Choreographer inspired by '31 film 'M'

Photo: Ryan Borque

Choreographer inspired by '31 film 'M':

It might not be readily apparent, but there's classic film noir inspiration behind the dance in choreographer Christy Funsch's latest solo piece, "Moving Still(s)," which has its San Francisco premiere this weekend at CounterPulse on a program of works new and old by both Funsch and Portland choreographer Katherine Longstreth.

"Moving Still(s)" grew out of a month's work that Funsch did last year in the Djerassi Resident Artists program in Woodside, taking as a departure point Fritz Lang's 1931 German film "M," a classic thriller that tells of a serial killer who kidnaps and murders young children. Funsch, however, was less intrigued by the lurid details of the film than in the director's craft and the characters.

"I was drawn to a lot of the decisions Lang made as a filmmaker," she says, "the use of space, the camera angles, the duration of the shots, all are part of his storytelling technique. Even the shots without characters really contribute to sense of story, so you'll see an empty courtyard with clothes drifting away, a ball, a balloon without owners."

For this solo piece, which she premiered last April in New York, Funsch chose 15 characters from "M," as well as some from Jean Pierre-Melville's 1962 New Wave noir crime flick "Le Doulos," and distilled gestures specific to each.

"It's not a reinterpretation of film, but an experiment for me, a way of finding dynamic shifts, muscular tension, new ways of embodying gestures," she says. "The solo is not narrative, but it's not abstract glimpses of characters, either. You'll see that one is a child, another a woman, a lawyer, a policeman. So it's a moving pastiche of people, characters that emerge out of theatrical gesture."

More recently, Funsch's work has focused largely on solos - a retrospective at Z Space last year let audience members experience some of the many single-dancer pieces intimately and individually, one on one in private spaces, as well as in a traditional setting. Now she says, she's interested in getting back to group work. This weekend's program also will feature the premiere of a trio, "She's Near She's Now She's Nowhere," a collaboration with Tamara Albaitis, who created a sound installation of tiny speaker cones suspended on wires throughout the space.

"For a time I really looked at how the solo figure could be empowered," she says. "Now it's about looking at things as a whole - how we navigate the world and find meaning for ourselves as individuals in a collection. You can go away for a residency by yourself, but when you come back, you're part of something larger."

Felipe Diaz, San Francisco Ballet master

Photo: Erik Tomasson

Felipe Diaz, San Francisco Ballet master:

It's been 15 years since Felipe Diaz soared across the War Memorial Opera House stage with San Francisco Ballet. After training for a couple of years at the San Francisco Ballet School, the Colombian-born dancer joined the company in 1988, rising to the rank of soloist in his 10 years with the Ballet. In 1998, he and then-partner-now-wife Marisa Lopez left to join the Dutch National Ballet, where they enjoyed vibrant careers before retiring, he in 2011 and she in 2012. Now, at 39, Diaz has returned to San Francisco Ballet as a ballet master, wielding the experience of his 22 years onstage to guide a new generation of dancers.

Q: What drew you and Marisa Lopez to Amsterdam?

A: I think it wasn't necessarily Amsterdam, I just wanted to come to Europe. I had a curiosity about their repertoire and what it was like to live in Europe. Marisa and I wanted to be together - we've been together 17 years, this summer we will be married 10 years.

Q: What were some of the differences between dancing in Europe versus with an American company?

A: In most European companies they have their own theater, so the company performs all year round. The schedule is shared between the ballet and opera, so you prepare for a program and then it goes onstage immediately and is performed maybe 16 or 17 times. Here, the schedule is more condensed, and while there is in theory more time to prepare, one could argue that it's better for the body to perform all year round rather than suddenly shock the body and perform intensively from January to May. On the other hand, at SFB there is definitely no room for complacency or to relax. You have to be ready to work, and it can be very exciting for the dancer, because you work on many different ballets at the same time instead of doing only one production over and over.

Q: When you retired, did you already know what you wanted to do next?

A: My parents are dancers and teachers and they have a school, so from an early age I understood what it was like to teach. While I was still dancing, in Amsterdam, on my free days, I would get together with other dancers and organize a class. It started out as me by myself, but little by little, friends would join me and that grew until the director noticed. In the last four years of my career, he asked me to teach company class, and at the school in Amsterdam and at Royal Conservatory in The Hague. So, when I retired, the director said that he had a full-time position as a ballet master for me. I retired on Dec. 24, 2011, and on Dec. 26, I was a ballet master.

Q: How did you end up coming back to San Francisco?

A: I was invited to teach the school's summer program a few times, and to teach for the company as well. San Francisco Ballet is a place I hold dearly in my heart. The city and organization gave me so much early in my career, and Helgi (artistic director Tomasson) taught me so many things - how to be a professional dancer, how to go about it and what it's like. So the prospect of working with him again was very appealing.

Q: What do you love to do outside of the ballet studio?

A: What I really love is to take my son, Gabriel, to the park. When my wife was pregnant, I envisioned myself and my son going to get ice cream, and now he's finally old enough to do that, so I can enjoy spending time with him.

Q: What are you doing now that the ballet season has ended?

A: I am in Amsterdam as guest teacher for the Dutch National, then I go to Tokyo to teach. It's a busy summer and I'm not really resting, but I think it's good to travel and be exposed to other places in the dance world, so you can always keep your thoughts and ideas current and keep on learning - never stop learning.

Jess Curtis: Performance experiment

Jörg Müller (left) and Jess Curtis in
"Performance Research Experiment #2:
Paradox of the Heart (Phase 1)." Photo: Sven Hugolani

Jess Curtis: Performance experiment:

Jess Curtis wants to know what's going on inside you. Literally.

In his latest "Performance Research Experiment #2: Paradox of the Heart (Phase 1)," which debuts at CounterPulse this weekend, Curtis and collaborator Jorg Muller team up with multimedia artist Yoann Trellu, dramaturge Mira Moschalski and neuroscientist Ida Momennejad for an evening-long event that is part performance and part scientific experiment.

It began with Curtis' 2003 "Performance Research Experiment #1," which CounterPulse presented in 2006. In that piece, Curtis and Muller based the length of each dance segment on the audience's reactions - when five watchers shouted out that they were bored, they would move on to another scene.

"It was an interesting survey," says Curtis of the piece, which his 13-year-old company Gravity has since performed throughout Europe. "I had the fantasy of controlling it and doing it in a much more systematic way where we might be able to capture data about attention spans in different performances, but we never really got that far with that."

Curtis, who has taught at UC Berkeley and is pursuing a doctorate in performance studies at UC Davis, notes that this second "Performance Research Experiment" is a somewhat different animal.

"I wanted to do something that pushed the science side a little farther," he says. "Always my work has a research base to it. I'm curious about questions like how does this kind of image affect an audience, or how do I bring together images that provoke certain kinds of conversations? How does a performance affect how we see things?"

Feedback from the audience this time comes in the shape of devices that will monitor the heart rates and skin conductivity of 10 performance viewers. Trellu will then take that digital information and play it out on screens in real time as the performance progresses.

Curtis - whose highly charged and yet often playful pieces blend theater, movement and aerial work - goes on to reference German author Erika Fischer-Lichte's writings on the transformative power of performance.

"She moves the discussion of performance away from 'What does it mean and how do you read it?' and asks, 'What is its impact on the world and how does it do that?' " he says. "Does watching a dance or performance have physical consequences on your body? These are all questions that are very interesting to me."

Anata Project Spring Season: Revealing

Photo: Claudia Hubiak

Anata Project Spring Season: Revealing:

It's not just secrets that are revealed in Claudia Anata Hubiak's newest work, "The Hush Hush Chronicles," which the 2-year old Anata Project premieres Friday at Z Space, on a shared program with New York-based Summation Dance Company.

"I am playing with the idea of secrets, of holding information and what that does to us, the pathways it carves in our bodies, the memories it forms and the pressure it causes," says the outgoing Hubiak, a former champion gymnast, who discovered dance when she was 18.

"It was a total switch for me," she says wryly. "I was 17 when I finished doing gymnastics. I was the Colorado state champion, but the older I got and the more I did it, the more terrifying it was for me. The only part that was joyful for me was the dance element, so I kept following that. I decided to study ballet and jazz, and somehow, by magic, I got into the dance department at UC Santa Barbara."

As a rehearsal in SoMa's LEVYstudio gets under way, it's hard not to see the kinesthesia of the competitive athlete in her movement. Hubiak demonstrates a move with a fluid spiral that takes her from the floor onto her feet and back to the floor again in swift, fearless strokes. A trio of dancers interlocks, limb sliding against limb. There's always something moving, she tells the dancers.

"For a long time I think my choreography was very strong and angular and athletic, and I love that element of it," she says, "but over the years I've tried to dissolve and break that down so it's not the dominating factor. Definitely the gymnastics has factored in, but also I grew up in a Buddhist household, so the mindfulness and kinesthetic awareness through meditation has influenced my work a lot."

Nevertheless, it's the darker side of life, the furtive moments hidden in corners of basement speakeasies, that interests Hubiak in "The Hush Hush Chronicles," which will be performed to live music by indie folk group We Became Owls.

And is Hubiak pro-secrets?

"No, I'm not," she says with a self-conscious laugh. "I'm trying to learn how to hold more secrets, actually. Not that I necessarily spill other people's secrets, but I don't hold my own very well. They come out pretty easily."

Smuin Ballet: Helen Pickett's 'Petal'

Smuin Ballet: Helen Pickett's 'Petal':

"Mostly breathe, do not punch it," instructs choreographer Helen Pickett from the front of Smuin Ballet's studios, "Listen to the music, do not punch it."

Pickett is in San Francisco rehearsing her ballet "Petal" for the company's spring season, which starts a two-week run this weekend at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts before touring to Mountain View, Walnut Creek and Carmel.

With a wide smile, she admits to a caffeine-fueled energy as she settles back to watch the dancers launch into her high-octane yet sensual choreography. No delicate hothouse blooms here - "Petal" seems instead to be a barely contained riot of wildflowers.

The vivacious dance maker created "Petal" in 2008 for the Aspen/Santa Fe Ballet, and it's been staged for Atlanta Ballet, where she is resident choreographer. The debut with Smuin Ballet represents a homecoming for Pickett, who lived in San Francisco as a teenager and attended Lowell High School while studying at the San Francisco Ballet School.

While there in 1986, the young dancer met William Forsythe, a choreographer whose lasting influence is detectable in her style. She recalls watching him rehearse the company as he created his ballet "New Sleep."

"After a week of me sitting in the doorway like a 5-year old kid - and this is so Bill - he said, 'You've been watching all this time, why don't you come in and try some things?' " says Pickett, who later asked him if she could audition for the Frankfurt Ballet and joined the company at 19.

"It sounds like a fairy tale, but bottom line is that I asked him," she says pragmatically. "You look at people's lives and they seem charmed, but you are responsible for your success. As Louis Pasteur says, fortune favors the prepared mind."

After several years with Frankfurt Ballet, Pickett left dance to work with the Wooster Group theatrical troupe. She pursued acting for several years, while also teaching Forsythe improvisation techniques, when a chance opportunity from Boston Ballet drew her into choreographing in 2006.

Since then, the lively "Petal" has become one of her best-known works. Pickett says it was inspired by the vibrant color and softness of a Gerber daisy.

"All human beings have these senses, and they connect us," says Pickett, who wrote her master's thesis on proprioception, a word that comes up in her rehearsals. "Intimacy is such an important part of a human life - without it, we wither. So how do we break that fourth wall and connect to the audience more than just visually? Let's celebrate this burst of color, this sound, this touch."

Balanchine and Beyond review: Diablo Ballet

'Balanchine and Beyond' review:

Short and sweet were the bywords for Diablo Ballet's "Balanchine and Beyond" program, which opened in Walnut Creek on Friday night.

The company has in recent seasons developed a workable template for smaller-scale stagings with an informal "Inside the Dancer's Studio" performance series at the Shadelands Arts Center. The nearly hour-long program is a little more involved than a studio showing, but less grand than a theatrical show. The milieu feels more economical, but also more convivial, and clever lighting by Jack Carpenter lent the proceedings a coolly elegant atmosphere.

The evening got off to a rousing start with Robert Dekkers and Hiromi Yamazaki in the pas de deux from George Balanchine's "Stars and Stripes." Dekkers and Yamazaki offer a clean, unmannered approach to the steps, but also winsome sweetness in the interplay between El Capitan and his Liberty Belle. Dekkers finds a crystal-clear musicality in the John Philip Sousa marches, while Yamazaki's jumps and beats are bright and cheerful.

The best part is that all that is delivered enthusiastically and yet without a trace of irony, which is a credit to the meticulous and thoughtful coaching by Christopher Stowell, who staged the duet along with Artistic Director Lauren Jonas.

The "Beyond" part of the program included "From Another Time," a contemporary premiere from former Diablo Ballet dancer Tina Kay Bohnstedt, set to an original score by East Bay native Justin Levitt, who also accompanied the dancers on piano. Shifting moods, from tender to unsettled, colored the enigmatic relationships between the two women and three men. David Fonnegra and Jennier Friel Dille were particularly absorbing in their duet, while Edward Stegge was nostalgic rather than lonely as an odd man out among couples.

Dekkers returned, this time with Mayo Sugano in a pas de deux from "They've Lost Their Footing," a rumbustious company staple created by KT Nelson in 1999.

"See Saw," the final piece of the evening, was choreographed by Dekkers, his third work for the company. Dekkers revealed that he once played cello and chose as his inspiration the first movement from Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, performed live by Phyllis Kamrin, Amy Brodo and Ian Scarfe.

"See Saw" is more mature than the name suggests, and Dekkers' style here was formally balletic from the waist down, with wildly angular contemporary shapes and impulses from the waist up. Pleasing patterns mark the arrangements for the four women and three men, although the crowded spacing on the limited Shadelands stage occasionally looked muddy. Rosselyn Ramirez was eye-catching in heartfelt duets and solos that spoke of innocence and yearning in a succinct and compact work that never outstayed its welcome.

Company C leaps boldly into spring works

Dennis Nahat's "Ontogeny." Photo: Kathryn Rummel 

Company C leaps boldly into spring works:

The dancers of Charles Anderson's Company C have an appealing, gutsy way about them, and whether the choreography is lightweight or more serious-minded, the dancing onstage was audacious during the opening of the company's spring program on Thursday at San Francisco's Z Space.

There was plenty of opportunity to show off nervy attack in Dennis Nahat's "Ontogeny," made for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1970. A constantly shifting and evolving biology unfolds in four movements, set to the frenetic music of Karel Husa. The nine dancers look responsive and alert as they fly through the air in startling lifts and twine limbs into pretzels evoking primordial organisms that meld and test each other in duets and small knotty trios.

Jacqueline McConnell, supported and manipulated by Bobby Briscoe, Connolly Strombeck and Calvin Thomas Jr., was attractively brash, if less refined in the opening movements. Later sections led by Tian Tan, with Edilsa Armendariz, Chantelle Pianetta, Daniella Zlatarev and David Van Ligon, were more subdued and sculptural.

A scientific flavor tinged the evening, which opened with Carl Flink and John Bohannon's "A Modest Proposal." If this amusing novelty piece - with narrator Ryan Drummond in headset microphone delivering an engaging monologue as the dancers organized themselves illustratively behind him - felt like a TED talk, probably because that's exactly how Drummond conceived it in 2011.

The affable Bohannon's modest proposal asks why not replace the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation with dancers demonstrating complex scientific concepts - an idea he's promoted with a Dance Your Ph.D. competition.

"A Modest Proposal" is certainly entertaining, but one can't help noticing a few things. First, despite the elegant visual representation, did anyone actually learn and retain what he said about lasers and the production of slow light or the biology of proteins in moving cell walls? Second, rather than feeling like equal conversant partners to a scientist, here the dancers look like voiceless equipment. They form artistic photons or collapsing proteins, convenient "furniture" for Drummond to sit on or amusing transport drones to move him from place to place during his monologue. But where is the part where science learns from dance? Let's take this intriguing idea and push it further.

The other premiere of the program was Van Ligon's "Natoma," set to music by Zoe Keating. There are some inventive ideas in this more formally ballet work, led by Strombeck and Armendariz, although the connective tissue between such moments was less compelling, and crisper and more distinct execution would have helped focus matters.

Then too, choreographic intention was sometimes indistinguishable from happy accident. A trio of women each placed a foot delicately in front of the other on pointe and rock back and forth gently - but was the rocking purposeful, or only the quivering result of a loss of balance?

Also on the program was director Anderson's hyperbolic "Bolero," as well as his duet "For Your Eyes Only" - a last-minute addition to the program, which he says was created for a performance for the hearing impaired. Danced in silence, the duet for Pianetta and Briscoe had greater focus and impact than did the exaggerated "Bolero."

'Scooby-Doo Live! Musical Mysteries'

Photo: Kelly Phillips

'Scooby-Doo Live! Musical Mysteries':

On Sunday, the answer to the famous question "Scooby-Doo, where are you?" will be "at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland," where fans young and old can see a live musical version of the enormously popular cartoon.

It's been 44 years since the lovable dog with the penchant for mysteries - and his teenage pals Shaggy, Fred, Daphne and Velma - piled into the Mystery Machine and chugged onto televisions in Hanna-Barbera's family-friendly TV show. With reruns capturing new audiences hungry for Scooby snacks, the Australian creative team of writer and director Theresa Borg, composer Craig Bryant and choreographer Katie Ditchburn deemed this the right moment to launch "Scooby-Doo Live! Musical Mysteries," a live children's musical that has been enjoying success in Australia for two years.

"The old episodes still have a huge appeal across generations, and now there are new films and new series," says Borg, of Melbourne, in a phone conversation. "We thought it was perfect, it's such a fabulous family brand and one that the whole family - grandparents, parents, kids - can enjoy."

She continues: "I love the teenagers. They're such nice, wholesome characters, you'd be proud to have those kids in your family. I have three children, and I'd have no objections to them having friendships with the kids in that gang. The girls are great role models - they're straightforward and intelligent."

Borg calls "Scooby Doo Live!" a bite-size tribute to American musical theater, a kids' show that takes the music from the popular television cartoon and gives it a '60s jukebox slant. Children's theater has become a specialty for Borg, who produced the show with her husband, Anton Berezin, through their company, Life Like Touring.

Wherever the tour takes the show, she explains, they take advantage of the local setting. For Sunday's performance, for instance, the ghost-tracking mystery at the heart of the musical will actually be set in the Paramount and take advantage of the surroundings to introduce kids to a little old-time theater and vaudeville as well.

And about that endearing dog? Borg says, just as in the cartoon, Scooby always winds up front and center, even singing and dancing.

"That's who the kids come to see," she says. "People will recognize enjoy seeing all the things about TV show they know and love, plus this show is very interactive. We invite children to help solve the mystery along with the gang and keep busy looking out for the ghost. They scream when they see it and let Scooby and his friends know."

"He's got a special place in many people's hearts," she adds.

Hope Mohr Dance: 'Failure of the Sign'

Katharine Hawthorne, Tegan Schwab, Roche Janken of
Hope Mohr Dance in Hope Mohr's
"Failure of the Sign is the Sign." Photo: Margo Moritz.

Hope Mohr Dance: 'Failure of the Sign':

A fascination with the relationship between language and movement was the springboard for Hope Mohr's latest dance work, "Failure of the Sign Is the Sign," which debuts at ODC Theater this weekend on a program that the 6-year-old Hope Mohr Dance company will share with New York-based choreographer Susan Rethorst.

"I've always been interested in brain and body in conversation or in antagonism," says Mohr, who is an artist-in-residence at ODC Theater. "I'm a dancer, but I'm also a writer. My experience of being a writer and of language is very cerebral, and my experience of being a dancer is very somatic; so I was interested in how those two things collide. For this piece, I wanted to focus on the moment when we learn to speak, which often happens around the age of 1, and investigate that experience of funneling sensation into speech as an archetypal transition into selfhood, a laying down of the foundation for who we are."

Mohr, who has two young children, was attracted by the notion that the moment of learning to speak might also represent a separation from one's mother, the start of a journey into individuality with the inevitable sense of loss that arises from that. Thus, improvisation with "sounding" is where she began her process, she says.

"I don't know if I've ever seen a piece with dancers talking where it worked for me," she says matter-of-factly, "So in this, the dancers aren't really singing or speaking, but rather sounding consonants, vowels, getting at the sound of a kinetic experience. We were trying to link the voice to physical experience from a purely sensing place, that is, not going through the cerebral."

In addition to a soundscape composed by musician Caroline Shaw, Mohr's choreography will get a visceral and visual jolt from artist Katrina Rodabaugh's outsize soft sculptures, which resemble giant internal organs - heart, lungs, intestines - and which are strewn throughout the space.

"For me, it felt related to the idea of motherhood," Mohr says, "and to the investigation into an internal emotional landscape. Our relationships to our mothers is a template for intimacy that has reverberations in our lives as adults. So the work has become a lot about the search for connection, and how that might be ruptured in that moment of learning to speak."

"It's my hope that this piece will offer vivid, compelling imagery that resonates with your own emotional territory. It's a very personal piece," says Mohr.