Joanna Berman: A balancing act in world of the ballet

Whether onstage or off, Joanna Berman has always exuded a generous warmth. It was at the San Francisco Ballet where she drew in audiences in roles from Aurora in "Sleeping Beauty" to the sassy girl-next-door in "Sandpaper Ballet." And you feel it when she takes your hand and fixes you with a limpid gaze as if you're the most important person in the world at that moment. Now, a decade after she retired from the Ballet, Berman is back in the Bay Area after a two-year sojourn to Canada, and she's bringing the benefits of that warmth and experience to a new group of dancers as she stages a duet from Christopher Wheeldon's "Mercurial Manoeuvres" for Diablo Ballet's performances at the Shadelands Arts Center in Walnut Creek this weekend.

A balancing act in world of the ballet

SoccerTots, HoopsterTots offer free demo classes

"The soccer ball is smaller, of course," says Laura Adams, director of San Francisco's SoccerTots program, which will host a week of free demo classes in locations throughout the city starting Saturday.

If 18 months sounds a little young to begin thinking of a career as the next Mia Hamm or Landon Donovan, consider that at that stage, a toddler is just beginning to develop the kind of motor skills that will serve them in sports.

SoccerTots works with kids from 18 months to 6 years old and helps them develop their physical coordination - balance, agility and control - as well as team skills in weekly noncompetitive classes. The students - about 10 to 14 per class - are coached by an energetic young staff, many of whom majored in physical education, Adams says.

SoccerTots, HoopsterTots offer free demo classes

Batsheva: Subtle start, then full steam ahead

The Batsheva Dance Company takes a while to get started with "Max" at Yerba Buena Center, but when the piece finally picks up steam, one gets a palpable satisfaction from watching the precise execution of striking movement.

San Francisco Performances has brought this remarkable modern dance troupe over from Israel for several seasons, and it's a happy thing to say that with Batsheva, one never quite knows what to expect. "Max" is one of Ohad Naharin's most stripped-down and unadorned works, and if one has seen other more elaborate pieces, it might feel surprisingly tame. The opening sections particularly are striking but can be slow moving and subtle - not for those with short attention spans.

Subtle start, then full steam ahead

Batsheva dancers bring 'Max,' Gaga skills to YBCA

Forceful and enormously persuasive - an evening with the Batsheva Dance Company might portend dazzling, explosive zaniness or a visceral punch to the gut made of pure movement - or both simultaneously - and for that, credit Ohad Naharin, who has directed the 48-year-old company since 1990.

Speaking by phone from his home base in Tel Aviv, Naharin talked about the making of his 2007 "Max" - which Batsheva performs this weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of the San Francisco Performances season - and what Gaga, the unique system of movement exploration his dancers use as daily training, is all about.

Batsheva dancers bring 'Max,' Gaga skills to YBCA

S.F. Ballet review: Love is hell in 'Francesca'

You have to appreciate a ballet that plonks you down at the mouth of hell right at the outset.

San Francisco Ballet choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov wastes little time with niceties in his newest ballet, "Francesca da Rimini," which the company premiered on Thursday night at the War Memorial Opera House. Red-clad furies swirl around the lovers' triangle of Maria Kochetkova, Joan Boada and Taras Domitro, the maw of Dante's inferno opens to disgorge three menacing shadows, and in the first 15 seconds you know there will be no happy ending here.

Bombast seeps from the very pores of this ballet, but when you're talking about lavish Tchaikovsky music - his symphonic fantasy on the same subject - mixed with the drama of Dante's "Inferno," clearly this is not the moment for half-measures.

S.F. Ballet review: Love is hell in 'Francesca'

Black History Month Celebration at Habitot

Even though they might be too young to fully comprehend the significance of Black History Month, it's never too early to introduce little ones to the contributions of African American artists, scientists and thinkers. And at Habitot Children's Museum's Black History Month Celebration, parents can acquaint their pre-schoolers with a few of these historical figures in a day of fun and hands-on activities.

Habitot's mission is to spark curiosity and creativity, especially in children from infant to 6 years old. Founder and executive director Gina Moreland explains that to that end, aspiring young artists can get hands-on with open-ended art activities. In its art studio, the museum will have materials available for kids to make collage-style artwork in the hallmark style of Romare Bearden, a leader in the Harlem Renaissance. The works won't be as expansive as the epic murals for which Bearden was known, but they'll be personal projects the kids can take home with them.

Black History Month Celebration at Habitot

Ballet's candy-colored 'Beaux' plays with imagery

One might think that "Beaux" is the kind of piece that should not be taken too seriously. And yet, underlying the frolicsome cascades of sideways split jumps, and lofty sautes that bound across the space with the head thrown back, Mark Morris' eighth creation for San Francisco Ballet, which premiered Tuesday at the War Memorial Opera House, asks for a deeper examination of personal premises.

Set to neoclassical works for harpsichord by 20th century Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu- conducted on opening night by Martin West - the candy-colored camouflaged piece feels larky, even goofy. Yet, the air between the guys dancing - an egalitarian mix of principals, soloists, corps members and one apprentice working together mainly in triads - is one of gentility and collegiality.

Dappled with Isaac Mizrahi's neon piebald patterns, against a similar large-scale backdrop devised also by Mizrahi, the nine men - Sean Bennett, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Diego Cruz, Ruben Martin Cintas, Vito Mazzeo, Pascal Molat, Gennadi Nedvigin, Jeremy Rucker and Benjamin Stewart - cavort companionably, occasionally evoking thoughts of a band of colorful fauns gamboling in a cartoonish forest. The men of "Beaux" are playful, curious, innocent. So why does it seem, at first glance, so unmanly?

Ballet's candy-colored 'Beaux' plays with imagery

'Was It a Dream I Loved': Dancers reimagine 'Faun'

Faun or fawn, man or woman, human or other - ambiguity is at the heart of Sonsheree Giles' "Was It a Dream I Loved," which the Oakland artist collective This Sweet Nothing performs this weekend at the Fox Theater.

The idea has been percolating, Giles says, for about five years and began with her attraction to the famous ballet "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune," choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky to the Debussy symphonic poem - a ballet that, as it happens, debuted almost exactly 100 years ago.

The original story - of a faun whose afternoon lounging is interrupted by a band of nymphs - has served as a point of departure for her work, Giles says, although her 45-minute piece has a completely original score by co-collaborator Caroline Penwarden and designs by visual artist Heike Liss.

"Part of my attraction to it has to do with the formalism, the stoicism and elegance of it, and yet the rejection of formalism, too," she says. "It's about how Nijinsky took all of his classical training and subverted it - threw it out the window when it came to choreographing his own work. I'm attracted to how it can be so elegant and simple and yet have this controversial underlying sexual content."

'Was It a Dream I Loved': Dancers reimagine 'Faun'

SFB's Onegin--another look

I have a great time writing dance reviews, but one of my biggest frustrations is having only a few hundred words in which to compress so many thoughts. In my recent review of San Francisco Ballet's "Onegin" for the Chronicle I had a chance to write about three of the four casts, but as always I wish I could've said more.

Now that I've had time to go back a few times (yes, I'm an "Onegin" junkie--I could watch that ballet all day), and see the fourth cast, I thought I'd jot down a few more observations.

Firstly, the role of Gremin. I didn't get to fully expound on how much I enjoyed the care that the four men put into this role, which is not an inconsequential one. As with the Tatianas and the Onegins, there were some very different interpretations, but I found appealing things in each of them. In the cast with Maria Kochetkova, Pascal Molat was wonderful as her Gremin. Tender, without being uxorious, he treated her with great delicacy, and in their ballroom pas de deux, he made her float effortlessly. In the second act, as Onegin tweaked Lensky at the Name Day party, I appreciated the mildly amused expression that turned to genuine concern as the conflict escalated. Molat is a terrific dancer, but I think his dramatic skills are often underrated.

As the Gremin to Vanessa Zahorian's Tatiana, Quinn Wharton felt a little younger, less like distinguished royalty perhaps. Nevertheless, there was something so sweet about the way that he looked down into her eyes as they danced together. In the fourth cast that I saw, Tiit Helimets really captured the princely demeanor and I couldn't help but notice how elegant his partnering of his Tatiana was--no grabbing or indelicate grasp of her wrist, but rather a very gallant lead.

If I had to pick the most intriguing Gremin though, it would be Damian Smith, who always seems to bring out the best in Yuan Yuan Tan. His was the Gremin of Tchaikovsky's opera, who loves Tatiana madly--whose life had been "slipping drearily away [until] she appeared and brightened it like a ray of sunlight in a stormy sky, and brought me life and youth and happiness." In a few brief minutes onstage, Smith managed to convey the quiet exaltation of a man who knows just how lucky he was to marry Tatiana.

Am I the only one who likes to play "Fantasy Ballet" and come up with alternative casts I'd love to see someday? If so, I have to confess, I would have shifted around the roles for Ruben Martin and Damian Smith. Smith strikes me as the perfect Onegin, with the maturity to make a complicated man really understandable. Martin gave the part an excellent effort, but you just couldn't stop thinking, this is really just a nice guy that gets misunderstood a lot. Martin is so generously outward and I think that for me the best Onegins are much more inward-seeking and contained-- I would have thought he'd make a perfect Lensky instead.

Speaking of nice guys, I thought Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, in the fourth cast that I finally saw on Thursday night, had exactly the right physical look for Onegin. Darkly handsome, with a faintly patronizing air, he, like Davit Karapetyan, gives Onegin courtly manners, with perhaps a little more Gallic flair. Watching his rapid pirouettes just before the duel with Lensky -- a very capable Isaac Hernandez-- I couldn't help but be reminded of Vilanoba's turn as Frederi in Roland Petit's "L'Arlesienne." If Onegin were a little less buttoned-down of a character I think it might have been more comfortable for Vilanoba. As it was he seemed like an okay guy who did a few jerk-ish things -- don't we all know men like that?-- so that in that pesky third act ballroom scene, his re-discovery of Tatiana and all he had lost had a less keen-edged impact.

Vilanoba's Tatiana was Sarah Van Patten, whose limpid eyes convey emotions clear to the back of the standing room at the opera house. I expected to be moved by her, although if i'm being honest, that only happened in bits and pieces throughout the night. Right from the start, that long elegant line of Van Patten's neck was so expressive in the first few scenes, and it felt like she had a bang-on idea of the idealistic, romantic young girl she was playing. As the "grown-up" Tatiana, she went out on a limb dramatically, stretching to meet the agonized strings of the Tchaikovsky score in that final pas de deux. What was harder for me to see though, was how one scene built the groundwork for the next. When she confronted Vilanoba after his duel with Lensky, she stared him down with enormous contempt, but I thought, "Now where did that girl come from?"

Still, it's a real treat to have the luxury of four casts to quibble over. And it was really wonderful to see the corps dig into their parts as the run progressed. There were only a few changes each night -- I think Daniel Baker, Diego Cruz, Steven Morse, Francisco Mungamba, Dustin Spero, Benjamin Stewart, Matthew Stewart and Lonnie Weeks were in the peasant lineup at every performance I saw, while among the women, I enjoyed watching the various Olgas (Clara Blanco, Dana Genshaft, Dores Andre and Courtney Wright) alternate in the group of womenfolk, joined by Elizabeth Miner, Nicole Ciapponi, Koto Ishihara, and Shannon Roberts. The Act I dances got sharper, and the polonaises and mazurkas became grander as the run went on, which was gratifying to watch unfold. And lest I forget, I must add that Courtney Wright's Olga made a bright foil for Van Patten's Tatiana. Gifted with a light ballon, I think Wright looked best while skimming through her teasing duet with Vilanoba.

All in all, I imagine it's safe to say that "Onegin" has won more converts to the ballet--be prepared to fight for tickets if and when it repeats next season.

Bright Knights Chess Club: free event for SF kids

When Vincent Ng and his teammates from Balboa High School went to chess competitions back in the late '90s, they noticed there were very few competitors from San Francisco. Determined to change that, Ng and his fellow students founded the Bright Knights Chess Club to bring the joy of chess to kids in San Francisco.

On Saturday, the Bright Knights will sponsor the latest in a series of tournaments aimed at kids ages 6 to 18 at the Richmond branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Split into two sections - one for kids who are members of the U.S. Chess Federation and an open section for beginners, novices and advanced players - the competition allows even entry-level players to gain experience playing each other.

Bright Knights Chess Club: free event for SF kids

Dance Magazine: Madison Keesler On the Rise

Onstage or off, Madison Keesler has riveting eyes. A bewitching intensity shines from their depths, which are set in a pretty, delicate face. At 21, Keesler, a San Francisco Ballet corps member, has already drawn notice in soloist roles. In Helgi Tomasson’s Giselle, her engaging glances lent a girlish appeal to her strong technique in the demanding peasant pas de cinq. And as a demi-soloist in Symphony in C, Keesler stood out for a sensitivity and expressiveness in her dancing, for ports de bras that seem to unfurl endlessly, for her fluid transitions, and that piercing focus that connects her with her partners as well as the audience.

Though born in California, Keesler moved around as a child. When she was 6, she started tap, jazz, and ballet, but within two years she had zeroed in on ballet. She began studying at the International Ballet School in Colorado Springs with Mark Carlson and Vaganova-trained German Zamuel. When she turned 10, her family moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and she enrolled in Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet under Marcia Dale Weary.

Read more: Dance Magazine – On the Rise