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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