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."