Dance Column: Holiday Treats

A veritable bouquet of holiday treats are headed our way starting this weekend. Some are like old friends, back for their annual visit, and others are newcomers, but safe to say, we won’t lack for entertaining things to take the kids of any age to see throughout the month of December.

ODC/Dance’s “The Velveteen Rabbit”

Why do I love “The Velveteen Rabbit” so much? Is it because I’m a sucker for hard luck cases? Possibly. I get farklempt at the mere description of the threadbare, velveteen fur and shabby velvet nose.

KT Nelson’s take on the tale of the “bunchy, fat bunny” and the boy who loves him has become an enduring holiday tradition, and justly so. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the enormously popular “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and a host of special guests will be on hand throughout ODC/Dance’s run to help celebrate. Among the events this weekend, Friday’s matinee (November 24) is Grandparent’s Day, Saturday (Nov 25) is ASL Signed Narration Day with actor Ty Giordano, and Sunday’s matinee (Nov 26) will be followed by a milk and cookies party with the dancers (Call the Yerba Buena box office for tickets to the party.)

And as always, plan to bring your stuffed animal friends along to enjoy the show. Don’t they deserve a night out too?

ODC/Dance performs Margery William’s beloved classic November 24 – December 10 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. (www.ybca.org, 415-978-2787)

Smuin Ballet “Christmas Ballet”
Fans of Michael Smuin’s holiday revue are in for a treat this year as the Smuin Ballet adds seven new numbers to the lineup, including three by Michael Smuin, two contributions from associate director Celia Fushille-Burke, and one apiece from Amy Seiwert and Shannon Hurlburt. With newly refreshed sets and costumes, this Christmas buffet, which comes in hot and cool versions, puts a sassy spin on the Christmas roundelay.

The 2006 edition of the “Christmas Ballet” makes its bow on the stage of the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts November 24-25. Or you can catch it at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from December 15-24. (www.smuinballet.org, 925-943-SHOW or 415-978-2787)

Moving Arts Dance Company’s “MAD Hatter” Performance and Tea Party
For something a little more unusual, follow Alice’s granddaughter Allyson down the rabbit hole at Moving Arts Dance Company’s second annual “MAD Hatter” Performance and Tea Party. There are sweets aplenty on the table and on the stage as choreographers Anandha Ray, Michael Lowe, Dudley Brooks, Jenny McAllister, Dianna Rowley, and Isabelle Sjahsam offer up their version of life in Wonderland.

Moving Arts will have two shows in San Francisco at the Cowell Theater on December 2 (www.fortmason.org, 415-345-7575) and two shows at the beautiful El Campinil Theatre in Antioch on December 9 (www.elcampaniltheatre.com, 925-757-9500).

Diablo Ballet’s “Nutcracker”
In collaboration with Civic Arts Education, Diablo Ballet will unveil its very first production of the “Nutcracker” at the Del Valle Theater in Walnut Creek. Directed by the Diablo Ballet Intermediate Program’s Rebecca Crowell, the production won’t lack for talent. Leading the cast of 58 dancers – which includes children and adult drawn from all over the East Bay, as well as the Diablo Ballet apprentices – will be Tina Kay Bohnstedt and Vikot Kabaniaev as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier. Lauren Main de Lucia and Matthew Linzer will rule over the Land of Snow, and Nikolai Kabaniaev, Diablo’s co-artistic director, will even take his turn onstage as Herr Drosselmeyer.

Diablo Ballet’s “Nutcracker” premieres at the Del Valle Theatre in Walnut Creek, December 1-3. (www.diabloballet.org, 925-943-SHOW)

San Francisco Ballet “Nutcracker”
The gold standard of "Nutcrackers” around here has always been the San Francisco Ballet production and Helgi Tomasson’s grand version, with its spectacular, larger-than-life sets and costumes holds delights for kids of any age. With dreamy scenes and even dreamier dancing, this “Nutcracker” is sure to send patrons, young and old, twirling out into the streets.

At the regular family performances, there’s milk and cookies in the lobby, plus, SFB also offers a chance to give a little holiday delight with the annual San Francisco Firefighters Toy Drive. Bring along a new toy or book to donate when you come to the show and the SF Firefighters will see that it brightens a needy child’s Christmas.

San Francisco Ballet’s “Nutcracker” runs December 14-31 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. (www.sfballet.org, 415-865-2000).

Contra Costa Ballet "Story of the Nutcracker"
For an early start on the holiday season, you can see the Contra Costa Ballet’s "Story of the Nutcracker," an hour-long version of the ballet, which features Diablo Ballet’s David Fonnegra and Company C’s Jenna Maul as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.

The Contra Costa Ballet performs their version of the holiday classic from November 30-December 2 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts in the Hofmann Theater. (www.contracostaballet.org, 925-943-SHOW).

Berkeley Ballet “Nutcracker”
Teacher, choreographer, director, Sally Streets has been a mainstay of the Bay Area ballet scene, and this year the company she founded, Berkeley Ballet Theater, celebrates its 25th anniversary. Streets and Robert Nichols choreographed this colorful and lovely version of the Tchaikovsky classic to make a more intimate experience.

To kick off their anniversary season, they’ll be performing their production of the “Nutcracker” from December 8-17 at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. (www.berkeleyballet.org, 510-843-4689)

Smuin Ballet: Christmas Ballet 2006 edition

Smuin Ballet
“The Christmas Ballet” 2006 Edition
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
December 15-24, 2006

The post-Thanksgiving crowd at the Lesher Center showed no tryptophan drowsiness at the opening of Michael Smuin’s annual favorite, “The Christmas Ballet,” which made its bow last weekend with spiffed up new costumes by Sandra Woodall and newly designed scenery by Douglas Schmidt and Paul Swensen.

Smuin’s flagship productions are usually elaborate affairs, and this year’s refurbishment of the company’s holiday staple actually benefits from having more sparkles and fringe. In the first half, new white drapery suggests an elegant ballroom with outsized lacy snowflakes hovering overhead, while the second half is bathed in yards of Christmas crimson velvet, punctuated by dozens of fluffy, white, beachball-sized “Santa cap” pom-poms.

Admittedly, the designers have gone a little projection-happy, in the second act particularly, where video of everything from church bells to mistletoe only distract from the dancing. Still, all the new flash and dash does help create some truly lovely images. In the opening to the second act, “Christmas by the Bay,” the dancers now dip and swirl behind projections of San Francisco holiday scenes, and the simplest images -- the lights of Union Square’s Christmas tree or the outlines of the Embarcadero Center -- make a romantic frame around the five couples.

The high-flying company is also still getting used to the low-flying snowflakes. During an excerpt from Handel’s “Messiah,” Ikolo Griffin tossed his partner so vigorously that her head bonked into one of the snowflakes, causing some mirth in the audience.

If the company took a little time to warm to their work in the opening “Magnificat,” by the second piece -- “Noel Nouvelet,” Amy Seiwert’s contribution to this year’s edition -- Aaron Thayer and Erin Yarbrough make a ____ couple. Seiwert gives them simple, and yet unexpectedly lovely choreography – mere pirouettes facing in opposite directions are effective because they fit to the music beautifully.

The look of the women in the company has gradually been shifting towards more of the bullet-like, compact zingers like Vanessa Thiessen, who stood out in the “Zither Carol” and “Away in a Manger.” In “For Unto Us a Child is Born” Yarbrough, partnered with James Strong, evinces the same speedy, knife-like technique along with a regal, classical upper torso, but when she lets her hair down, as she does in “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” – a sweetly romantic diversion contributed by Shannon Hurlburt -- the sex appeal is palpable. As always, Strong proves himself a more-than-just-reliable squire, particularly in “Hodie Christus Natus Est” which he danced on Friday night with Thiessen. Her light jumps and intent confidence gave the couple an illusion of breathlessness, but when certain lifts proved difficult to manage, it was Strong who kept the duet moving.

The company will always need its long and leggy dancers though. Nicole Trerise makes a luscious comedienne in “Licht Bensh’n” and the ever popular “Santa Baby,” which had the audience clapping from the first “ba-boom.” She shows off a more serious side paired with Thayer and two other couples in Celia Fushille-Burke’s “Es ist Ein Ros Entsprungen.” The graceful refinement of Fushille-Burke’s choreography for the three couples has all the hallmarks of her own dancing. The footwork for this section, as well as for her “Resonet in Laudibus,” which immediately followed, offered deceptively pretty, and yet tricky combinations -- of the sort that Fushille-Burke herself always navigated with aplomb.

Jessica Touchet shows off formidable baton-twirling skills in the oddly gimmicky “Carol of the Bells,” which Smuin created for her this year, while Hurlburt, always a favorite, reprises his signature showstopper roles in “Little Drummer Boy” and the dazzling tap solo to “Bells of Dublin,” as well as his usual solid yeoman work throughout the evening.

And though it’s often the new dancers -- like Griffin, Courtney Hellebuyck, and Yoko Callegari, who just joined the company this month – who receive notice, there’s a definite pleasure in watching others like Aaron Thayer improve year by year. Thayer’s solo -- a new section created by Smuin to a recording of Placido Domingo singing “La Virgen Lava Panales”-- has a mature conviction and vitality, and in “Pretty Paper” a duet with Robin Cornwall, he hits just the right balance of playful solicitude.

In the end, this year’s edition of “The Christmas Ballet” is jam-packed with 28 bite-sized numbers. Some of them are cheeseball, some quite lovely, but all adding up to a jolly way to start the season.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Dance Review: SF Hip Hop DanceFest

San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
November 19, 2006

A certain palpable energy was humming through the audience at the Palace of Fine Arts, where Micaya’s San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest played host from November 17-19 to two dozen groups from around the world.

Festivals like these should be archived for textbook study. After all, we’re living out a golden opportunity to trace the evolution of a dance phenomenon that has been growing and absorbing changes rapidly in the last ten years. Moves borrowed from gymnastics, capoeira, conventions drawn from modern, African and jazz dance have all been steadily seeping into hip hop and, I dare say, hip hop has been crossing over in the other direction as well. The SF Hip Hop DanceFest offers a timely look at where the forward momentum is taking the culture.

“Work it out! Represent!” someone shouted in the darkness as Funk Beyond Control took their places for “Side Show,” a jubilant free-wheeling routine for the nearly 30 dancers.

This Bay Area-based troupe – made up mainly of teenagers – took top honors at the Hip Hop World Championships and it’s easy to see why. “Side Show,” a winking tribute to the auto sydeshows of the now-emerging hyphy culture, was choreographed by several of the dancers along with director Darnell Carroll and these young dancers set the bar for the whole night at a high level. With a zippy pace and flambosting solos that merged into pulsing urban funk parties “Side Show’s” rowdy hyphy-train fired up the audience, who grooved along with tunes from Too $hort, E-40 and Keak da Sneak as well as Santana and Janet Jackson. But lest you think it was all frenzy, lurking under the rollicking atmosphere was an unmistakable focus and discipline that made FBC one of the cleanest crews of the evening.

For a change of pace, local group fLO-Ology Dance Collective moved into a house groove, adopting a dramatic narrative approach to their politically-charged “Dancing in the Wind.” If the quintet of dancers looked a little less focused than FBC nevertheless, their clear command of the driving rhythms underscored a sense of desperation in the pulse of modern life.

Later in the program, the brawny Lux Aeterna had a slightly different take, merging capoeira with hip hop beats in a more fully-realized work titled “Navaras,” to the music of the same name by Juno Reactor. Colored in twining silver body paint against a blood red screen, the five dancers seemed tinged with the slime of urban dystopia. Less refined than gymnastic, nevertheless, the dancers made good use of their charismatic physicality, and Jacob “Kujo” Lyons’ fearless tumbles across the floor, planches and gymnastic flares, while seemingly out of context, were impressive nonetheless.

Clad in grey and black hoodies, Khaotic GroovemintZ, from Vallejo served up sexy breaks in a fly routine titled “VII,” while the tough-as-nails Extreme, a group of six women from Montreal, Canada set a convincing “don’t mess with the b-girl” tempo. Hailing from Boulder, CO was Elements of Motion, whose athletic “Mile High” featured power moves, freezes and acrobatics that sent the crowd into cheers.

The clubbing couples of “2 AM” from Phoenix Dance Company showed a more industrial sensibility melded with hip hop, while SanRancune’s “It’s Deep…” for the Paris-based duo of Meech and Joseph Go along with David Imbert, mixed an animatronic pop-and-lock feeling with a dark cool European delivery. Shaun Evaristo’s serious-looking, thirteen-member Gen 2, from Daly City, adopted a casually grounded urban style in the group piece “Team is Back.”

Somewhat mystifying was Mind over Matter’s “Ghetto Circus,” which closed the evening. Featuring a bewigged Allan Frias as ringmaster, “Ghetto Circus” looked less like a circus and more disturbingly like a cross between a poorly costumed voguing act and a questionable cheer routine. That the dancers of this crew have skills was evident, but they deserved better material to work with.

High points of the program, though, were two solos, one from a rubber-man Kenichi Ebina, who replaced an injured Rauly Dueñas at the last minute and one from the human cartoon, Takahiro Ueno. The liquid-limbed Ueno, who won the 2006 Showtime at the Apollo Dance Challenge, also won spontaneous cheers from the crowd with his contortionist antics in “Nightmare Spiral,” which called up images of a carnival shooting gallery, a hat trick that weirdly inverts the “bullet time” effect, melting legs. He has to be seen to be believed.

Looking a bit like a lanky, nerdy otaku in his loose red track suit, Kenichi delighted the audience with whimsical but expert mime perfectly synched with a soundtrack of noise effects. From the old flashlight in the jacket trick to hovering balances a la Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” it wasn’t that it was hard to see how the tricks were done – the magic was in the artistry of the perfect illusion, which made suspended any disbelief entirely. Now that Jet Li has retired, maybe it’s time to call Kenichi and Takahiro in.

This review originally appeared in In Dance.

Music Review : John Santos and the Machete Ensemble: The Farewell Concert

It kinda started in your ribs -- just a little tic from side to side that happened reflexively as the Machete Ensemble sent the first notes into the air. Pretty soon it moved into the tip of your shoulders -- just a bit of a bounce. And that set your head nodding in time with the beat. Before long, you found yourself swinging and swaying in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater's groovy reclining seats, which luckily left a lot of leg room in front, in case you wanted to ... you know ... get up and dance. Which most people did.

It seemed like everyone who was ever part of the San Francisco Latin jazz scene was on hand to bid adios to John Santos' Machete Ensemble, which disbanded in a blowout concert on November 12 after twenty-one years of turning up the Afro-Latin heat in the Bay Area.

All night long, a parade of former Machete members as well as friends and family came up on the stage to jam with the core group of Macheteros -- Orlando Torriente on vocals, John Calloway on flute, Ron Stallings and Melecio Magdaluyo on saxes and clarinet, Wayne Wallace on trombone, Murray Low on piano, David Belove on bass, Paul van Wageningen on drums and Orestes Vilató on just about everything else. And sitting in the middle of it all was the genial, chatty Santos himself, on the congas emblazoned with red, white and blue "Impeach Bush" stickers -- as charming as ever, although, as he admitted, talking a little faster than usual so as to fit in all the fun in a brief amount of time.

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

Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Kamikaze Ground Crew

For their first performance back in the Bay Area in 13 years, the Kamikaze Ground Crew got a warm welcome at the Great American Music Hall at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. After all, it's really a hometown crowd for the seven-member band, most of whom still have local ties, even though the crew is largely based now in New York.

It's a loose knit group of talent -- all of them involved in lots of other projects. Co-founders Doug Wieselman and Gina Leishman both write music for dance and theater -- the latter most recently composing scores for Berkeley Rep's Mother Courage and Cal Shakes' As You Like It -- and trumpet-player Steven Bernstein and Kenny Wolleson head their own rollicking band Sex Mob. In fact, a majority of the compositions that the KGC unveiled on Wednesday night, came courtesy of Leishman and Bernstein, but those looking for the exuberance of Sex Mob, or the witty, light touch of Leishman's Shakespearean songs like "It was a lover and his lass" would have been confused at the start.

What seems clear is that in the years since KGC's start as the pit band for the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a lot of experimenting has been going on. So it was that some of what we got that night was esoteric, some of it impenetrable, while other pieces were lively and even antic. All put together, though, it made for a program that suffered from uneven pacing.

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

Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Arturo Sandoval

What is it about los Cubanos? Artists like Los Carpinteros craft incredibly sculpted social critiques. Dancers such as Carlos Acosta, the Carreno clan and the Feijoo sisters have stormed the ballet world. And their musicians -- their musicians always rock the house.

The audience in the Herbst Theater was primed from the outset when trumpet master Arturo Sandoval took the spotlight at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. And if there was any disappointment that evening, it was that the show had to end some time.

Backed by a tight-knit quintet that included Ed Calle on sax, Javier Concepcion on keyboards, Armando Gola on bass, Tomasito Cruz on congas and Alexis Arce on drums, Sandoval hit the stage at a blistering pace, dispatching double digit high notes on his trumpet solos with almost irritating ease.

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

Theater Review: Stew's "Passing Strange"

"Stew" is a great moniker for the rock musician-poet-filmmaker, all-around-performing-artist, whose Passing Strange made its bow last week at Berkeley Rep. He's a rich mix of flavors, a bubbling cauldron of ideas and talents, and his latest effort, which takes an autobiographical look at his development as a young black musician, is a kind of spicy recipe based on his life. Some of the ingredients might seem improbable, but the final dish is worth savoring.

Passing Strange takes its title from Othello's description of how he won Desdemona's heart. But as with much of the wordsmithy in this play -- which Stew and partner Heidi Rodewald first developed at the Sundance Institute and which will move on to New York's Public Theater after the Berkeley run -- "passing" is meant to encompass numerous other meanings: passing for white or passing for black, being passed up, passing through, passing on. The word itself has a sense of restlessness that is reflected in the rhythm of the play as well as the music, as it follows Stew's youthful escapades -- a Baptist upbringing in LA and coming of age amidst rarefied surroundings in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Read more on the KQED Arts & Culture site.