El Wah Movement performs at Ethnic Dance Festival

Photo: RJ Muna

El Wah Movement performs at Ethnic Dance Festival:

In Haiti, the mystical Rada spirits protect and provoke justice, counter dishonesty and inspire vitality and energy. It is these lwas, or spirits, that El Wah Movement Dance Theatre invokes in its dance, "Rele Tout Bon Moun Yo (Call All the Good People)," performed this weekend by the troupe - one of 10 dance groups that take the stage during the final week of the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Lam Research Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The news from Haiti is so frequently grim - earthquakes, political unrest, epidemics - that oftentimes the beauty of the island is forgotten. A score of dancers and musicians, including Haitian dance icon Blanche Brown, bring to life the color, ritual and pulse-pounding drumming in an adapted version of a traditional Haitian prayer.

Colette Eloi, a Haitian native who directs the 8-year-old company, choreographed "Rele Tout Bon Moun Yo," and also sings during the performance, dedicated the piece to the people of the world who came to Haiti's aid after the earthquake of 2010, which devastated the island nation, and from which the country is still recovering.

On Saturday night before the performance, Eloi and Brown will be joined by Deborah Vaughan and Latanya D. Tigner of Dimensions Dance Theater, who also perform at the festival this weekend, on a special panel moderated by Ethnic Dance Festival co-director CK Ladzekpo that will discuss the history and future of dance from the African diaspora.

Micaya's annual show, 'Mission in the Mix'

Stavroula Arabatgis of SoulForce Dance. Photo: Blake Tucker

Micaya's annual show, 'Mission in the Mix':

For decades, the irrepressible Micaya has championed hip-hop, and this weekend her annual "Mission in the Mix" show at Dance Mission Theater brings a diversity of Bay Area dance to the stage.

In addition to four new pieces for her own SoulForce Dance Company, which appears every night, "Mission in the Mix" will also play host to a dozen other local dance and music performers, including Ava Apple's salsa dancers Latin Symbolics, the Eight-Count hip-hop dance ministry team from Great Exchange Covenant Church in Sunnyvale, and Platinum, an all-women troupe from the NewStyle Motherlode studios.

"Platinum is a group of older women, moms of kids studying hip-hop who saw what they were doing and said, 'I want to do that,' " says Micaya. "So they put their own company together, and they are just so fierce."

Highlighting the local dance community, as well as showcasing her own dancers, says Micaya, is what drives her program. SoulForce Dance Company will dance side-by-side with dancers from Micaya's student workshops, whose members range in age from 13 to 74 years old.

"I love Mission in the Mix," says Micaya, "As much as I love the hip-hop festival, this is really my heart and soul. It's about my own DNA and creativity and playing my own dancers, doing what inspires me and nurturing students and the community. I feed off of that, I love it."

Levydance at 10 - joyful risky business

Photo: Brant Ward

Levydance at 10 - joyful risky business:

The audience caught its breath, because it surely looked like the handsome young man would dive face first off the end of the stage and onto the pavement below. But as dancer Paul Vickers charged headlong for the edge, Scott Marlowe reached him barely in time to pull him back from the brink with exquisitely choreographed certainty.

Risk and reward. That's what sets Levydance, which celebrates the culmination of its 10th season with performances in SoMa this weekend, apart from the garden-variety dance company. And according to company founder and choreographer Benjamin Levy, it's also what keeps dance making interesting for him.

"Levydance is constantly reinventing itself, asking why we exist," Levy said. "Why do I make art in a theater, put lights on it and ask people to show up? Why do we do things the way we do and can we shake them up? I think it's time creatively and businesswise for innovation in the world of dance, and I'm really excited to see what happens if we risk creating new models."

A California native, Levy came to dance as a teenager, but really fell in love with the art as an undergrad at UC Berkeley, where Levydance got its start in 2002 as a group of friends - Lily Dwyer, Cambria Garell, Christopher Hojin Lee and Pearl Wang - who, as he puts it, "wanted to make art together."

Though the dancers from that first core company have moved on, Levydance's current four-member roster, which includes Marlowe - also the company's artistic associate - Yu Kondo Reigen, Vickers, and Sarah Dionne Woods, is no less passionate about the collaborative creative process Levy has developed over the years.

The atmosphere at Thursday night's open-air performance, on an uncharacteristically clement San Francisco evening, was typically both relaxed and meticulously calculated - part family fiesta with guests sipping wine and happily munching on tacos and part retrospective. Levy has said that he and his four-dancer company plan interactions with their enthusiastic following by remembering that the every audience member is a welcome guest. It is perhaps why their best performances feel like a homecoming.

The first word that comes to mind when envisioning the company's body of work is "rambunctious." Perhaps the next word would be "smart." I first encountered Levydance at the Summerfest dance festival in 2004, where they performed "Holding Pattern," one of four revivals on this program.

At the time, although not flawless in execution, it was both unusual and fascinating. Energy blended easily with polish in imaginative cascades. On Thursday night, that bold movement was no less effective and eye-catching than nine years ago.

If anything, Reigen, Vickers and Woods gave the sinuous transitions, the tumbling of one dancer over another only to freeze suspended in the air, a sharper, meatier subtext, taming wild energy with disciplined execution.

Indeed, a signature of Levy's work is its rational exuberance and vigor. For the performances on Heron Street, where the company has its home studio, catwalks interconnect a larger stage with two smaller platforms, girdling a small mosh pit of viewers and lending potential velocity to the dancing.

Levy's aim is to bring the dance as close to the audience as possible without scaring anyone and certainly his performers are more intimate with the audience now than ever. In those early days, the small group of dancers was excellent, yet remote.

By contrast, Marlowe's turn in the 2005 solo "if this small space" was fearlessly accessible and vulnerable in its proximity to the viewer. That willingness to take risks whether physical or emotional, whether it's a big vision for the company's future or diving off the end of a stage, is what defines Levydance.

"I'm not interested in making dance just to make dance - in making pretty things and having people clap at them. Really it's about this," Levy says, waving a hand between the two of us.

"For me, the audience is an integral part of fulfilling the creative act. And it can be a negative experience - it's not like you have to love my work and get what my mission is. We just need to acknowledge that you're watching and that your watching gives us an energy that changes the way we dance."

Like many choreographers, Levy is driven by the desire to innovate and to expand into a community organization, but truth be told, it's not that what he does has never been seen before. The company plans a collaboration later this year with the Exploratorium, a performance installation called "Comfort Zone," and last year Levydance launched an AMP residency series hosting New York choreographer Sidra Bell.

Though the program was meant to shake up the artistic process, it was more a nod to the new realities of cross-presenting, than groundbreaking artistically.

Still, you can't blame a guy for trying, especially when his approach is thoughtful, yet bold and undeterred by fear of failure.

Amara Tabor-Smith: SF a backdrop to tribute

Ed Mock with Cecilia Marta, Amara Tabor-Smith and Pearl Ubungen.Photo by Bonnie Kamin

Amara Tabor-Smith: SF a backdrop to tribute:

How do you call up the ghost of a larger-than-life dance artist whose work inspired a generation? Choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith conducts a moving seance in "He Moved Swiftly But Gently Down the Not Too Crowded Street: Ed Mock and Other True Tales in a City That Once Was...," Saturday and next weekend in locations from Civic Center to the Mission District.

Presented by Dancers Group's Onsite series, which supports free large-scale, site-specific performances, the five-hour long show (you can join for as little or as much as you want - complete schedule and locations are at www.dancersgroup.org) takes the audience from 32 Page St., where the choreographer and teacher Ed Mock once had a studio, to the Valencia Street site of his favorite barbecue joint, to the ODC Theater. It's a bold undertaking that Tabor-Smith hopes will capture the spirit of the man.

"He was a magical person, a big spirit, and at the same time really approachable," says Tabor-Smith, who danced with his company, Ed Mock Dancers. "He didn't call himself a political choreographer, but he was part of that movement of dance in the '70s and '80s that was about truth-telling, experimentation and being bold - about the excitement that comes from risking failure and enjoying that."

"We are conjuring the spirit of Ed," she says with a smile, "and in the spirit of Ed, anything could happen."

Push Dance Company: 'Unlock'

Photo: Smeeta Manhati

Push Dance Company: 'Unlock':

Love isn't like a grindstone that does the same thing to everything it touches, declares Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"; love is like the sea - a moving thing that takes its shape from the shore it meets, and that's different with every shore.

The resonance that choreographer Raissa Simpson found in Hurston's classic 1937 novel inspired her latest work, "Unlock," which the 8-year-old Push Dance Company premieres at the Zaccho SF dance space this weekend, on a program that showcases 10 years of Simpson's work.

"I first read this novel on a hot summer day in New York, and I couldn't let go of it," says Simpson. "I could never forget the story of this woman who was searching for her authentic self through other people and through love in the hope that she would be happy, but finally at end of the book, she was alone."

"Unlock" finds Simpson collaborating with set designer Benito Steen and composer and cellist Unwoman (Erica Mulkey). In an effort to make Hurston's story more current, she has set her version in Bayview-Hunters Point.

"I wanted to explore love in this community," she says. "For me, this book was the first time I had read a story where African Americans were in love. Usually you read stories about African Americans struggling and in poverty, and all those things are true, but this book seemed like a guide to love.

"I work with the Third Street Youth Center and Clinic with children that are at risk, and there's something about working with teenagers and seeing them in love that made me think of this book again."

Like Hurston's protagonist, Janie, Simpson is of mixed ethnic background. Her mother is Filipina, while her African American father was born in Cleveland. As a child, she remembers encountering racism in Texas before the family finally settled in San Jose, and the migratory threads of Janie's life as she attempted to unlock the secret to finding herself also rang true to Simpson.

"As a child, going from an all-African American neighborhood to white suburban neighborhood in the South was difficult," she says. "I have memories of a friend's mom who made her tell me I couldn't play with her anymore. Those experiences as a child are part of the social structures that I look at now as an artist. My work has a lot of social commentary because I find that my life is a social commentary."