Dance 2011: Highs, lows and top 10 moments

High: Maria Kochetkova and Gennadi Nedvigin at San Francisco Ballet. In the greatest partnerships in ballet, the union is greater than the sum of its parts, and so it was with these two dancers throughout the 2011 season. It wasn't just that his princely comportment set off her delicate phrasing in "Giselle," or that his rakishness highlighted her vivacity in "Coppelia." So well matched in their impeccable Russian training, Kochetkova and Nedvigin serve up not only artistry of the highest caliber but also that inexpressible, mysterious excitement born of potent onstage chemistry.

Low: The premature retirement of Miami City Ballet Artistic Director Edward Villella. The word that Villella was being ousted by his board sent ripples of outrage through the dance world. Now there are signs that a similar fate may await Ballet San Jose Artistic Director Dennis Nahat. Tracking fiscal health is a board's mandate, but when it ventures into artistic decisions and treats a ballet company like a business machine, the real loser is the art form.

Read more: Dance 2011: Highs, lows and top 10 moments

'Yes Sweet Can': 'Mittens and Mistletoe' circus

Take a little bit of acrobatics and a little juggling, throw in some trapeze work and clowning, and it adds up to a charmer of a circus cabaret for kids.

This weekend, the 5-year-old Sweet Can Productions kicks off two weeks of holiday performances of its popular "Yes Sweet Can" show at Dance Mission, turning the everyday into magical moments.

Read more: 'Yes Sweet Can': 'Mittens and Mistletoe' circus

'The Jewish Nutcracker, a Maccabee Celebration'

Who wouldn't want to make friends with the Sufganiyot Fairy?

Like her counterpart, the Sugarplum Fairy, she's delicate and sweet, and in the guise of Katy Alaniz Rous - who plays the Sufganiyot Fairy in "The Jewish Nutcracker," which opens at the ODC Theater today - she also looks as if she's got a Yiddishe kop - some real smarts.

"Usually when people hear about a Jewish 'Nutcracker,' they say, 'How is that Jewish?' " says Rous, who also choreographed this unusual production last year. "But you know, the regular 'Nutcracker' isn't really a Christian story; it just takes place at a Christmas party."

Read more: 'The Jewish Nutcracker, a Maccabee Celebration'

Ballet San Jose review: Generous 'Nutcracker'

A fairly imposing, 6-foot Mouse King was bounding around the entrance to the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, making more than one youngster a little wary about this whole ballet thing as patrons filtered into Ballet San Jose's matinee performance of Dennis Nahat's "Nutcracker."

Fortunately, once coaxed past the dangers of the rodent kind and into the theater, there was plenty to bewitch ballet-goers of any age. Nahat's 1979 retelling of the holiday classic has always been notable for its fresh spin and the wealth of detail throughout the ballet, whose Tchaikovsky score - with some interpolations and rearrangement - was given a sensitive rendering by the Symphony Silicon Valley under Dwight Oltman's direction. The first act especially, with its broad and yet meticulously executed comedy and thoughtfully plotted individual characters set in David Guthrie's textured and decorative Viennese home, just might be the best in the Bay Area's bevy of "Nutcrackers."

Read more: Ballet San Jose review: Generous 'Nutcracker'

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San Jose Ballet's Dennis Nahat may be forced out

San Jose Ballet Artistic Director Dennis Nahat may be forced out of the company he founded. Apparently, the artistic direction has moved solely into the hands of the board of directors.

"It's a peculiar and precarious situation," Nahat said in a conversation shortly before a matinee performance of his production of "Nutcracker." "I am still an employee of the ballet, I am still management, but if there are changes being made, I am not privy to them."

Read more: San Jose Ballet's Dennis Nahat may be forced out

BALLET REVIEW / Cracking open the joy, awe

It would be so easy to think of this yearly tradition as a kid's ballet, a socially acceptable night out for the juice-and-cookies set. But if a jaded smirk crosses your lips at the thought of yet another year of "Nutcracker," it's good to remember that for more than a few patrons in the theater, this will be their first ballet, and the wonder it generates can be infectious. For every trick you think you know, there is someone in the audience who won't be able to hold back an awed "Wow!" when the doll pops out of a magic box, or a tree begins to ascend magically - and, news flash, it might not be just kids we're talking about.

Read more: BALLET REVIEW / Cracking open the joy, awe:

'Danzón,' Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, review:

"Tanzt, Tanzt, sonst sind wir verloren," German choreographer Pina Bausch once said. "Dance, dance, or else we are lost."

Now two years after her death, her imperative lives on in her company Tanztheater Wuppertal, which returned to perform Bausch's 1995 "Danzón" on Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall stage courtesy of Cal Performances last weekend.

Bausch's variety of dance theater - evidenced in sprawling evening-length collages of surreal, seemingly absurd vignettes - is sometimes ridiculed, sometimes embraced and often misunderstood. But if her work seems at first glance to be random and incomprehensible, it can also be compelling and intensely personal - a potent dream sequence of images that will bring up different correlations and correspondences in the mind of each viewer. Importantly, what it is for you, may not be what it is for me.

Read more: 'Danzón,' Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, review

Left Coast Leaning Festival review: hit and miss

"What are you trying to say?"

It's a question that could be sardonic, frustrated or genuinely curious, and the latest edition of the Left Coast Leaning Festival, which opened at the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday, evoked a combination of those moods in a program of works that was inventive, perplexing, combative and delightful.

This is the third year for Left Coast Leaning, a co-presentation of YBCA with Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Living Word Project, and the mission - to seek out works of a distinctively West Coast voice that "emanate from a guttural, visceral place," as Joseph says - continues to be both provocative and appealing. But as is often the case with festival programs, the lineup of five works - by local performers as well as artists from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. - is hit-and-miss.

Read more: Left Coast Leaning Festival review: hit and miss

'Hover Space' review: Shifting possibilities

There's a wonderful idea at the heart of "Hover Space," which the nervy and rumbustious Printz Dance Project premiered at Z Space at Theater Artaud on Wednesday night. Although ostensibly themes of love and longing thematically tie the 12 dancers together, the centerpiece - literally - of the work is a massive square platform designed by Sean Riley and suspended on chains, covering roughly half the space of the stage.

Bookended by solos performed by choreographer Stacey Printz, "Hover Space" comes in 12 segments in which the dancers work - often in pairs - on, under and around the platform, which not only rises and lowers to reshape the theatrical space but also dips at steep angles to form a surface for the performers to scale, or slide along.

Read more: 'Hover Space' review: Shifting possibilities

Pina Bausch company carries on with 'Danz�n'

In the world of modern dance, Pina Bausch is indisputably an icon of the postmodern dance movement. The sprawling works she created for Tanztheater Wuppertal redefined what it meant to create a dance. They might be simultaneously touching and yet cryptic, keenly perceptive and also frustratingly intellectual, but always they are movingly human.

Two years after the passing of its director and auteur at the age of 68, the company carries on her legacy with former dancer Dominique Mercy and Bausch's assistant Robert Sturm at the helm. The disarming and affable Mercy was one of Bausch's first recruits to the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and speaking by phone from the company's home base in Germany, he candidly discussed the troupe's direction after Bausch's death, and about "Danzón," her 1995 work that they'll bring to the Cal Performances stage at Zellerbach Hall in UC Berkeley this weekend.

Read more: Pina Bausch company carries on with 'Danzón':

Fungus Fair at Lawrence Hall of Science

If you've ever wondered if that little brown mushroom that grows on your lawn is poisonous or whether that pretty shelf fungus you saw on a hike was edible, now is your chance to find out.

This weekend, the Mycological Society of San Francisco's annual Fungus Fair will draw fungi fans from all over the Bay Area for a weekend of getting down and dirty with mushrooms. The Mycological Society has been around since the 1950s, and in addition to leading mushroom field trips and forays, it has sponsored the Fungus Fair since 1969.

Read more: Fungus Fair at Lawrence Hall of Science

Trey McIntyre Project review: Jazzy number

Smart, vibrant dancing filled the stage at Zellerbach Hall when the 10-member Trey McIntyre Project of Boise, Idaho, brought three ballets to Cal Performances on Friday night.

The robust muscularity of McIntyre's freewheeling choreography was at its invigorating best in "The Sweeter End," a 2011 collaborative effort with New Orleans' Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Set to a loose grouping of old jazz standards like the "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "Trouble in Mind," the piece has a vaudevillian flair and Looney Tunes hyperactivity that suits the deft bravado and swagger of these dancers.

Trey McIntyre Project review: Jazzy number...

Diablo Ballet season premiere review

If there is a company character to Diablo Ballet, it is the compact swiftness and the gusto with which they attack the stage. There were a few new faces on the roster when the company opened its 18th season at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek this weekend, but on a program of three contemporary ballets, there was no lack of verve and punch in the dancing.

The newest addition to the Diablo repertoire is a sober, somewhat abstract premiere by Val Caniparoli titled "Tears From Above," set to Elena Kats-Chernin's score for two cellos - performed live by Daniel Reiter and Paul Rhodes.

Bathed in Jack Carpenter's crepuscular lighting, suggesting the fading light at the end of a day, the ballet quickly gathers momentum, shifting from undulating arms and spines and into space-devouring sequences. The quartet of dancers - Mayo Sugano, Derek Sakukura, Hiromi Yamazaki and Robert Dekkers - surge and swell in repeated cadences across the stage, before breaking into pensive duets.

Diablo Ballet season premiere review:

Dominic Walsh's offers a 'Rose' to Diablo Ballet

"I feel that in some ways we've lost our understanding of theater," says choreographer Dominic Walsh, sitting quietly in a shady spot outside the Diablo Ballet studios in Walnut Creek.

Walsh gazes across an unromantic parking lot toward a line of trees as if deeper answers might lie percolating somewhere out there in the sunshine. There's an echo of that questing spirit in his version of "Le Spectre de la Rose," a reinterpretation of the Ballets Russes-era masterpiece originally created by Michel Fokine in 1911. Walsh is just finishing a whirlwind rehearsal of his "Spectre" for Diablo Ballet's 18th season, which opens Friday at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

Dominic Walsh's offers a 'Rose' to Diablo Ballet...

'Nearly 90{ 2},' Merce Cunningham Dance review

Rarely does an audience have a chance to anticipate the final performance of a great work. But so it was on Tuesday night as the 13 members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave the company's final performance of Cunningham's last creation, "Nearly 90," capping eight days of workshops, lectures and events at Stanford Lively Arts.

The company's two-year Legacy tour - which commenced at Cunningham's death in 2009 - continues until the end of this year, when the company will disband permanently. This last appearance at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium felt like a firm push forward from one of modern dance's most influential choreographers.

'Nearly 90{ 2},' Merce Cunningham Dance review...

'Light Moves' review: Meditative digital-human mix

It's hard for performing artists to think big these days and actually pull it off. Shrinking budgets often lead to an overabundance of caution. That's what makes it all the more impressive that year after year, Margaret Jenkins consistently generates works of ideas and scale like "Light Moves," which the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company premiered Thursday night at the Novellus Theater as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts season.

Over the two-year process of creating "Light Moves," Jenkins - along with her collaborators, including composer Paul Dresher, video artist Naomie Kremer and poet Michael Palmer, as well as the eight dancers of her company - has judiciously edited the work, paring away some of the more distracting elements seen in previews last year.

'Light Moves' review: Meditative digital-human mix...

LEVYdance review: Sweet and surprising 'Romp'

Dance can move you, excite you, even delight, but it's hard to really surprise an audience these days, to keep them guessing. LEVYdance captures that exhilarating feeling that anything could happen with "Romp," which the three-member company - Benjamin Levy, Melodie Casta and Scott Marlowe - premiered on Thursday night at Z Space at Theater Artaud.

An audience of about 100 fits onto the stage of Artaud, where chairs have been arranged in small clusters evenly throughout the space. It creates a maze of cleverly arranged pathways, and before you can even register that the piece has begun, the performers, in street clothes, have inserted themselves into the maze dancing a high-octane folk dance to the music of Brass Menazerie. Bodies fly past your feet, arms swoop over your head, and hips gyrate in a thumping, joyous opening that fits neatly into the interstices of the audience arrangement, just barely missing actual physical contact by centimeters. Keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.

LEVYdance review: Sweet and surprising 'Romp'...

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Family Concert

Countless youngsters have discovered a love of music by playing the simplest of instruments, a recorder. That was what drew Marion Verbruggen, who began playing when she was 6, into the world of period-instrument music. Now one of the world's leading recorder virtuosos, Verbruggen will appear with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in a family concert Saturday afternoon - with an interactive twist.

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Family Concert...

'From Wallflower to Dance Brigade'

It's likely she would never describe herself this way, but Krissy Keefer is a force of nature.

Founder of the feminist dance collective the Wallflower Order and its successor Dance Brigade, Keefer has been a provocateur and an institution in the modern dance community since 1975. And with its new show at the Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend, Dance Brigade celebrates Keefer's 35 years of modern dance theater.

Pragmatic and disarmingly direct, Keefer seems often to be in nonstop motion as she talks about her legacy - you get the sense that this boundless energy is the driving and organizing force behind the agitprop fury and dark humor that threads through much of her work.

From Wallflower to Dance Brigade...

Wayne McGregor's 'Entity' review: Order from chaos

A danced investigation of movement exploring the intersection of creativity and cognitive neuroscience: Is there anything that sounds drier and less sexy? And yet, that inspiration results in a giddy, sometimes thrilling, occasionally frustrating blend of motion, ideas and imagery in Wayne McGregor's "Entity," which his London company, Random Dance, performed last weekend at the Novellus Theater in its Bay Area debut as part of San Francisco Performance's fall season.

Parsed out in two acts - the first with music by composer Joby Talbot and the second an electronica score by Coldplay collaborator Jon Hopkins - "Entity" explores a kind of metascience, a creation examining the way we create. It's a heady topic to take on through the medium of dance, in which technique, speed and stamina have advanced to a dazzling degree and yet our understanding of the brain-body connection that inspires choreographic creativity is limited.

Wayne McGregor's 'Entity' review: Order from chaos...

Pirate Store brings bucks for educational programs

For the truly discerning pirate, there's really only one place to shop in San Francisco.

Eye patches, treasure shining kits and the handy Scurvy Begone, in convenient jelly bean form, are just a few of the delightful items to be found at the Pirate Store. Proceeds from the store benefit 826 Valencia, which provides writing education workshops, after-school tutoring and a wide range of other educational programs for kids.

Pirate Store brings bucks for educational programs...

Dance Magazine: The Turning Point

You’re about to graduate from high school and know you want to keep dancing. But how, where, and in what environment? Is your goal to dance professionally? And how much of the college experience do you want?

From the intensive training of a conservatory to the broad-based academics of dance programs in liberal arts colleges, a plethora of choices is available to dancers nowadays. Making a decision that could affect not only your next four years but also your whole career is intimidating, to say the least.

Read more: Dance Magazine – The Turning Point

Dance Magazine – Vanessa Zahorian

It’s been a long rehearsal day at San Francisco Ballet. Vanessa Zahorian walks into the company’s conference room apologizing for looking tired and for the informality of the loose rehearsal clothes she’s thrown over her lanky limbs. But there’s no need; her bright blue eyes sparkle with the all-American girl freshness that serves her so well onstage.

Trained at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and the Kirov Academy, Zahorian is one of SFB’s most reliable principals—rarely injured and gifted with a solid technical facility that was evident from the time she joined the corps in 1997. She stays in top form through a mix of common sense and lessons learned over the years about what works best for her body.

Read more: Dance Magazine – Vanessa Zahorian

Dance Teacher magazine: Summer School

Busy teachers are always looking for ways to enrich curriculum, and adding dance is a great option. But it can be daunting for a teacher to come up with movement-oriented lessons on her own. The Luna Dance Institute’s (LDI) annual summer workshop, held at Mills College in Oakland, California, pairs six dance artists with six classroom teachers for a six-day intensive. Now in its 11th year, the Summer Institute includes discussions about child development and learning theories, practical investigations on how to incorporate dance into state and national curriculum standards and a year of follow-up coaching from LDI staff. And, thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and others, Luna is able to offer the whole experience for free.

Read more: Summer School 

'A Cat in Paris': Stylish animated film at Kabuki

Parents who wistfully crave the great storytelling and artistry of classic cel animation might consider letting the gracefully nimble feline of 'A Cat in Paris' take kids on the adventure of a lifetime. The film is presented as part of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Created in stylish, hand-drawn 2-D animation by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli and set among the rooftops of Paris, the film is a noir-ish thriller for the 8-and-up set.

Though younger children might find the story a complex one to follow - the festival will be showing an English-language version of the 65-minute film - the imaginative tale of the young Zoé and her heroic cat, Dino, has a modern-day fairy-tale feel, complete with chilling villains and a nail-biting, high-stakes chase over the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral.

'A Cat in Paris': Stylish animated film at Kabuki...

Imagination Playground: Architect focuses on fun

What if playgrounds exercised the mind as well as the body? A whole new kind of play space comes to the Bay Area Discovery Museum this weekend, with the unveiling of the Imagination Playground.

At a time when teaching kids construction skills and the value of working with their hands is garnering interest, the Imagination Playground brings together the concept of a safe, social space with the notion of unstructured free play.

Imagination Playground: Architect focuses on fun...

Bike About at the S.F. Zoo

What does a kangaroo have for breakfast? Does a flamingo need to stretch in the morning? Are snow leopards cranky when they awaken?

You can get answers to these and other burning questions at the San Francisco Zoo's monthly Bike About tour, the next of which takes place Saturday.

'It's great because you can have the zoo all to yourself,' says Sarah Riemer, who helps coordinate the early-morning tours during which docents guide small groups of families around the zoo."

Bike About at the S.F. Zoo...

Women's History Month: S.F. maritime park, piers

Women at sea are the focus as the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park celebrates Women's History month throughout March.

The festivities include the free photography exhibition 'Women Who Changed Maritime History' at the Visitors Center on Jefferson Street. On Saturday at 1 p.m., the kids can take a break and sit in for Maritime Story Time's 'The Tale of Henry and Harry.' On Sunday at 3 p.m., a park ranger will lead a tour of the small crafts at the Pier's floating docks.

Women's History Month: S.F. maritime park, piers...

Carlos Acosta, in 'Swan Lake,' talks about future

Carlos Acosta, in 'Swan Lake,' talks about future:

At 37, the Cuban-born star Carlos Acosta has achieved the kind of international recognition accorded to the likes of Baryshnikov and Nureyev, although sitting in Ballet San Jose's studios, where he's rehearsing with Alexsandra Meijer for his guest appearance this weekend in Dennis Nahat's 'Swan Lake,' Acosta looks remarkably unassuming.

Flying from London to San Jose and jumping straight into rehearsals has left remnants of jetlag written on his handsome features, but when he stands up to dance, the exhaustion magically falls away, revealing the charismatic smile and trademark energy and style that has made him one of the true ballet superstars of his generation.

In a break between rehearsals, he spoke about the challenges of "Swan Lake," his thoughts on retirement and the future of ballet.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/23/DDP61HQ6K6.DTL#ixzz1F0w4Yrfz

Tulipmania: Pier 39 begins celebration of blooms

"I tell people that not all 39,000 bulbs will bloom at once,"says Denise Dirickson, the director of environmental services at Pier 39, where Tulipmania begins Saturday.

But 39,000 is about the number of bulbs that Dirickson and her team of gardeners planted in the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the coming weeks, they'll adorn the gardens and barrels around the pier with a riot of purples, pinks, oranges and yellows.

Tulipmania: Pier 39 begins celebration of blooms...

'Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies' review

Navigate through the many layers of esoteric images collaged together in Jess Curtis/Gravity's latest work, 'Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies,' which had its world premiere Thursday night in the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and you may come out the other side feeling a little lost.

Realigning our views of the human form seems to be the mission, wrapped up in neo-burlesque packaging. The six-member multinational cast takes us in directions that are by turns fanciful and non sequitur, as they drift, skulk and cavort with gusto through a spare white landscape furnished with an assortment of detritus that might have wandered in from other stories - boxing gloves, a ukulele, a single skate dangled over a naked mannequin, a porcelain tub, a refrigerator. They're all props in a strange quotidian drama.

'Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies' review...

Kids Create: Workshops in Mayan embroidery

Intricate and colorful, the geometric patterns of Mayan embroidery techniques will be a jumping-off point for the Kids Create workshop Sunday at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles.

Aimed at kids from 5 to 10 years old, the Kids Create workshops, which meet the first Sunday of each month, focus on multicultural art activities, often tied into museum exhibitions like 'Modern Maya: Huipils From the Collection of Paul and Kathleen Vitale,' which opens Tuesday and runs through May 1. For this week's Kids Create event, youngsters will learn about the symbols and embroidery methods of the Mayans and apply them to making bookmarks, which they will be able to take home with them.

Kids Create: Workshops in Mayan embroidery...

Pointe magazine – Inside the audition for Lines Ballet

Inside the audition for Lines Ballet

There’s a feeling of quiet intensity in the air at San Francisco Dance Center, where ballet master Arturo Fernandez is leading an open audition for Alonzo King LINES Ballet. After barre, director Alonzo King slips into the studio. With minimal fanfare, he takes up a position to one side, observing the dancers as they begin an adagio combination. Although LINES holds open calls a few times a year, it’s rare, he says frankly, to hire someone directly from an audition. King prefers to have dancers spend some time with the company in classes so he can really “see who they are” before they join the 11-member contemporary troupe. “I am drawn to people who aren’t playing Simon Says,” says King, “but who really have given a lot of thought to the science of movement.”

Read more: Pointe magazine – Inside the audition for Lines Ballet

'Elixir of Love for Families - the Movie': opera

Maybe your introduction to opera was humming along with Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd as a kid - and a new generation of young operagoers might just be captivated by the catchy and familiar tunes after seeing a colorful, family-friendly version of 'The Elixir of Love' at the Herbst Theatre. The film screens three times on Sunday and Jan. 30.

Ruth Nott, education director for the San Francisco Opera, says the hourlong movie - filmed during its 2008 production - was created specifically to help introduce youngsters to the world of opera. Nott says the first such film - based on the opera's 2009 production of Mozart's 'Magic Flute' - was produced for use in schools and community outreach programs, but it received an overwhelmingly positive response from families.

'Elixir of Love for Families - the Movie': opera...

Chinatown Alleyway Tours guided by local youths

In San Francisco's Chinatown, many tourists - indeed, many longtime Bay Area residents - never make it past the silk purses and bamboo backscratchers in shops lining Grant Avenue. But if you want to get to the heart of Chinatown, see it through the eyes of the kids who grew up there and who now lead the Chinatown Alleyway Tours, offered every Saturday morning from Portsmouth Square.

These are not your typical tours, pointing out only the cosmetic highlights of one of San Francisco's oldest immigrant communities. The guides who lead the tours - usually a few of them at a time - are savvy, lively storytellers and knowledgeable politically, as well as historically. A couple of hours spent with them walking down the byways and alleys will help you get to know a side of the neighborhood behind the touristy side of the largest Chinese community outside of Asia.

Chinatown Alleyway Tours guided by local youths...