KQED's Spark: Profile of Delroy Lindo

Charismatic, versatile and eloquently formidable, the Delroy Lindo that most audiences know is a dynamic force on both stage and screen. Whether playing manic West Indian Harlem numbers-runner Archie in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" or sympathetic jazz musician and father Woody Carmichael in "Crooklyn," Lindo's sensitivity and ability to uncover what makes people tick has long been admired. A prolific actor, Lindo has been in more than 45 films and television shows as well as dozens of stage productions...

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KQED Spark: Benjamin Levy

With a body of work noted for its pulsing athleticism and intelligent composition, Benjamin Levy has become one of the Bay Area's most sought-after choreographers, creating a style marked by personal inspiration distilled into pure movement.

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KQED Profile: Ballet Afsaneh

"Whether in a major theater, a cultural festival, museum or middle school, we are presenting this work, seeking to remind audiences and ourselves, that there is still beauty in this world that sometimes seems to have fallen in love with war."

--Sharlyn Sawyer, Ballet Afsaneh

From Uzbekistan to India, Turkey to Afghanistan, the Ballet Afsaneh Art and Culture Society brings to the stage the vibrant sights and sounds of the ancient route through Asia known as the Silk Road.

A crossroads of trade in ideas as well as goods, the 7000 mile-long Silk Road connected the empires of Byzantium, the Ottomans, of India, Persia and Mongolia with Western Europe for over 2000 years. Combining music, poetry and dance, Ballet Afsaneh's performances offer a richly textured perspective on cultures that originate in modern day Iran, Tajikstan, Uzbekhistan and Afghanistan -- an alternative to the usual news about political upheaval and war in this region.


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KQED Profile: Erika Chong Shuch

"I want to take big questions of life that are the most intimidating and find a way to make them relatable."

--Erika Chong Shuch

Choreographer, director, dancer and teacher, Erika Chong Shuch crosses over boundaries in her works, which meld together theater, dance, science, poetry, music, video and mechanics to formulate multidisciplinary works of art-- in the truest sense of the term. Inspired by a wide range of subjects, from cannibalism to extraterrestrial intelligence, Chong Shuch nevertheless puts the focus on the drama of human experiences.

SPARK follows Chong Shuch from the earliest stages of the creative process, as she embarks on One Window, a work that explores our relationship to boundaries and confinement and which was created as part of Intersection for the Arts' year-long Prison Project.

A restless intellect, Chong Shuch dropped out of high school in San Jose at 17, yet still found her way into theater and dance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduating, Chong Shuch danced in Seattle and in Berlin with Alex B Company and Sommer Ulrickson (Wee Dance Company) before returning to California to earn a master of fine arts degree at San Francisco's New College of California, where she also co-founded the multi-disciplinary Experimental Performance Institute.



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KQED Profile: Mark Jackson

From Stanislavsky to the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour --where movement intersects with drama is the primary interest of writer, director and actor Mark Jackson, one of the Bay Area's most exciting and original young playwrights.

A graduate of San Francisco State University's Theater Arts program, Jackson's brand of physical theater integrates the kind of theories of gesture and biomechanics that he studied under Gennadi Bogdanov and at the Saratoga International Theater Institute with a modern sensibility to create dramatic works that update age-old ideas of theater and present them in a fresh light to new audiences.

Jackson first came to widespread critical attention when he founded San Francisco's Art Street Theater in 1995. For Art Street, he created seven new plays in his nine-year stint as the company's artistic director, including I Am Hamlet, for which he won his first Bay Area Critic's Circle Award in 2002. Jackson's reinventions of classic plays, such as R&J and Io, Princess of Argos! drew inspiration from sources as varied as Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, but also honed a flair for perceptive commentary on contemporary society.

For his acclaimed Death of Meyerhold which premiered in 2003 at Berkeley's Shotgun Players, Jackson turned to the work of legendary and revolutionary theater director Vselovod Meyerhold to craft a powerful, and heady mix of dance, commedia, kabuki, and circus.


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KQED Profile: Carlos Baron

A childhood in Chile marked by both the lyricism of Pablo Neruda's poetic legacy and the violence of the Pinochet regime flavors the experiences that poet and playwright Carlos Baron has brought to his writings over decades as an exile from his homeland.

After studying sociology and theater arts at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 70s, Baron returned to briefly to Chile to defend the Salvador Allende government, for which he was imprisoned. Upon returning to the Bay Area, in 1975 he helped to found the La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, a cultural meeting ground for Chilean exiles, where he was the first Cultural Coordinator. As a poet and a professional storyteller, Baron's impassioned work has appeared throughout the world at festivals in Cuba, Chile, and the US.

Multiculturalism and Latino theater remain primary interests for Baron, who was also the theater and dance coordinator for the Mission Cultural Center and founder and first artistic director of San Francisco's Teatro Latino. As a professor of theater arts at San Francisco State University, Baron has not only helped to expand La Raza and multicultural studies at the university, but also directs the University's Teatro Arcoiris, or Rainbow Theater, a multicultural theater workshop.

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KQED Profile: Janice Garrett

Since its founding in 2001, the San Francisco-based Janice Garrett and Dancers has rapidly become one of the most respected small modern dance troupes in the Bay Area. Much of its success derives from the lively, athletic dances of Garrett herself, whose choreography is notable for as much for its craftsmanship as for its dazzling speed, musical clarity and wit.

Garrett came to dance relatively late, at the age of 23, after she had already graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford. She subsequently studied dance at Mills College, and in 1980 moved to New York. It was there that she would join the modern dance company of Dan Wagoner, an alumnus of the Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor companies.

After ten years in New York, Garrett returned to the Bay Area, although she continued to work extensively in Europe, choreographing pieces for the Scottish Dance Theatre, London Contemporary's 4D Performance Group, London Contemporary Dance School and at the School for Modern Dance in Denmark. At the London Contemporary Dance Theater, she collaborated with British director and choreographer Jonathan Lunn on a range of productions and built a reputation for whimsical, kinetic dances.

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KQED Profile: Shuji Ikeda

A native of Okayama, Japan, ceramicist and ikebana artist Shuji Ikeda originally hoped to become a film-maker. After coming to the United States in 1973 to study film at San Francisco State University, and graduating cum laude, however, he was frustrated by the challenges of breaking into the business, and in a serendipitous turn of events, turned to pottery as a means of therapy.

Now renowned for his craftsmanship and innovative methods-- including his unusual woven baskets made of hundreds of delicate strands of clay and his organically elegant dancing pots-- Ikeda has had a carved a unique niche for himself in the ceramics world and his work has been exhibited everywhere from the San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum to Gump's.


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KQED Profile: Ronn Guidi

Passion for the art of dance is perhaps the defining quality of Oakland's Ronn Guidi, director of the Oakland Ballet Academy, and founder of the famous Oakland Ballet.

An ever-energetic mainstay of the East Bay's dance scene, Guidi created the Oakland Ballet in 1965, leading the small regional company to international attention in the 1970s with his canny choices of repertoire. Bolstered by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and ambitious world premieres, like Eugene Loring's The Tender Land --for which composer Aaron Copland himself conducted the opening night -- Guidi's enthusiasm and efforts paved the way for the troupe to become a major force in the dance world as one of the few remaining companies in the world performing the lavish and inventive ballets created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was he who brought living legends such as Leonide Massine, Frederic Franklin and Irina Nijinska to stage authoritative restorations of Boutique Fantasque and Les Biches.


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Theater Review : Emperor Norton, The Musical

The spirit of rugged individualism is the very lifeblood of San Francisco. It's the kind of place where Starchild can run for County Supervisor, where we not only put a measure to impeach President Bush on the ballot, but dozens of people will go out to Ocean Beach in mid-winter and lie upon the sand to spell the words "IMPEACH" with their bodies. I like to think of it as a city of the grand flourish.

And ever has the City by the Bay been this way, it appears. The city's slogan, "Find Yourself Here," was never more applicable than to the epic figure of San Franciscan Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States, who ruled the nation from his seat of power, a little place on Commercial Street between Kearny and Montgomery. And for those not familiar with the man who was once one of San Francisco's most beloved figures, Kim Ohanneson and Marty Axelrod have devised a rough-hewn tribute to Emperor Norton I, Emperor Norton, The Musical, which runs through April 1 at the tiny Shelton Theater off Union Square.

The production, which had its origins as a cabaret act is undeniably cheesy -- and long -- with a handmade look about it. Painted flats of scenes from the Hyde Street pier or Tadich Grill simply lean against the back wall and the 12-member cast barely fits on the postage stamp sized stage. With little room backstage at the Shelton, the divan that you see in the lobby at intermission makes its way onto stage in the second act. There's a whiff of the sense that this show had roots in a group of pals goofing off and yet there's also something good humored and heartwarming about what is obviously a labor-of-love project. The folksy numbers are cute and despite -- no, perhaps because of -- its amateur moments, it somehow fits the quirky DIY story of the Emp, as he was more familiarly known.

Read more on KQED.org's Arts & Culture site.

Theater Review: "Homeland"

"Holy smokes, it's the story of my life," I thought during the first act of Homeland, Jay Kuo's terrific new musical, which has been workshopped at the New Conservatory Theatre and arrived as a semi-staged production at the Magic Theatre over the weekend.

A followup to his successful romantic comedy, Insignificant Others, Homeland finds Kuo again mining the local landscape and coming up with a gem of a bittersweet tale about love blooming in the rarefied world of San Francisco.

It's a curious thing that happens quite often in the Bay Area -- a place where I'm startled if I run into a bona fide, born-and-bred local. No matter where we're from though, somehow we all wind up discovering "families" for ourselves. You know the family I mean -- the one with your crazy left wing activist friend, the struggling artist you met in a coffee shop, your wild and crazy, newly-freed-from-the-closet pal, and various interesting and probably left-leaning others. Kuo has built Homeland around just such an extended family, in this case, a loosely-banded guerilla street theater group. As a love story and a tale of the divisive politics of this current generation, it will no doubt connect to audiences at many levels, but for the Bay Area crowd, it will be doubly poignant, because it tells the stories of the people that you and I know -- maybe even the stories of our own lives. And as with all the best musicals, the circumstances in which our heroes find themselves might be farcical, even far-fetched, but it doesn't matter at all, because the characters ring true.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

Theater Review : "The Forest War"

When art speaks truth, it hurts, and it never hurts so much as in Mark Jackson's stylish new play The Forest War, which runs through January 14 at the Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

Written and directed with imaginative flair, The Forest War comes in the form of Japanese Kabuki theater, from the choreographed stylized stage movements and tableaux, to Valera Coble's beautifully-textured elaborate costumes, to Jackson's formalized, rhythmic dialogue. It's a classic jidai geki, or Japanese period drama, addressing themes that are timeless and in this case, all too familiar.

The Forest War of the title has been prosecuted by the aging Grand Lord Karug, played by Drew Anderson, and after a decade, the long battles have decimated the country and demoralized its citizens. In theory, the war has been won, and Karug decides to pass the leadership to the peaceable Lord Kulan (Cassidy Brown) instead of his belligerent son, Lord Kain (Kevin Clarke). Thus the stage is set for your classic father/son power struggle. Read into it what you will.

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Music Review : John Santos and the Machete Ensemble: The Farewell Concert

It kinda started in your ribs -- just a little tic from side to side that happened reflexively as the Machete Ensemble sent the first notes into the air. Pretty soon it moved into the tip of your shoulders -- just a bit of a bounce. And that set your head nodding in time with the beat. Before long, you found yourself swinging and swaying in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater's groovy reclining seats, which luckily left a lot of leg room in front, in case you wanted to ... you know ... get up and dance. Which most people did.

It seemed like everyone who was ever part of the San Francisco Latin jazz scene was on hand to bid adios to John Santos' Machete Ensemble, which disbanded in a blowout concert on November 12 after twenty-one years of turning up the Afro-Latin heat in the Bay Area.

All night long, a parade of former Machete members as well as friends and family came up on the stage to jam with the core group of Macheteros -- Orlando Torriente on vocals, John Calloway on flute, Ron Stallings and Melecio Magdaluyo on saxes and clarinet, Wayne Wallace on trombone, Murray Low on piano, David Belove on bass, Paul van Wageningen on drums and Orestes Vilató on just about everything else. And sitting in the middle of it all was the genial, chatty Santos himself, on the congas emblazoned with red, white and blue "Impeach Bush" stickers -- as charming as ever, although, as he admitted, talking a little faster than usual so as to fit in all the fun in a brief amount of time.

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Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Kamikaze Ground Crew

For their first performance back in the Bay Area in 13 years, the Kamikaze Ground Crew got a warm welcome at the Great American Music Hall at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. After all, it's really a hometown crowd for the seven-member band, most of whom still have local ties, even though the crew is largely based now in New York.

It's a loose knit group of talent -- all of them involved in lots of other projects. Co-founders Doug Wieselman and Gina Leishman both write music for dance and theater -- the latter most recently composing scores for Berkeley Rep's Mother Courage and Cal Shakes' As You Like It -- and trumpet-player Steven Bernstein and Kenny Wolleson head their own rollicking band Sex Mob. In fact, a majority of the compositions that the KGC unveiled on Wednesday night, came courtesy of Leishman and Bernstein, but those looking for the exuberance of Sex Mob, or the witty, light touch of Leishman's Shakespearean songs like "It was a lover and his lass" would have been confused at the start.

What seems clear is that in the years since KGC's start as the pit band for the Flying Karamazov Brothers, a lot of experimenting has been going on. So it was that some of what we got that night was esoteric, some of it impenetrable, while other pieces were lively and even antic. All put together, though, it made for a program that suffered from uneven pacing.

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Music Review : SF Jazz Festival: Arturo Sandoval

What is it about los Cubanos? Artists like Los Carpinteros craft incredibly sculpted social critiques. Dancers such as Carlos Acosta, the Carreno clan and the Feijoo sisters have stormed the ballet world. And their musicians -- their musicians always rock the house.

The audience in the Herbst Theater was primed from the outset when trumpet master Arturo Sandoval took the spotlight at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. And if there was any disappointment that evening, it was that the show had to end some time.

Backed by a tight-knit quintet that included Ed Calle on sax, Javier Concepcion on keyboards, Armando Gola on bass, Tomasito Cruz on congas and Alexis Arce on drums, Sandoval hit the stage at a blistering pace, dispatching double digit high notes on his trumpet solos with almost irritating ease.

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Theater Review: Stew's "Passing Strange"

"Stew" is a great moniker for the rock musician-poet-filmmaker, all-around-performing-artist, whose Passing Strange made its bow last week at Berkeley Rep. He's a rich mix of flavors, a bubbling cauldron of ideas and talents, and his latest effort, which takes an autobiographical look at his development as a young black musician, is a kind of spicy recipe based on his life. Some of the ingredients might seem improbable, but the final dish is worth savoring.

Passing Strange takes its title from Othello's description of how he won Desdemona's heart. But as with much of the wordsmithy in this play -- which Stew and partner Heidi Rodewald first developed at the Sundance Institute and which will move on to New York's Public Theater after the Berkeley run -- "passing" is meant to encompass numerous other meanings: passing for white or passing for black, being passed up, passing through, passing on. The word itself has a sense of restlessness that is reflected in the rhythm of the play as well as the music, as it follows Stew's youthful escapades -- a Baptist upbringing in LA and coming of age amidst rarefied surroundings in Amsterdam and Berlin.

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Theater Review : Theatre of Yugen: Noh Pressure Cooker

First let me say that I'm all for the trying. The Noh Pressure Cooker Festival, which ran over three weekends in October, is meant to offer a range of new works by the NOHSpace's resident troupe Theatre of Yugen. Now in its 28th season, this active group of performers studies a variety of techniques centered around the venerable 600-year old Japanese theater form, but their focus in the Pressure Cooker Festival is new work and contemporary stories. Anyone wandering in looking for a classical Noh version of The Tale of Genji is in the wrong place.

If the air of experimentation is admirable, however, the execution still leaves something of a slapdash feeling. Enthusiasm for their work obviously informed the three pieces on display on the second weekend, but the overall impression was that these were works-in-progress that, for the most part, were just not thoroughly thought out.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

Dance Review: David Dorfman's "underground"

"Would you overthrow your government? If not, why not?" Spoken quite matter-of-factly on the Yerba Buena Center stage, the question hangs in the air for a moment, as we all consider what it would mean.

In perhaps his most provocative work to date, David Dorfman turns a none-too-oblique gaze at contemporary apathy in underground, a multi-textured work that had its Bay Area premiere on September 21. His examination of activism and terrorism comes wrapped in a reminiscence of the "Days of Rage," when the '60s militant group, The Weathermen -- a splinter of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society -- waged a guerilla war against the U.S. government in protest of the Vietnam War. Bombings, riots -- they even busted Timothy Leary out of jail and got him to Algeria -- and yet, as revolutions go, the Weathermen's efforts to shake Americans from complacency through violence brought home to our doorsteps largely fizzled.

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Theater Review: Mother Courage/As You Like It

What a difference good sound and lighting can make to a show. It may sound like the blinking obvious, but when you see the good stuff, you realize how much it elevates a production.

Take the recent shows from Berkeley Rep and Cal Shakes -- Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Shakespeare's As You Like It, respectively -- both of which present smooth, professional results from what can be self-consciously theatrical material. Minor quibbles aside, both shows leave you in a thoroughly satisfied mood and a huge part of that is the effect of the setting, the lights and the music.

Interestingly enough, the talented Alexander V. Nichols designed the lighting for both shows, and for both, Gina Leishman created original scores. Well, gifted professionals are always in demand, especially when their work makes you look so good.

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Dance Review : ChoreoFest

On bright sunny afternoons, the Yerba Buena Gardens looks like the storybook picture of an urban oasis, with the waterfall rolling down on one side, sunbathers dotting the sloping hills and kids playing soccer on the green lawn. Perhaps it's not the most ideal setting for a dance performance. It's true that low flying pigeons don't usually buzz the audience in the nearby Center for the Arts Theater, nor is the music usually obscured by a passing Harley. But there's something pleasantly escapist about slipping out for lunch hour and seeing a free show, and when the show turns out to be well-conceived and satisfying, well, you feel as though you've gotten away with something.

The Yerba Buena Gardens Festival puts on free midday concerts and events through October, and this year for a week in August, the festival turned its focus on local choreographers and dancers, culminating in an hour-long program brought together by curator Brechin Flournoy and directed by Laura Elaine Ellis. Festivals that put their artists in a lineup and send them out one after the other are a dime a dozen, but for the Choreofest program Ellis eschewed such usual conventions and created instead a performance that blended and overlapped performers in a cohesive and engaging way. Just big enough to suit the outdoor expanse, and yet intimate enough to suit the eclectic style of the artists.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.