish and inventive ballets created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was he who brought living legends such as Leonide Massine, Frederic Franklin and Irina Nijinska to stage authoritative restorations of Boutique Fantasque and Les Biches.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.