Trey McIntyre Project review: Jazzy number

Smart, vibrant dancing filled the stage at Zellerbach Hall when the 10-member Trey McIntyre Project of Boise, Idaho, brought three ballets to Cal Performances on Friday night.

The robust muscularity of McIntyre's freewheeling choreography was at its invigorating best in "The Sweeter End," a 2011 collaborative effort with New Orleans' Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Set to a loose grouping of old jazz standards like the "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "Trouble in Mind," the piece has a vaudevillian flair and Looney Tunes hyperactivity that suits the deft bravado and swagger of these dancers.

Trey McIntyre Project review: Jazzy number...

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Diablo Ballet season premiere review

If there is a company character to Diablo Ballet, it is the compact swiftness and the gusto with which they attack the stage. There were a few new faces on the roster when the company opened its 18th season at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek this weekend, but on a program of three contemporary ballets, there was no lack of verve and punch in the dancing.

The newest addition to the Diablo repertoire is a sober, somewhat abstract premiere by Val Caniparoli titled "Tears From Above," set to Elena Kats-Chernin's score for two cellos - performed live by Daniel Reiter and Paul Rhodes.

Bathed in Jack Carpenter's crepuscular lighting, suggesting the fading light at the end of a day, the ballet quickly gathers momentum, shifting from undulating arms and spines and into space-devouring sequences. The quartet of dancers - Mayo Sugano, Derek Sakukura, Hiromi Yamazaki and Robert Dekkers - surge and swell in repeated cadences across the stage, before breaking into pensive duets.

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Dominic Walsh's offers a 'Rose' to Diablo Ballet

"I feel that in some ways we've lost our understanding of theater," says choreographer Dominic Walsh, sitting quietly in a shady spot outside the Diablo Ballet studios in Walnut Creek.

Walsh gazes across an unromantic parking lot toward a line of trees as if deeper answers might lie percolating somewhere out there in the sunshine. There's an echo of that questing spirit in his version of "Le Spectre de la Rose," a reinterpretation of the Ballets Russes-era masterpiece originally created by Michel Fokine in 1911. Walsh is just finishing a whirlwind rehearsal of his "Spectre" for Diablo Ballet's 18th season, which opens Friday at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

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'Nearly 90{ 2},' Merce Cunningham Dance review

Rarely does an audience have a chance to anticipate the final performance of a great work. But so it was on Tuesday night as the 13 members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave the company's final performance of Cunningham's last creation, "Nearly 90," capping eight days of workshops, lectures and events at Stanford Lively Arts.

The company's two-year Legacy tour - which commenced at Cunningham's death in 2009 - continues until the end of this year, when the company will disband permanently. This last appearance at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium felt like a firm push forward from one of modern dance's most influential choreographers.

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'Light Moves' review: Meditative digital-human mix

It's hard for performing artists to think big these days and actually pull it off. Shrinking budgets often lead to an overabundance of caution. That's what makes it all the more impressive that year after year, Margaret Jenkins consistently generates works of ideas and scale like "Light Moves," which the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company premiered Thursday night at the Novellus Theater as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts season.

Over the two-year process of creating "Light Moves," Jenkins - along with her collaborators, including composer Paul Dresher, video artist Naomie Kremer and poet Michael Palmer, as well as the eight dancers of her company - has judiciously edited the work, paring away some of the more distracting elements seen in previews last year.

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LEVYdance review: Sweet and surprising 'Romp'

Dance can move you, excite you, even delight, but it's hard to really surprise an audience these days, to keep them guessing. LEVYdance captures that exhilarating feeling that anything could happen with "Romp," which the three-member company - Benjamin Levy, Melodie Casta and Scott Marlowe - premiered on Thursday night at Z Space at Theater Artaud.

An audience of about 100 fits onto the stage of Artaud, where chairs have been arranged in small clusters evenly throughout the space. It creates a maze of cleverly arranged pathways, and before you can even register that the piece has begun, the performers, in street clothes, have inserted themselves into the maze dancing a high-octane folk dance to the music of Brass Menazerie. Bodies fly past your feet, arms swoop over your head, and hips gyrate in a thumping, joyous opening that fits neatly into the interstices of the audience arrangement, just barely missing actual physical contact by centimeters. Keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.

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Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Family Concert

Countless youngsters have discovered a love of music by playing the simplest of instruments, a recorder. That was what drew Marion Verbruggen, who began playing when she was 6, into the world of period-instrument music. Now one of the world's leading recorder virtuosos, Verbruggen will appear with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in a family concert Saturday afternoon - with an interactive twist.

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'From Wallflower to Dance Brigade'

It's likely she would never describe herself this way, but Krissy Keefer is a force of nature.

Founder of the feminist dance collective the Wallflower Order and its successor Dance Brigade, Keefer has been a provocateur and an institution in the modern dance community since 1975. And with its new show at the Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend, Dance Brigade celebrates Keefer's 35 years of modern dance theater.

Pragmatic and disarmingly direct, Keefer seems often to be in nonstop motion as she talks about her legacy - you get the sense that this boundless energy is the driving and organizing force behind the agitprop fury and dark humor that threads through much of her work.

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Wayne McGregor's 'Entity' review: Order from chaos

A danced investigation of movement exploring the intersection of creativity and cognitive neuroscience: Is there anything that sounds drier and less sexy? And yet, that inspiration results in a giddy, sometimes thrilling, occasionally frustrating blend of motion, ideas and imagery in Wayne McGregor's "Entity," which his London company, Random Dance, performed last weekend at the Novellus Theater in its Bay Area debut as part of San Francisco Performance's fall season.

Parsed out in two acts - the first with music by composer Joby Talbot and the second an electronica score by Coldplay collaborator Jon Hopkins - "Entity" explores a kind of metascience, a creation examining the way we create. It's a heady topic to take on through the medium of dance, in which technique, speed and stamina have advanced to a dazzling degree and yet our understanding of the brain-body connection that inspires choreographic creativity is limited.

Wayne McGregor's 'Entity' review: Order from chaos...

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Pirate Store brings bucks for educational programs

For the truly discerning pirate, there's really only one place to shop in San Francisco.

Eye patches, treasure shining kits and the handy Scurvy Begone, in convenient jelly bean form, are just a few of the delightful items to be found at the Pirate Store. Proceeds from the store benefit 826 Valencia, which provides writing education workshops, after-school tutoring and a wide range of other educational programs for kids.

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