Dance 2011: Highs, lows and top 10 moments

High: Maria Kochetkova and Gennadi Nedvigin at San Francisco Ballet. In the greatest partnerships in ballet, the union is greater than the sum of its parts, and so it was with these two dancers throughout the 2011 season. It wasn't just that his princely comportment set off her delicate phrasing in "Giselle," or that his rakishness highlighted her vivacity in "Coppelia." So well matched in their impeccable Russian training, Kochetkova and Nedvigin serve up not only artistry of the highest caliber but also that inexpressible, mysterious excitement born of potent onstage chemistry.

Low: The premature retirement of Miami City Ballet Artistic Director Edward Villella. The word that Villella was being ousted by his board sent ripples of outrage through the dance world. Now there are signs that a similar fate may await Ballet San Jose Artistic Director Dennis Nahat. Tracking fiscal health is a board's mandate, but when it ventures into artistic decisions and treats a ballet company like a business machine, the real loser is the art form.

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'Yes Sweet Can': 'Mittens and Mistletoe' circus

Take a little bit of acrobatics and a little juggling, throw in some trapeze work and clowning, and it adds up to a charmer of a circus cabaret for kids.

This weekend, the 5-year-old Sweet Can Productions kicks off two weeks of holiday performances of its popular "Yes Sweet Can" show at Dance Mission, turning the everyday into magical moments.

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'The Jewish Nutcracker, a Maccabee Celebration'

Who wouldn't want to make friends with the Sufganiyot Fairy?

Like her counterpart, the Sugarplum Fairy, she's delicate and sweet, and in the guise of Katy Alaniz Rous - who plays the Sufganiyot Fairy in "The Jewish Nutcracker," which opens at the ODC Theater today - she also looks as if she's got a Yiddishe kop - some real smarts.

"Usually when people hear about a Jewish 'Nutcracker,' they say, 'How is that Jewish?' " says Rous, who also choreographed this unusual production last year. "But you know, the regular 'Nutcracker' isn't really a Christian story; it just takes place at a Christmas party."

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Ballet San Jose review: Generous 'Nutcracker'

A fairly imposing, 6-foot Mouse King was bounding around the entrance to the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, making more than one youngster a little wary about this whole ballet thing as patrons filtered into Ballet San Jose's matinee performance of Dennis Nahat's "Nutcracker."

Fortunately, once coaxed past the dangers of the rodent kind and into the theater, there was plenty to bewitch ballet-goers of any age. Nahat's 1979 retelling of the holiday classic has always been notable for its fresh spin and the wealth of detail throughout the ballet, whose Tchaikovsky score - with some interpolations and rearrangement - was given a sensitive rendering by the Symphony Silicon Valley under Dwight Oltman's direction. The first act especially, with its broad and yet meticulously executed comedy and thoughtfully plotted individual characters set in David Guthrie's textured and decorative Viennese home, just might be the best in the Bay Area's bevy of "Nutcrackers."

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San Jose Ballet's Dennis Nahat may be forced out

San Jose Ballet Artistic Director Dennis Nahat may be forced out of the company he founded. Apparently, the artistic direction has moved solely into the hands of the board of directors.

"It's a peculiar and precarious situation," Nahat said in a conversation shortly before a matinee performance of his production of "Nutcracker." "I am still an employee of the ballet, I am still management, but if there are changes being made, I am not privy to them."

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BALLET REVIEW / Cracking open the joy, awe

It would be so easy to think of this yearly tradition as a kid's ballet, a socially acceptable night out for the juice-and-cookies set. But if a jaded smirk crosses your lips at the thought of yet another year of "Nutcracker," it's good to remember that for more than a few patrons in the theater, this will be their first ballet, and the wonder it generates can be infectious. For every trick you think you know, there is someone in the audience who won't be able to hold back an awed "Wow!" when the doll pops out of a magic box, or a tree begins to ascend magically - and, news flash, it might not be just kids we're talking about.

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'Danzón,' Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, review:

"Tanzt, Tanzt, sonst sind wir verloren," German choreographer Pina Bausch once said. "Dance, dance, or else we are lost."

Now two years after her death, her imperative lives on in her company Tanztheater Wuppertal, which returned to perform Bausch's 1995 "Danzón" on Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall stage courtesy of Cal Performances last weekend.

Bausch's variety of dance theater - evidenced in sprawling evening-length collages of surreal, seemingly absurd vignettes - is sometimes ridiculed, sometimes embraced and often misunderstood. But if her work seems at first glance to be random and incomprehensible, it can also be compelling and intensely personal - a potent dream sequence of images that will bring up different correlations and correspondences in the mind of each viewer. Importantly, what it is for you, may not be what it is for me.

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Left Coast Leaning Festival review: hit and miss

"What are you trying to say?"

It's a question that could be sardonic, frustrated or genuinely curious, and the latest edition of the Left Coast Leaning Festival, which opened at the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday, evoked a combination of those moods in a program of works that was inventive, perplexing, combative and delightful.

This is the third year for Left Coast Leaning, a co-presentation of YBCA with Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Living Word Project, and the mission - to seek out works of a distinctively West Coast voice that "emanate from a guttural, visceral place," as Joseph says - continues to be both provocative and appealing. But as is often the case with festival programs, the lineup of five works - by local performers as well as artists from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. - is hit-and-miss.

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'Hover Space' review: Shifting possibilities

There's a wonderful idea at the heart of "Hover Space," which the nervy and rumbustious Printz Dance Project premiered at Z Space at Theater Artaud on Wednesday night. Although ostensibly themes of love and longing thematically tie the 12 dancers together, the centerpiece - literally - of the work is a massive square platform designed by Sean Riley and suspended on chains, covering roughly half the space of the stage.

Bookended by solos performed by choreographer Stacey Printz, "Hover Space" comes in 12 segments in which the dancers work - often in pairs - on, under and around the platform, which not only rises and lowers to reshape the theatrical space but also dips at steep angles to form a surface for the performers to scale, or slide along.

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Pina Bausch company carries on with 'Danz�n'

In the world of modern dance, Pina Bausch is indisputably an icon of the postmodern dance movement. The sprawling works she created for Tanztheater Wuppertal redefined what it meant to create a dance. They might be simultaneously touching and yet cryptic, keenly perceptive and also frustratingly intellectual, but always they are movingly human.

Two years after the passing of its director and auteur at the age of 68, the company carries on her legacy with former dancer Dominique Mercy and Bausch's assistant Robert Sturm at the helm. The disarming and affable Mercy was one of Bausch's first recruits to the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and speaking by phone from the company's home base in Germany, he candidly discussed the troupe's direction after Bausch's death, and about "Danzón," her 1995 work that they'll bring to the Cal Performances stage at Zellerbach Hall in UC Berkeley this weekend.

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Fungus Fair at Lawrence Hall of Science

If you've ever wondered if that little brown mushroom that grows on your lawn is poisonous or whether that pretty shelf fungus you saw on a hike was edible, now is your chance to find out.

This weekend, the Mycological Society of San Francisco's annual Fungus Fair will draw fungi fans from all over the Bay Area for a weekend of getting down and dirty with mushrooms. The Mycological Society has been around since the 1950s, and in addition to leading mushroom field trips and forays, it has sponsored the Fungus Fair since 1969.

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