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| Photo: Brant Ward |
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.
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