Dance Review: WestWave Programs 2 & 3

West Wave Dance Festival: Programs 2 & 3
Project Artaud Theater

At fifteen years old, the West Wave Dance Festival, which opened last week in the Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco has become one of the best places to see what the Bay Area’s modern dance choreographers are up to in the long summer months that stretch between one season and the next.

Boasting the work of some 48 choreographers, this year’s festival is a three week extravaganza that offers the many small companies and young choreographers of the area the opportunity to put their work -- some still in development, some excerpts of finished pieces – in front of an audience.

True, the festival’s early programs can be something of a mixed bag, with more polished pieces appearing side by side with ones that have the feeling of a college dance concert. Nevertheless, being there at the start of a young modern choreographer’s ventures is a tempting draw and the format of six to seven pieces per performance which the festival has settled into means that each program is nicely varied, but doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Both last Thursday and last Saturday night (Program 2 and 3), for instance, featured stark duets, a bit of theater, some dance played against video and a dash of slapstick humor.

In fact, it was pleasant to see a little levity in an arena where the dance is often about serious issues. In Kerry Mehling’s “Just a Little One,” Mehling takes on the persona of a 20s lounge lizard visiting a speakeasy. Her inebriated solo, accompanied by an equally inebriated monologue -- the text was Dorothy Parker’s short piece of the same title – from his young flapper date who appears larger than life on the video screen behind. Another video-dance work in Thursday night’s Program 2, Rebecca Wender’s “Afterward” took less advantage of its video component, failing to mesh the onscreen with the live action movement.

If Jenny McAllister’s “Only in Fairytales” – a series of miniature “Fractured Fairytales” -- was less rigorously executed, it still brought a few chuckles, but generally, the more literal “literary” pieces were often a weak point in the program. A danced version of Prospero’s Act V “but this rough magic I here abjure” speech from “The Tempest” took little advantage of the richly descriptive word imagery available, and Apryl Renee’s “Trope of Seuss” -- a riff on “Green Eggs and Ham” – couldn’t get past it’s own absurdity to evolve into more than a one-note vignette.

On the serious side, Sue Roginski and Christy Funsch’s “Alone Together” was easily the most clearly structured and cleanly executed investigation of space and form on the program. At times languid, and yet highly specific in the way they fit shapes together, Roginski and Funsch gave the work an internal logic that had a focus missing in other pieces.

Interestingly, the program also demonstrated the limitations of presenting a work in a theater setting. An excerpt of Cheryl Chaddick’s “Landslide” -- which her company performed last May in the underground rave hangout, the Gingerbread Warehouse, now called the Danzhaus – made less sense out of context and took on a histrionic tenor that missed the elegant sweep of Chaddick’s more choreographed sections of the same piece.

The nice thing about the West Wave Dance Festival is that these programs promise to only gain momentum as the festival continues this week and next and some of the strongest and most experienced contributors are yet to come.

In the next two weeks’ lineup of choreographers and dancers are reliably inventive dance-makers, including Manuel Biag’s always intriguing SHIFT>>> Physical Theater with a sneak preview of his latest work “The Shape of Poison” and the talented Amy Seiwert, whose “Tonic” will close Program 6 (Friday & Saturday, July 22-23).

And there will be no shortage of form and structure on Program 7 (Thursday & Friday, July 27-28), which will feature work from such experienced hands as Janice Garrett, Heidi Schweiker and the always exciting mixed-ability troupe, AXIS Dance Company. Benjamin Levy will reprise his “Violent Momentum” and there will be new pieces from Alex Ketley, and the promising Kate Weare. And Viktor Kabaniaev, who continues to develop a unique contemporary choreographic style, will be presenting a duet for Smuin Ballet’s Ethan White and Diablo Ballet’s Tina Kay Bohnstedt on Program 8 (Saturday & Sunday July 29-30).

WHAT: West Wave Dance Festival 2006
Program 4- Tuesday, July 18: Martt Lawrence, Patricia Banchik-Bell, Carmen Carnes, group A, Aura Fischbeck, Vanguard Dance Company

Program 5- Thursday, July 20: Linda Bair Dance Company, Katie Faulkner/little seismic dance, Monica Marks/UDanceElectra, Pappas and Dancers, Vispo Dance, Ross Dance Company

Program 6- Saturday-Sunday, July 22-23: Amy Seiwert, SHIFT>>> Physical Theater, Dance Ceres, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, Facing East Music + Dance, Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement

Program 7- Thursday-Friday, July 27-28: Alex Ketley, LEVYdance, AXIS Dance Company, Kate Weare, Janice Garrett & Dancers, Heidi Schweiker

Program 8- Saturday-Sunday, July 29-30: KT Nelson (special guest appearance), SPOON, Navarrete x Kajiyama, Lisa Townsend Company, Viktor Kabaniaev, Randy Paufve

Program 9- Monday, July 24: A night of all dance and no tech, curated by Anna Dal Pino & John LeFan, At ODC Theater , 3153 17th Street at Shotwell, SF. This Program only, tickets: $10

Dance Review: Dandelion Dance Theatre's "Anicca"

Dandelion Dance Theatre
“Anicca”
Theatre of Yugen
July 14, 2006

A thoroughly naked man with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck and a clipboard in his hand greeted latecomers to a recent evening’s performance of Anicca. They shuffled apologetically into the Theatre of Yugen’s tiny Noh Space, clambering over the row of unclothed people sitting serenely on the floor, and tried so hard not to stare. Was it me, or did they all look just a little disinclined to remove their coats?

Lesson? Don’t be late to performances of Dandelion Dance Theater’s “Undressed Project” – the latest installment of which played at the Noh Space last weekend.

Anicca or Night Marsh II is not Oh! Calcutta! But neither is it a coy production. It’s all hanging out there, right from the start. Oh, sure, there are some clothes on the performers, but they mainly exist to be removed in this series of vignettes that start in the intimate box of the Noh Space, and then continue on the winding site-specific installation segment to culminate outside in the garden overlooking Alabama Street.

Nakedness, or clothedness, as relates to power is the core concept that lurks behind this anti-sartorial bit of dance-theater. It’s certainly not a new concept, choreographers have been doing this since time immemorial – recent exponents include Karen Finley, Pina Bausch, Glen Tetley, to name just a few -- but one begins to suspect that the performance is more of a culmination of a course of healing therapy than serious choreography. There’s a lot of tension-easing ribaldry in the spoken sidelong comments and the movement of the piece, but underlying it all is the question – how naked did it really need to be?

The assemblage of dancers features as wide a variety of shapes and sizes as you can imagine, with two mixed-ability performers, one who performs with a leg prosthesis and the other who works from her wheelchair. A circus barker spotlight, people running amok in BVDs to the music of the hyper-falsetto chansons of the Tiger Lilies, a guy playing Dvorak’s Humoresque on the violin as he’s denuded-- it all starts to look like a cross between healing arts therapy and burlesque.

Still there are a few moments of intriguing dancing. An opening duel between two tough guys who assert primacy by pants-ing each other is amusing, and there’s a gracefully contentious fight over a prosthetic leg and a pair of glasses that covers roughly the same territory. Perhaps the most touching is a solo in which a woman whose leg has been amputated recount the moments she spent locked in the remains of a grisly car wreck.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz once told dance critic Clive Barnes "The naked body hides every bit as much as it reveals." And what is of greatest interest in Anicca is the untold stories of these bodies, those tattoos and stretch marks. Frustrating, though, is the sense that the piece ultimately just scratches at the idea that a body is the story of one’s life -- that it can be just another costume, one more suit that we wear. The typical disinclination to reveal a body part (“The sleeves cover that scar,” “A high neckline hides the flabby skin,” etc.) is the story.

Anicca is hardly prudish and yet, it’s also hardly revelatory. As we rose to begin the walk through of the installation-art portion of the show, I couldn’t help thinking, “nakedness and emotion, vulnerability, a walk down the ‘Hall of Impermanence’ -- yes, I get it. But, then what?”

We entered the outside garden, where I observed -- over the heads of the twenty-odd naked performers who mingled among us -- the familiar San Francisco fog gently roiling over the streets toward us. Swathed to the lip in my typical summer attire – which includes a field jacket over a Polartec fleece, sealed with a 48-inch pashminette scarf -- I placed my well-clad derriere on the metal chairs next to a quizzical ceramic garden goat and thought to myself, “Brrr.”

And yet, the performers stood stoically quivering amongst us as yet another drama played out on a blood smeared carpet under the trees. I pulled on a pair of lined leather gloves and tried politely not to think about shrinkage. And I tried to concentrate on what was going on. “Difficult. Very cold,” it says in my notes. Other audience members huddled under blankets and finally, at the conclusion of the show, one of them tossed a blanket to the performers.

“Here! Now you can cover up!”

They made a beeline for the great indoors. The show was over.

This review originally appeared on KQED.org

Theater Review: "Permanent Collection" at the Aurora Theatre

I remember the first time I was ever drunk on art. Early in my college career, my Dad called. He was coming to Philadelphia by train and we were going to visit a mysterious place that a friend had told us about called the Barnes Foundation. He secured an appointment and I met him at the station in Merion, PA, about ten minutes outside of Philly on what is familiarly known as "the Mainline."

To get to the Barnes, you must pass the kind of immense mansions and neatly manicured estates that inspired Agnes Nixon to create the people and places of soap operas like All My Children and One Life to Live.

"What the heck is inside this place, anyhow?" we wondered as we walked through the Doric portico decorated with tiles of clearly African motif. Inside? A treasure trove of not just African but Egyptian, Greek, and Navajo art, not to mention some 181 paintings by Renoir, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses, and more Cezannes than I had ever seen in my entire life. It was like seeing hundreds of old friends -- ones you'd known for years, but had never seen before. We had entered the playhouse of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, educator, art collector, and something of a cranky old codger.

That was back in the early nineties, shortly before the history of this mind-bogglingly priceless art collection took the tragic turn documented in Thomas Gibbons' intriguing play Permanent Collection.

Read more on KQED.org's Arts & Culture site.

KQED Profile: Gang Situ

"Actually, I hate to use the words, 'East meets West.' We're getting closer. I see these lines ... disappearing."

-- Gang Situ

Music is in the blood for composer Gang Situ, whose mother was a mezzo-soprano with the Shanghai Opera and whose father was the music director and conductor of the Shanghai Philharmonic. Born in 1954 in Shanghai, Situ studied piano and violin at an early age. But as a teenager, Situ -- whose given name means "steel" -- was swept up in China's Cultural Revolution and was sent for a four-year "reeducation" that found him harvesting rice and gathering firewood in the countryside. Ironically, the experience would indirectly bolster his love of music, as he and his fellow workers would secretly listen to banned recordings of Western artists, such as David Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.

In 1985, Situ arrived in the United States. He had only $40 to his name and spoke only a few words of English. By 1994, just nine years later, he had attracted notice as a composer with his Double Concerto for Violin and Erhu, which has since been performed by more than a dozen orchestras around the world, including the San Francisco Symphony.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: headRush

The Oakland-based guerrilla performance group headRush is serious when it comes to taking their message to the streets. You can find them performing their brief but high-energy sketches not only in theaters, festivals and cafés, but also on sidewalks and in parking lots. The group brings its brand of urban poetry and satire to audiences wherever it finds them.

The brainchild of a trio of teacher-actors -- Rosa González, Simón Hanukai and Xago (Luís Juarez) -- headRush debuted at Oakland's Jahva House in September 2003. Calling themselves a "psycho-politico spoken-word theater crew," González, Hanukai and Juarez hoped to exhort and incite their viewers out of passivity using Chicano "teatro," a satirical agitprop style made popular in the 1960s by Luís Valdez and the farmworkers' El Teatro Campesino. Setting up wherever there is space to move, headRush's off-the-cuff improvisations and audience involvement recall the immediacy of Campesino's "actos," or one-act plays, which might have been performed on the back of flatbed truck or on a picket line.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: San Francisco Young Playwrights

Giving young Bay Area playwrights the opportunity to develop their work is the goal of the San Francisco Young Playwrights Foundation, created in 2005 by Lauren Yee.

The author of over a dozen plays that have been produced for festivals and theaters around the world, Yee knew first-hand the benefits of gaining early writing experience. In high school and later as a Yale University student, she won awards and recognition from the California Young Playwrights Festival to the Florida Teen Playwright Festival. But despite the many programs available in her hometown of San Francisco for teen performers, Yee saw a lack of opportunities for students to hone their skills writing for the stage.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.