Friday, March 22, 2013

Shen Wei Dance Arts review: 'Cube' moves

Photo: Zoe Liu
Shen Wei Dance Arts review: 'Cube' moves

Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei is known for both vast spectacle, including the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and quiet, introspective works. His "Undivided Divided," which had its West Coast premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum on Thursday night, has intriguing elements of both, yet it sometimes felt remote.

There's no sitting throughout the 35-minute piece, which is part installation, part performance art. Instead the audience wanders through a six-by-six grid of 36 squares - some simple panels on the floor and others occupied by clear plastic cubes, or large frames filled with elastic cords or strange hairy stuff. Eighteen men and women, all supine on individual panels and clad only in nude-colored briefs, begin shifting as an original sound score by So Percussion fills the air.

Though the movement is sometimes muscular and tense and other times wildly impulsive, each dancer nevertheless remains tightly contained within the "cube" of space, rarely breaking the plane between us and them. Midway through the piece, the dancers cross over to other squares, where they reel and writhe in small splashes of bright paint, smearing color over themselves, the panels, the textured fluff, the plastic walls of structures that look like greenhouses. One man tangles his limbs in the web of elastic cords that stretch across a frame, while another climbs to a precarious perch atop stacks of plastic cubes.

If the dancers are confined to the positive space, the audience moves through the darkness of the negative space freely as they dance.

The initial reaction is how appealing and slightly voyeuristic it feels to walk among such beautiful bodies. The close quarters allows you to examine their remarkably confident dancing in detail, to study the tension of muscles and the fragility of balances.

When all the dancers stop in a sculptural contrapposto pose with one arm raised, a glance around the room reveals that we are suddenly amid a forest of elegant branches. Standing among the performers in these moments of synchronicity, a powerful current of focused artistic consonance runs throughout the crowd.

It's intriguing too to consider the watchers as part of the performance. Which observers hang to the periphery and who prefers to walk among the squares? The audience itself moves in interesting, unchoreographed ways as viewers try simultaneously to avoid touching each other and keep from falling into the paint-covered squares. And the performers are close, sometimes closer than you realize. At any given moment you might be watching someone on one panel and turn to find yourself unnervingly close to another dancer behind you.

Yet despite the intimacy of these close quarters, the dancers might look directly at you, but it doesn't feel as if they intend to engage, and there is something clinical about that. "Undivided Divided" is beautiful, enormously striking visually, but doesn't venture further to hit viscerally.

Here we stand, closer than we would ever be in a traditional theatrical presentation, and yet instead of evoking a kind of immediacy and passion, there is cool detachment as each of us meanders on our own.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Point Bonita harbor seal hike for the family

Photo: NatureBridge
Point Bonita harbor seal hike for the family:

Even if it's a little too cold to get in the water these days, you and the kids can enjoy watching the seals frolic in the ocean on a guided hike out to Point Bonita on Saturday afternoon, courtesy of NatureBridge.

The NatureBridge organization was founded more than 40 years ago as the Yosemite National Institutes, with the aim of connecting kids and families to the outdoors. Now partnered with the National Park Service, the group sponsors one or two hikes in the Golden Gate area each month in addition to running a coastal camp during the summer for kids and public education programs throughout the Yosemite area, the Santa Monica Mountains, the Channel Islands and Washington's Olympic National Park.

The family hike starts at 1 p.m. at the NatureBridge facilities at Fort Cronkhite in Sausalito. Amy Blake, the family programs coordinator, says participants will play a "family mingle" game before breaking into smaller hiking groups. Guides will supply each family with a pair of binoculars to use along the 4-mile hike, which will take them along Rodeo Beach and into hills of the Marin Headlands to Point Bonita.

For kids younger than 6, Blake advises bringing a carrier or a trail stroller, as the terrain can be difficult for young children.

Although it's pupping season for elephant seals now, Blake says it's more likely that hikers will see harbor seals on the trip.

"The guides will help everyone spot animals, and then they'll work together do an inquiry activity that helps you learn more about seal behavior," she says.

The hike is a great way to offer kids an introduction to the harbor seal habitat and gives them a chance to use their powers of observation to figure out more about seal behavior.

The hike lasts until about 4 p.m., and afterward the guides will take groups up the road from NatureBridge to the Marine Mammal Center, where they can visit rescued seals, sea lions and other pinnipeds being nursed back to health before they're released into the wild.

The hike is limited to 60 participants, so registering beforehand - at www.naturebridge.org - is a must.

"We're really focused on giving a family the opportunity to get out in nature and connect with the Golden Gate recreation area," Blake says. "It's a chance for families to learn side by side, and what we really love is letting kids see their parents getting excited about learning something new."

Thursday, March 7, 2013

On the Move: An Exploratorium Roadshow

Above the workshop at the old Exploratorium space, there hung a sign that read, "Here is being created the Exploratorium, a community museum dedicated to awareness." While the museum awaits its grand reopening April 17 at San Francisco's Pier 15, it will be taking that spirit of creativity and exploration onto the streets of San Francisco with a mobile museum that launches Sunday at locations in Bayview, the Mission and the Embarcadero...

Read More at: On the Move: An Exploratorium Roadshow

Monday, March 4, 2013

Diablo Ballet review: The Web Ballet

If you follow #diablowebballet on Twitter, you already know that the subject matter, mood and setting of Diablo Ballet's "Flight of the Dodo," which premiered Friday night at the Shadelands Center in Walnut Creek, took its shape from eight tweeted suggestions submitted to the company this year.

It's sometimes hard to believe Twitter gets used for much more than following baseball and checking food truck locations, but the company reports that it received 132 responses, which were culled, then shaped by choreographer and dancer Robert Dekkers into a ballet.

Read more at: Diablo Ballet review: Crowd calls shots

Friday, March 1, 2013

Pointe magazine – How it's Done: Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux

Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux comes and goes like a summer love affair: It’s romantic, adrenaline-filled and all too brief. The bravura showstopper is set to music that Tchaikovsky originally wrote for Swan Lake, but Petipa never used. After learning that the music had been rediscovered in the Bolshoi archives, George Balanchine used it to create a duet on New York City Ballet principals Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow in 1960.

The scintillating 40-second female variation is a showcase for precision and a chance for the dancer to demonstrate an effervescent individuality. Verdy notes that Balanchine added certain touches especially for her. “There are witty things in it—little retards, little changes of return,” she says. “He loved my gargouillades. So in the développé-échappé combination, he put in a retard with the développé a la seconde, which meant I had to make the gargouillades quick; they had to be electric.”

Read More: Pointe magazine: How it's done: Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux