96 Hours: Elephant seals--Tour winter breeding grounds

This weekend and for the next few months, you can get more than a glimpse of one of the most unusual animals in California wildlife just off Highway 1, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. Each year, thousands of elephant seals come back to the beaches of Año Nuevo State Reserve, where hundreds of new pups will be born, and the adult males will duke it out with each other and find a female to mate with before returning to the ocean.

With its trunklike nose and ground-shaking, throaty roar, the northern elephant seal is one of the most impressive and strangest mammals in the ocean, making its home along the Pacific coast as far south as Mexico. On average, they spend more than three-fourths of their lives in water, but when the elephant seals come ashore, they like to vacation - like many humans - along the California coast.

Read more on the Chronicle website.

Dance review: Ballet San Jose's 'Nutcracker'

On the way to Ballet San Jose's performance at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night, a young man bantered with his female companion about being dragged to the "Nutcracker" yet another time.

'Oh, you know you wanted to come,' the young woman said playfully. 'You said so.'

'Well, there are two reasons I wanted to come,' her companion admitted. 'The music - I love Tchaikovsky. Plus, I figure there have to be some cute girls in it somewhere.'

True, though after two hours of flash and dash, of tiny yet painfully adorable mice, gutsy leaps and high-flying partnering, even the most restless of boyfriends might have conceded that this 'Nutcracker' offers a lot more than that."

Read more on the SF Chronicle's website.

Cheryl Burke: 'Dancing With the Stars' tour

Two-time 'Dancing With the Stars' champion Cheryl Burke has all the right moves, but she also has her heart in the right place when it comes to dancing. For Burke, 24 - who's been nominated twice for Emmys for her choreography - that means giving back to the community she grew up in, as well as teaching at her new dance studio in San Francisco and using her celebrity charm to promote one of the causes she holds dear: physical fitness. We caught up with Burke before she embarked on a 38-city 'Dancing With the Stars' tour with partner Maurice Greene.

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

96 Hours: 'Peter Pan': Children get into the act

For an early holiday treat, the high-flying musical 'Peter Pan' fits the bill. But it's more than just a chance to take in an entertaining musical: An afternoon with Children's Musical Theater could also sow the seeds for a budding actor or actress.

The company got its start as the Cabrini Community Theater in 1968, founded by John Healy, himself a young performer who wanted to create a theater accessible to everyone. Deemed the largest youth theater company in the country - and now under the artistic direction of Kevin Hauge - the theater follows an unusually inclusive policy of casting every child who auditions. Last year, according to marketing associate Heather Lerner, thousands of kids turned up at the auditions, and all of them went onstage in at least one of the company's multiple-cast productions."

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

Dance Review: Smuin's 'Christmas Ballet'

Holiday jollity hit the stage Friday as Smuin Ballet heralded the arrival of the holidays with a cheery, chipper opening of 'The Christmas Ballet' at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

In its 14th outing, Michael Smuin's spiffy, toe-tapping alternative to the avalanche of 'Nutcrackers' retains its lovable verve and still sports loads of eye candy for the anti-snobs of ballet."

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Dance Review: San Jose Ballet's 'Toreador'

"It's been 168 years since the premiere of August Bournonville's Spanish postcard ballet "The Toreador," but with delectable costumes and sets and loads of bright, effervescent charm, this once-lost ballet has become an attractive showcase for Ballet San Jose's deepening roster of dancers, who gave it a lively showing at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts Thursday night.

'The Toreador' hasn't been seen since 1990, after Ballet San Jose's artistic director, Dennis Nahat, bought the sets and costumes - created originally for the Royal Danish Ballet's 1978 revival - from the Dallas Ballet, which had folded under director Flemming Flindt. Once a staple at the Royal Danish Ballet, 'The Toreador' left the active ballet repertoire in 1929 and was not seen again until 1978, when Danish choreographer Flindt revived it based on historical notes and the memories of the few people who had danced the ballet."

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

Yerba Buena Learning Gardens

The Yerba Buena Gardens provides a wide assortment of delights for children, with the Zeum museum, the carousel and Paul Lanier's 10-foot-tall Wishing Tree. But what parents might not know is that on weekends Yerba Buena Gardens also offers Learning Days, a year-round series of free workshops and events designed to foster the green thumb.

"It's one of the best kept secrets in town," Mary McCue, the general manager of Yerba Buena Gardens, says of the program that has been quietly teaching urban kids the basics of gardening for almost 10 years.

"It started when we were taking a group around on a tour of the Yerba Buena Gardens," she recalls, " and we had a little boy in the group who said he was going to start a garden, too. He said he was going to plant tomatoes and carrots ... and lamb chops. And I thought, 'Oh my, we need to teach these kids about gardening!' "

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Smuin Ballet: Been Through Diamonds, Carmen

There's a different look to the Smuin Ballet company these days. Not to say better or worse, just different. New faces and a new energy along with new repertoire was what I took away form the company's season opener at the Palace of Fine Arts.

It's been a year and a half since the company's highly visible and high-energy founder passed, and time has wrought some changes. Celia Fushille-Burke has assumed the mantle of company director, while dancer Amy Seiwert is now a choreographer-in-residence. Added to the roster this year are dancers Darren Anderson, Ryan Camou, Terez Dean, Ted Keener, Brooke Reynolds, Jean Michelle Sayeg and Shane Messac.

Friday's program opened with a premiere of Seiwert's Been Through Diamonds, a larky neo-classical look at relationships between four couples that found the men clad in loose suit jackets and pants and the women in Mario Alonzo's sexy dresses. With its dark smokiness and mysterious interplay between the sexes, Diamonds has a bit of the look of a much earlier work that Seiwert did for Oakland Ballet in 2003, Monopoly. Whereas Been Through Diamonds is set to Mozart, the music for Monopoly was Gorecki, but in both Seiwert stepped away from movement as abstraction and given her steps a more human backstory and emotional context.

When I saw Monopoly-- which also featured a rock-solid Erin Yarbrough-Stewart, who stood out in Diamonds too-- I recall thinking that something about Seiwert's trademark twisting and fluid style didn't quite jibe with the story at hand and likewise, it's not clear to me that she had found a comfortable way to get her emotional points across while still utilizing the distinctive connectors and thrusts of weight that mark her work.

Still, as more of a meditation, Diamonds made an impression, particularly in the confident way that Seiwert layers complex steps and transitions from one scene to the next. Newcomer Camou made an appealing soloist, as did his partner Susan Roemer.

The other new work on the program was Robert Sund's Carmen, a one act distillation of the famous story of love gone wrong, this time set to tracks from Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Sketches of Spain. Although it seems like the perfect sort of vehicle for a company known for larger-than-life stories, this Carmen came across as less dramatic than angst-ridden.

Aaron Thayer, as the ill-fated Don Jose and Jessica Touchet as his titular lover did their best with the choreography, which offered serviceable, though not always inspired moments. Touchet-- a dancer who sports a bright charm to go with her dead-centered turns--engaged in much teasing and flicking of her shawl and one rather absurdly tame catfight with Yarbrough. She worked hard to serve up sizzle, but it wasn't her fault that ultimately at the moment of highest emotion, she was little more than kicked around.

Also on the program was Michael Smuin's cleverly nostalgic portmanteau ballet Dances with Songs.

Program Notes.

SF Jazz: Max Raabe & the Palast Orchester

In the early morning hours, I lie awake and listen to NPR and allow random items from Morning Edition to seep into my head. What I remember can be odd-- occasionally a news item crosses over into my dreams -- was I really arguing with Sarah Palin about her lipstick?

The other day all I could remember was the sound of one of the little thirty second musical transitions, and when I finally got up and looked on the NPR site to find out what it was, I ran across the name of Max Raabe. One link led to another and I found myself utterly charmed by his lounge-lizard approach to the dance music of the 20s and 30s. Then I found out he was coming to the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, courtesy of SF Jazz.

Apparently Raabe and his orchestra, coming off of a highly successful run at Carnegie Hall, have wider fan base than I knew, because the gorgeous Art Deco Paramount was filled to the rafter with ardent fans.

The Palaster's appeal is in the utterly tight, thoroughly serious approach to comedy. The band looks immaculate and plays even better, evincing the sound of a bygone era of Weimar, Germany that occasionally makes someone like me -- who grew up steeped in 1930s Hollywood stereotypes --wonder if someplace in an alley jack-booted thugs are kicking a victim to death.

Raabe himself is a dry and witty front man, a study in leisured boredom as he croons through delightful tunes such as "My Gorilla has a Villa in a Zoo," as well as Brechtian favorites from "Mahagonny" and "Three Penny Opera."

By the time he got round to the band's perennial favorite encore number, an austerely rendered cover of Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," they had the crowd in the palm of their hands... and wondering when they'll be back again.

Program Notes.

Target Family Day at downtown museums

Explore four of the city's liveliest museums - the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Zeum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - as they and the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offer activities, performances and free admission as part of Target's Family Day on Sunday.

On the Esplanade Stage, the Unique Derique and the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company will be among the many performers, and at Zeum, kids will be able to ride the carousel for free all day long. A huge communal sidewalk mural is planned for the Museum of the African Diaspora, and over at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, activities will celebrate the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

SFMOMA's Family Day earlier in the year brought in 2,400 visitors, but Sunday's mix of films, hands-on activities and events, inspired by the museum's eye-catching "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900" exhibition, promises to attract even more.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

Coastal Cleanup Day: Tidying up our shores

From bottles, cans and cigarette butts to old tires and oil drums, the tons of trash that litter our beaches and waterways also chokes the marine ecosystem and endangers wildlife. But on Saturday, tens of thousands of Californians will join in what the Guinness Book of World Records has deemed the world's largest trash collection effort: Coastal Cleanup Day.

It's the perfect project for families, school groups, scout troops or community organizations, says the Marine Mammal Center's Ann Bauer.

In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteer cleaners removed 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclable materials from California's shores. In the Bay Area, you can come out between 9 a.m. and noon to one of dozens of sites, grab a trash bag and a check-off sheet and join in the pickup.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

San Mateo park a cornucopia of pleasures

Officially speaking, San Mateo doesn't have a town square, but surely Central Park qualifies as the heart of the city.

Planted in downtown San Mateo, and only a few minutes' walk from the Caltrain station, Central Park has become the go-to place for the community for everything from music and theater festivals that draw thousands to impromptu family picnics on a hot Sunday.

On a balmy Thursday night in July, the lawn was jammed with dancers and picnickers taking in the Central Park Music Series, an annual summer tradition. The lawn was carpeted with blankets and lawn chairs, and dancers from ages 6 to 60 were grooving away at this year's closing concert, featuring San Francisco reggae band Native Elements.

Read more at the SF Chronicle site.

96 Hours: Palo Alto Junior Museum

Founded in 1934 in the basement of the local elementary school, the Junior Museum has since grown into a beloved small gem in Palo Alto. The indoor museum area features rotating exhibits and lots of mechanical activities of the hands-on variety, showing how gears work or letting kids play with air bellows.

If you can pry kids away from the activities, out the back door is a small but highly appealing zoo with a bevy of critters that range from the tame (turtles, snakes and ducks) to the exotic (peacocks) to the wild (bobcats and a leopard shark). Many of the zoo's residents were carefully chosen as representatives of the local wildlife - an effort to foster understanding about the creatures that share the Bay Area with humans. It seems to be working: The kids cluster around the owl and ooh and ahh as it swivels its head 180 degrees. At a larger cage, visitors crane their necks to look at a red-tailed hawk while others brush past to see the fruit bats.

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

96 Hours: Strawberry Picking

Nothing tastes better on a hot summer day than fresh berries and cream, and in the Bay Area, we're lucky enough to be able to get our hands on some of the best organic strawberries and olallieberries in the country. You could pick your fruit at the local Whole Foods, but why not pick it right from the plant?

Just off Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz, Swanton Berry Farm offers berry aficionados the chance to roam their fields and collect a perfect basket of fruit while enjoying the sun, breezes and spectacular views over the Pacific. With warm days in the sun and cool nights wrapped in ocean fog, conditions on these coast-side acres are ripe for growing sweet, flavorful berries. One bite of a succulent Swanton strawberry and you'll see why they're so prized by connoisseurs like local jammaker June Taylor, who uses strawberries from the farm in her renowned preserves.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

"A Beautiful Tragedy" and the life at the Perm State Ballet School

Dancers spend a lot of time on Youtube watching as many videos as we can, so when one of my students mentioned a dance film I hadn't seen, I was a little surprised. But after he sent me the link, I spent probably the better part of an hour watching clips of David Kinsella's beautiful and yet highly disturbing film. "A Beautiful Tragedy" follows the progress of a 15-year old girl named Oksana Skorik, a student at the famed Perm State Ballet School -- a place which has turned out some of the world's most refined dancers.

It's not unlike watching a terrible tragic accident: so upsetting that you can't look away.

In pursuit of a career in dance, (as much for her mother as for herself) Oksana works, starves, battles loneliness, and takes heaps of verbal abuse from her teachers, notably Lidiya Ulanova, who calls the girls idiots and angrily tells them they're insolent and stuffed dummies.

"Why would a teacher do that?" wonders my student aloud. "What kind of a person is that?"

I have no good answers. But almost more disturbing is the thought that so many people think this is the way to make good dancers. Skorik went into the Kirov Ballet, and her classmate Masha Menchikova went to the Perm company. Success came to them, but how much more beautiful could they have been without the abuse?

Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3
Clip 4

You can order the film in both NTSC and PAL formats from Faction Film.

Dance Review: Scott Wells & Dancers in "Home Again"

Too often in dance the word "line" is used to describe a static pose, but Scott Wells & Dancers' deft style of contact improvisation reminds us that "lines" should be continuous threads of movement that roll, knot, ravel and occasionally seem to trail off into space - concepts of motion turned into a physical reality.

It's a particular pleasure to see the company back in the cavernous, cathedral-like Project Artaud, which beautifully frames the airborne flights of Wells' 16th season, presented by ODC Theater through Saturday at Artaud, a temporary home while the ODC venue undergoes renovation.

Beyond the drama of what look like dangerously high-flying antics, Wells' dancers have a talent for drawing audiences into the exhilaration of launching a body through the air, and sharing the satisfaction of timing so accurate, it makes clipping onto a trusty partner look easy. In his 2007 "Gym Mystics," Wells' gleeful sense of play pervades the piece from the moment Rajendra Serber launches himself at a free-standing wooden beam to the simultaneous tumbles and cartwheels of eight dancers criss-crossing the stage speckled with Allen Wilner's smoky lighting.

Read more on the Chronicle site.

Family films at Frameline32

Two shows geared for the young ones make up a special matinee at the San Francisco International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. They at last herald the arrival of children's media that blend non-traditional families into the fabric of the show.

First up is "Dottie's Magic Pockets," the brainchild of Tammy Stoner and Pink Pea Productions, which is designed not just to be gay- and lesbian-friendly, but also to feed a growing appetite for programming that introduces kids to the modern world's broad family range.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Dance Review: Joe Goode Performance Group-Remember the Wonder...

Midway through the performance of Joe Goode's latest "Wonderboy" -- at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through June 15-- the dancers operating the titular puppet abandoned their charge and left him sitting alone in his window, awash in drifting filmy curtains. Such was the storytelling power of this fabulous creature, though, that I continued to stare at him for several minutes, ignoring the dancers downstage. Somehow I wanted to see what he'd do next-- I wanted to catch what his reactions to the unfolding dance would be--even though I was quite aware that as a puppet, he wouldn't...couldn't possibly move.

Goode's latest collaboration with the San Francisco-born, now New York-based puppeteer Basil Twist (they worked together on Paula Vogel's "Long Christmas Ride Home" for the Magic Theater) makes for memorable theater. If the execution is not entirely perfect, the wonderful boy at the center of the story is charismatic enough to carry the show, which plays on a double bill with an abbreviated version of Goode's 1996 "Maverick Strain."

As in "Christmas Ride," the style reflects a modern version of the Japanese bunraku puppet form, in which the operators of the puppet are not only visible to the audience, but play characters of their own. In a strange way, the parsing of Goode's choreography, with slightly self-conscious, inward-seeking movements, makes an excellent match with the range of motion available to the boy himself.

In fact, the dancers (Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, Jessica Swanson, Andrew Ward, Patricia West and Alexander Zendzian) have obviously lavished attention not only on their own solos and duets, but also on matching their movement to Wonderboy's choreographed phrases. Perhaps though, there is no one better suited to this danced bunraku style than movement professionals. Accustomed to working in partnership and projecting the lines beyond their own bodies, the human performers generously transfer "realness" to this latter-day Pinocchio.

But making "realness" is also Basil Twist's stock in trade. A master puppeteer, who can seemingly enable any object--puppet or not--tell its own story, Twist imbues his boy with endearing details, an enigmatic lift to the corner of his lips, a sparkle in his eye, that continually draw your attention back to him.

As Wonderboy observed and commented on the workings of the world from his spare metal window frame-- just as the audience was watching from outside our own proscenium/window-- I couldn't help marveling at the enormous empathy I felt for the little guy. When he left the stage, I was a little unnerved and disappointed, like a kid whose friend has moved away, and when he tentatively dips his foot into the flow of life, I sensed a rush of exhilaration at his jetes from place to place. If only we could have flown up the aisle with him at the end.

Visit joegoode.org for more information on the show.

Mission to Mars at Chabot Center

The Red Planet takes center stage at the Chabot Space & Science Center's Mars Phoenix Landing Celebration this weekend, a great opportunity to indulge any budding space explorer.

Chabot will be throwing a landing party sure to spark the imaginations of anyone who's ever wondered about life on Mars. Over three days, visitors can follow the progress of the 1,500-pound Phoenix spacecraft as this first entrant in NASA's Mars Scout program completes its 422 million-mile journey, and - in just seven tense minutes - decelerates from its 12,500-mph plunge toward Mars to, it is hoped, gently land on its own three feet Sunday afternoon.

Read more on the the SF Chronicle website.

Global perspective at S.F. Arts Festival

Multiculturalism is the watchword at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 8 at a dozen venues around the city and will feature artists from China, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Germany and Croatia, side by side with such mainstays of the local arts scene as Joe Goode, Axis Dance Company, John Santos and Earplay. But while the out-of-town visitors are an appealing part of the 5-year-old festival, the brainchild of director Andrew Wood, it also, perhaps even more important, serves as a proving ground for international collaborations and a way of encouraging Bay Area artists to seek out inspirations abroad and bring back fresh ideas to their home base.

Whether through an existing project, like Kim Epifano's collaboration with Shanghai artists on "Speaking Chinese," or an outgrowth of an existing relationship, such as Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt's work with Berlin choreographer Sommer Ulrickson on "Yes, Yes to Moscow," or even a reason to fulfill a commission, like Erling Wold's one-man opera for John Duykers, the festival gives performers a venue and springboard for exploring outside their comfort zones.

Read more on the SFChronicle site.

SFB School: Room, board and barre for Ballet students

There's a well-kept multistory building in Pacific Heights that could easily be mistaken for one of the many comfortable family homes that loom along the blocks overlooking the bay. But Jackson Manor, as the house has been fondly dubbed, isn't your average Pac Heights mansion. Once owned as part of an off-campus, urban program for Westmont College, it's now in its fifth year as an official residence for dancers in the San Francisco Ballet School's trainee program, as well as advanced students.

As any artist knows, the road to professional success isn't easy. For many of the youngsters who win the opportunity to train at San Francisco Ballet's School, the pursuit of a career in the notoriously competitive world of ballet means sacrificing, not only time and energy, but family life as well. Students come from across the country and around the world to study at the school, but for a young dancer of perhaps 16 or 17, the task of finding a place to live in San Francisco is no trivial matter.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Earthquake in China

Chengdu-- home of the giant pandas, and now victim of a 7.9 earthquake. It's another sobering reminder that the big one could be coming any day now here in the Bay Area.

It shows up starkly as a giant block the size of, oh say, New Mexico, in the USGS' World Earthquake Map.

I was amazed to find out that NPR reporters Robert Siegel and Melissa Block happened to be in Chengdu on Monday recording shows for All Things Considered. Talk about wacky timing. Listen to Melissa Block, who was rolling tape at the time of the earthquake.

Dance review: Nahat adds twists to 'Firebird'

Vivid storytelling is one of Ballet San Jose's specialties, and what a fabulous tale it spins in "The Firebird," Dennis Nahat's retelling of the Ballet Russe classic, originally choreographed by Michel Fokine in 1910.

Nahat's 2005 version, which opened at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night, makes minor changes to the original tale, inexplicably changing the name of the Russian folk hero Ivan Tsarevitch to Prince Vladimir, for example. But for the most part, Igor Stravinsky's luxurious score - here a recording of his original 1910 version of "The Firebird" - dictates much of the story line, a conflation of Russian folk legends about the young son of a czar who rescues a princess from the clutches of the demon Kastchei with the help of a magical Firebird.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Dance review: 'C(H)ord' hard to forget

It's a curiously compelling thing when performers push aside their humanness, when movement is so bizarre as to make you forget that you're watching humans. But then the inkBoat ensemble, and especially director Shinichi Iova-Koga, whose "c(H)ord" premiered Thursday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, are remarkably adept at generating simple images that you just can't get out of your head.

Like most of the 10-year-old inkBoat's butoh-inspired theater, "c(H)ord" - a commission for YBCA's Making Peace series - is hardly literal or linear. Boasting an international cast - which includes Finnish performer Heini Nukari as well as the Japanese Takuya Ishide, Yuko Kaseki and Sten Rudstrøm (both based in Berlin) and Sherwood Chen, Dana Iova-Koga and Dohee Lee - it's the sort of show where you can't seriously ask yourself what just happened. The pleasure lies in allowing its vagaries to cascade past you episodically, and the overall effect is not so much discomfiting as strangely charming.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

SF Symphony's Adventures in Music program

It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered."

Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look.

As the kids themselves are quick to explain, it's all part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music, one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

Arielle Jacobs stars in High School Musical

If the producers of the national tour of "High School Musical" were trying to dream up the right actress for the role of Gabriella Montez - the smart, quiet newcomer to East High School who aspires to break free and sing in the school musical - they could hardly have asked for a more perfect match than Arielle Jacobs.

A native of Half Moon Bay, Jacobs was 14 when she moved with her family from California to Princeton, N.J., just as she was to start high school, so she knows what it's like to be the new girl in town.

"Fortunately for me, there were two middle schools in Princeton," she says, laughing. "So everyone just thought I was from the other middle school."

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

High School Musical hits the Orpheum stage

If you fall into the post-tween age group, your experience of a little phenomenon called "High School Musical" might be limited. But say "We're all in this together" to anyone between the ages of 9 and 13, and you're likely to get a rousing chorus of one of "High School Musical's" nine chart-topping songs and probably a few fancy hip-hop moves to go along with it.

One of the Disney Channel's most popular movies, "High School Musical" has garnered hundreds of millions of young fans around the world in the past two years. The movie's soundtrack went quadruple platinum, and last year a rock-concert-style tour featuring the film's stars sold out in 40 cities, with the Beatlemania-esque shrieks of young fans shattering eardrums across North America.

The rousing popularity of the movie has spun off one sequel already, another is in the works for this summer and there's even an ice-show version making its way around the world. Now, for those who just can't get enough of the story of handsome jock Troy Bolton, shy, bookish Gabriella Montez and their struggle to break free of stereotypes and win roles in the school musical, the high-energy, Broadway-style stage production of "High School Musical" comes to San Francisco, opening Tuesday at the Orpheum Theatre.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Where are they now? Alums of SF Ballet

As San Francisco Ballet celebrates its 75th season, we look at some of the dancers who shaped the company's rich history. The company will celebrate its alumni with a reunion weekend Friday through March 16.

Jacqueline Martin

A native of Portland, Ore., Jacqueline Martin came to San Francisco as a young girl in 1935 with Willam Christensen, who had taken over the then San Francisco Opera Ballet's school. Martin quickly drew attention in classical roles, and when Willam Christensen staged America's first full-length "Swan Lake" in 1940, he chose her to dance Odette opposite Janet Reed's Odile. With little money and few men in the troupe as World War II began, performances decreased, and Martin left to marry and raise a family in Oregon. There she was director of the Portland Ballet School for 32 years and the founded the Portland Ballet Company. She retired at age 62.

Read profiles of Janet Sassoon, Virginia Johnson, Cynthia Gregory, Diana Meistrell, Simon Dow, Mikko Nissinen and Caroline Loyola at the SF Chronicle site.

Jocelyn Vollmar of S.F. Ballet

At San Francisco Ballet's recent gala opening in January, rounds of polite applause greeted the introduction of many of the company's illustrious patrons and leaders, but when a trim, elegant little woman dressed impeccably in an evening gown made her way onto the stage of the War Memorial Opera House, there was a ripple through the room as the audience recognized America's first Snow Queen and rose to their feet in tribute.

"It's Jocelyn," went the whisper. "Get up! it's Jocelyn!"

Perhaps no figure in San Francisco Ballet's 75-year history is more beloved than Jocelyn Vollmar, who joined the company when it was 5 years old, and whose career traces nearly seven decades as dancer and then teacher for the Ballet.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Yayoi Kambara, mother and dancer at ODC

From the exhilarated smile on Yayoi Kambara's face as she flies through the air at her partner, Jeremy Smith, or floats on his extended arms, you can almost feel the thrill she takes in sheer movement. Rehearsing KT Nelson's "Walk Before Talk" for ODC/Dance's forthcoming season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kambara holds nothing back. If there's a sense that she's embracing the instant, that every second she gets to dance is one to savor, perhaps it's because for this new mother every moment - onstage or off, at home or in the studio - is precious.

Regular watchers of ODC/Dance's Downtown seasons might remember Kambara from last year in Nelson's "Water Project," in which she danced what might be thought of as the Earth Mother role while 37 weeks pregnant. Her daughter, Hanae - whose name means "flowering branch" - was born two weeks later, on April 11. Nelson says it was a major editorial shift in the ballet to include a pregnant dancer, but with three mothers leading the ODC organization - Artistic Director Brenda Way has five children, Nelson has a son and the school's director, Kimi Okada, is also a parent - incorporating Kambara's real-life experience into the piece was only natural.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Alvin Ailey chief Judith Jamison on retiring

She is the public face of one of the most popular and successful dance companies in the world - an articulate and warmly generous spirit who has led the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for just over 18 years, handpicked by Ailey as his successor.

Under her direction, not only has the Ailey company grown from a small troupe of dancers struggling to fulfill the vision of its founder to an internationally renowned 30-member company, but it has also built its own $56 million building in the heart of New York - which also houses a second company as well as Ailey's highly regarded school - and achieved financial security with a $22 million endowment.

But with Judith Jamison's announcement last month that she plans to retire as artistic director by 2011, the question for the company is who can possibly succeed her? Jamison, 64, answers that question and others as she takes a break during her company's residency in Berkeley this week.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Nacho Duato's Compañía Nacional de Danza in S.F.

Go to any San Francisco Ballet show and, near the back of the War Memorial Opera House, you can often see young students of the San Francisco Ballet School lurking in the standing room, garnering inspiration from the company's performances. In early 2001, somewhere in the darkness, that's where Kayoko Everhart fell in love with Nacho Duato's intimate and emotional "Without Words."

"I was crazy about it," says Everhart, now 24. "That was my first experience with a Nacho ballet and I absolutely loved it."

But little did she dream that, years later, she would return to the city as a member of Duato's own Compañía Nacional de Danza, when San Francisco Performances presents the company's San Francisco debut this week at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Read more on the SF Chronicle site.

Takami & Mobu Dance Group's "Illusion 2"

Mobu Dance Group
SomArts Cultural Center
through Feb 3, 2008

Butoh is a strange thing. I'm starting to believe that you have to be in the right mood, in the right space, to really appreciate it. It's like entering an alien, slightly perverse and sometimes creepy world-- not an easy sell to your friends for a Saturday night date.

So, how do you put people in the right frame of mind? I haven't got any perfect answers, but I think that the setup at SomArts--where Takami and Mobu Dance Group have set up for a two-week run of Illusion 2--is on the right track.

Pre-show, you can wander through an art exhibition that includes a mesmerizing sound installation by Oliver diCicco called "Sirens," among other pieces scattered throughout the gallery. In this quiet mood, you wander down a path lit by Kana Tanaka's mesh of glowing dots and globes to the performance space, and decide which side of the stage you want to sit on: far or near.

The air in SomArts' space is a curious mix--a surreal stage world set into the sounds of real life. Sitting in the audience, you can hear the rush of cars speeding along the freeway overhead. There's the quiet echo of the voice of a guy at the front desk answering a phone call, and the opening quartet--for Takami, along with Monique Tajiri Goldwater, Mai Shimizu and Roberta Marguerite Chavez-- is lit only by the greenish glow of the two EXIT signs.

Slowly though, the freeway noises blend seamlessly into an atmospheric sound bed, and almost by accident, you are subsumed into a post-industrial forest. The women mirror each other, playing out episodes, some near and some far from the point of view of each side of the audience, and they pass through the space like ghosts passing through a looking glass.

Did you know it takes you eyes thirty minutes to adjust to the darkness? Thirty minutes, I think, is probably a good length for a butoh piece. For the--admittedly small--number of butoh pieces I've seen, I feel as though any longer and it becomes too difficult to sustain the concept. Illusion 2 is a little like my chess game, strong opener, but a bit weak on its middle game. At the manic duet between wildly giggling women I felt like we had somehow lost the concept of illusion.

Still, Illusion 2--which runs a little over an hour--has a lot going for it, especially in the visuals, with spectacular set pieces by Kana Tanaka that are well lit by Stephen Siegel. A marshland of glass stalks separate the upper and lower parts of the stage, while dangling rotating cones drift in circles, reflecting rings of light like a laserium show across the audience and stage alike, giving the impression of both fragility and ethereality to the whole piece.

A dancer pushes a rondel of cut glass and shards of dichroic filters into a pool of light and the play of colors it casts onto a screen ignites my mammalian fascination with bright, shiny things. Like Olafur Eliasson's mirrored geometric fantasies, Tanaka's light puzzles have a life of their own, one which transcends awkward, contrived moments (to get the rondel to the other side of the stage, two dancers have to haul the art piece up the steps, trying artfully to maintain butoh style in the process.)

On the whole, though, this is a tighter, more streamlined piece than the earlier Illusion, which I saw at Project Artaud last season. Most effective are moments when one half of the audience is able to observe and therefore comprehend only part of the illusion, an apt metaphor for life. I wouldn't like to give away the ending, which I found jarring, and perhaps unnecessary, but the final images left me with a lasting sense of disquieting serenity.

SF Symphony: Messiaen's L'Ascension

Every so often we get to the Symphony in between dance performances, and we didn't want to miss out on a chance to hear some Messiaen. So on a dreadfully drippy night, we squished in our soaked shoes over to Davies to hear Myung-Whun Chung conduct the San Francisco Symphony.

Messiaen is, for me, always a bit of a mixed experience. Sometimes I don't know what to make of him, sometimes I'm just blown away. L'Ascension is certainly not an easy work-- it moves through four movements at a glacial pace, and yet, Chung managed to uncover fantastic, spine-tingling episodes in the Alleluias. I found myself completely absorbed in a sort of frozen moment in time, which I guess, is Messiaen's mission.

By contrast, Chung's Mahler was a mixed bag for me. Bringing Mahler to SF is like coals to Newcastle, and I'm very much attached to MTT's interpretation, which seems to "sing" more than the version we heard on Friday night.

Chung takes the "Langsam. Schleppend" (Slow. Dragging.) directive quite literally-- to the point of schlepping dullness for me. It seems his motive is to create a contrast with the frenzied pace that he takes in the accelerandos, which was in some ways effective, but also started to sound schizophrenic to me. Who is this crazy guy whipping the musicians around up there?

By the third movement, the orchestra had taken on a richer slow burn-- a tone set by Scott Pingel's burnished double bass solo. Chung eschews the breathy "wait for it..." pauses that MTT takes, and to which I've grown accustomed, and it's a bit of a pity, because I think that his fourth movement lacks a certain logic-- under his baton, the symphony plays beautifully -- but it is just not as expressive an organism.

Spoon & Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance: Filaments & Derivatives

Filaments & Derivatives
Spoon & little seismic dance
at CounterPULSE
January 18-20, 2008

The diminutive but versatile CounterPULSE space was crammed to the rafters, literally, for a Saturday night show of Filaments & Derivatives, a collaborative evening put together by Kegan Marling and Jane Schnorrenberg's Spoon and Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance.

All the attention seems wholly warranted -- after all, Faulkner's 2006 season in the same space generated a rare excitement with her polished presentation and multi-faceted program. I remember after seeing her show, I had the most satisfying kind of question in my mind, what would she do next?

Marling opened the evening with his solo Memory, a mannered, mildly humorous assemblage of eccentricities and peculiarities. If there's a confused pause at the start -- is this piece really serious or not?-- it's quickly dispelled by the opening bars of Irene Cara's "What a Feeling." Marling plays it all straight though, from the jerky marionette moves to the unnerving, pigeon-like gaze at the audience, and it's lifted from garden-variety dance, of the sort I used to see at college, by Marling's athletic grace.

Faulkner makes another foray into film with Loom, a rather sweet chronicle of the romantic ups and downs of a couple, played by Faulkner herself and ODC/SF's Private Freeman. The concept of the film, which gives the sense of falling from one scene into the next through still photographs, will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to HP ads, but Faulkner edits effectively, skillfully weaving threads of humor and non-linear sequiturs throughout.

Spoon premiered The Derivatives immediately afterward, but unfortunately after the larger-than-life Loom, this new work had a rather pedestrian air. Marling and Schnorrenberg, joined by Ross Hollenkamp and Rebecca Johnson, seemed to lack the energy to match their chosen score-- a mix that ranged from Philip Glass to Osvaldo Golijov to Cibo Matto--which was a pity because, at times, the bolts and catches of the partnering held the promise of developing into something meaty.

Similarly, Faulkner's Imprint, a moody kaleidoscope of shifting patterns for Carl Bellinghausen, Rebecca Gilbert, Heather Glabe and Chelsea Taylor, had moments of clarity, but ultimately looked like a work still under development.

Far stronger was Faulkner's unusual The Dry Line, which closed the hourlong program. Across a video projection of a storm approaching a lonely, weathered barn a trio women--Stephanie Ballas, Janet Das, and Marlena Penney Oden--drift like Fates, or weird sisters manufacturing a dream world. Faulkner's movement here is clean and definite, with a bit of An Afternoon of a Faun in the isolinear movements and flattened hands that look like they are drawn from ancient Egyptian paintings. The only danger with this piece is that the women, all strong performers, nevertheless are somewhat swallowed up by the video, which occasionally distracts the eye away from the people losing in the process some of the subtleties of their intricate trio. And after all, when all is said and done, it's Faulkner's choreography that I want to remember.