'Nevabawarldapece' review: Robert Moses Kin

There's a beautiful moment in Robert Moses' latest work "Nevabawarldapece" - which had its premiere Friday night at the Lam Research Theater in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts - when the dancers shift from frenetic ricochets and lunges across the stage into an instant of stillness, with a thrust of the solar plexus like the beating of a heart the only movement. In a world of seemingly endless chaos and confrontation, it feels like a plea for a return to core principles.

At the heart of "Nevabawarldapece," the title of which sounds something like "never be a world of peace" if said out loud, is the urgent, pulsing energy contributed by live performances from the spoken-word artist Carl Hancock Rux, folk-"hip-Alachian" singer Laura Love and reggae-blues musician Corey Harris, who are onstage with the 10 dancers of Robert Moses' Kin.

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San Francisco Ballet review: Tantalizing

Like a parade of amuse-bouches, the gala fare that opened the San Francisco Ballet's 80th season at the War Memorial Opera House on Thursday night was just light enough to suit the festive atmosphere and just tantalizing enough to get the mouth watering for the season ahead. Eleven bite-size ballets offered an agreeable mix of romance, sass, introspection, pomp and fireworks.

The oldest piece of the night was August Bournonville's 1858 "Flower Festival at Genzano" pas de deux, which appears so often in galas it's easy to forget how much of its appeal lies in refined style and storytelling. Not so here. The buoyant Gennadi Nedvigin and a cheerfully vivacious Clara Blanco created an utterly delightful aroma of springtime in a pitch-perfect performance. Who else but Nedvigin could turn a precisely placed fifth position after multiple pirouettes into an event worthy of applause?

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Bebe Miller's multimedia 'History'

How do you embody the internal life of the choreographic process? Bebe Miller's latest work, "A History," which her company performs this weekend at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center, takes on what drives the creative process and how to capture and document the essence of a work.

Miller says the idea for the project arose out of conversations with Talvin Wilks, her longtime dramaturge, and veteran dancers Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, who have performed with Bebe Miller Company for more than a decade, about what really drives their work.

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Ethnic Dance Festival's public auditions

This weekend, a world of dance comes to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as hopefuls from ethnic dance troupes across Northern California will audition for the 35th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.

"It's a great way to see the wonderful variety of cultures we have in this area," says Carlos Carvajal, co-artistic director of the festival. "Nowhere else can you do an international festival of this range in which all the participants live locally. Usually festivals as diverse as this have to bring people from other countries, but we have Mexico folklorico dancers, Indian dance, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Tibetan - and they're all local artists."

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Cid Pearlman's 'Shark' feeds off limitation

In the 1990s, the bohemian choreographer Cid Pearlman's company, Nesting Dolls, was known for its exuberant interdisciplinary collaborations. Pearlman now works out of the Santa Cruz area, where she teaches at Cabrillo College and makes work with her company, Cid Pearlman/Performance Projects. That multilayered approach shades her latest work, "Your Body Is Not a Shark," which premieres this weekend at ODC Theater and which finds Pearlman joining forces with former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, UC Berkeley's Denise Leto and Maya Barsacq, director of the Santa Cruz chamber orchestra Cadenza.

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Extreme sports at Crocker Amazon Park

Even though the colder weather is upon us, the kids can still go outdoors to play. The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has started a program designed to bring some extreme sports to local neighborhoods for youngsters to try out.

On Saturday, Mobile Recreation will visit Crocker Amazon Park in the Excelsior and Crocker-Amazon districts, bringing with it more than enough adventure to keep your kids - and maybe you, too - occupied for an afternoon.

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