Lyon Opera Ballet spotlights three women choreographers

Lyon Opera Ballet
“Die Grosse Fuge,” “Fantasie,” “Groosland”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
October 27-28,2006

When the Lyon Opera Ballet -- which Cal Performances presented at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall last Friday and Saturday nights -- gets on stage, there’s one thing you can be sure of, there will be athletic inventions of mind-bending capriciousness in the offing.

The works that this attractive troupe performs tend to be highly energetic and physically alert on the most obvious level, but what’s most appealing is the satisfying meatiness underneath. Their triple bill this time – featuring the works of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz and Maguy Marin – was not a program of esoteric intellectual works, but it was smart and even provocative on a number of levels.

The Belgian De Keersmaeker’s “Die Grosse Fuge,” for instance, made a galvanizing vehicle for the company.

On a bare stage under the hot exposed glare of a grid of lamps, seven men and one woman play out a high velocity contest in Ann Weckx’s dark business suits. Spiralling through the air with limbs flung wide or in contracted balls, they tumble and roll to the ground with an almost intoxicated zest to the music of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” as recorded by the Quatuor Debussy.

Although there’s a story inherent in the simple fact of putting a single woman -- Caelyn Knight -- amidst the men, De Keersmaeker doesn’t make too much of the situation, rather illustrating the fugue form in the complex patterns of choreography as dancers pick up phrases of movement and then pass it to others in rolling canons. Knight devours space as hungrily as the men, rolls up her sleeves with them and takes her tumbles to the floor with the same aggressive confidence that marks all of the Lyon dancers. But doubtless De Keersmaeker’s objective is to make you notice the very fact that you’ve noticed that there is only one woman.

Sasha Waltz’s hazy, dreamlike “Fantasie,” which followed on the program, covers different and even more ambiguous ground. Created for the Lyon Opera Ballet and premiered earlier this year “Fantasie” – danced first in silence, then to a recording of the Schubert Fantasie in F minor – effects some arresting scenes. At the start Bruno Cezario and Fernando Carrion Caballero confront each other in an unsettlingly slow encounter in which Caballero’s arm seem to pass through Cezario’s body. Yu Otagaki tightrope walks into Caballero’s orbit for a duet of garishly twisted limbs and other dancers join them, swaying in a knot in the corner.

In Martin Hauk’s shadowy darkness, some of the imagery is compelling. Still, one can’t help feeling that the work lacks development and is over-long. For a lengthy section of the ballet, the dancers seem to take a childlike pleasure in flitting about the stage with “airplane arms” but the story seems lost until we see Otagaki melting away from Caballero. He appears stricken and all the dancers vanish leaving Cezario alone onstage, as if within a fading dream.

And then you have to wonder Maguy Marin’s dreams look like. Her diverting 1989 ballet “Groosland” puts 20 dancers onstage, looking uncharacteristically zaftig in Montserrat Casanova’s padded “fat suits” featuring prim blue and chartreuse outfits. They mince and teeter through complicated little folk dances with a nimble charm that elicited not a few chuckles from the audience and the Rubenesque dancers are rather touching in their obvious delight in dancing to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. These characters are obviously far more comfortable with their illusory flesh than you or I might be with a real body, and when the dancers strip off the blue and chartreuse to romp “naked,” we’re reminded that this or any other body is just a vehicle, and that the real grace comes from the dancer within.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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: Gamelan Sekar Jaya's "Kali Yuga"

Gamelan Sekar Jaya
“Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
October 14, 2006

A fantastical battle between gods crosses paths with the realism of a modern world out of balance in Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s spell-binding drama “Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos,” which premiered in its entirety at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Saturday night.

Co-sponsored by Cal Performances and World Arts West, this lavish, multi-textured work draws its inspiration from Hindu cosmology in which the last of the four cyclical yugas, or ages of humanity, is called the Kali Yuga, a dark time marked spiritual dissolution, conflict and hypocrisy. Gamelan Sekar Jaya performed excerpts of the evening-length piece at last year’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and it is a such worthy theatrical spectacle that it seems a real pity that there was only one day of performances it.

A collaboration that brings Hindu together with Muslim, American with Balinese, “Kali Yuga” could be taken as a microcosm of a land of diverse contradictions – a paradisical island steeped in Hindu mythologywhere families still give offerings to the gods to protect their rice paddies, and a part of a Muslim nation torn by religious conflict and terrorist violence. Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang -- who also directed the 2001 “Kawit Legong”— this richly appointed production finds the kind of unique flavor of fusion that we’ve come to expect from this American gamelan ensemble.

Founded in 1979, El Cerrito’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya – whose name means “victorious flower orchestra” in Balinese – has become one of the most distinguished groups of its kind in or outside of Bali. Under the musical direction of Indonesian guest artists I Made Arnawa and I Dewa Putu Berata, Sekar Jaya impressively navigates the music composed by Arnawa, along with the troupe’s general manager Wayne Vitale.

The term “gamelan” refers to a set of metal or bamboo instruments, and each gamelan collection is tuned as a unit, with the instruments always remaining together, no matter who the players are. Sekar Jaya is comprised of five smaller gamelan ensembles whose potent combinations of percussion instruments include small metal pots, gongs, drums, flutes, and jegogan made from giant bamboo tubes, among many others. There is a universe implied in the gamelan sounds, which can elicit the sense of consonant order or dissonant chaos with equal ease, and it all adds up to a robust and deeply satisfying layering of sound that fill the ears literally, even as Elaine Buckholtz’s visuals and Jack Carpenter’s lighting fill the eye.

The thirty musicians of Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s ensemble make for an impressive centerpiece, enfolded by a U-shaped ramp along which unfolds the epic battle between Dewi Sri, the Balinese Rice Goddess and Bursasana, a demon who disturbs the order of the universe. Looming overhead is a rough circular hanging woven out of palms highlighted by a palette of light and shifting projections, but the bulk of the action takes place at the front of stage, where divine battles metamorphose into seemingly innocuous jaunts by tourists traveling through Bali or a masked dance turns into a modern rave. It’s a pleasing arrangement which places the musicians in the middle, and sometimes as a part, of the dance drama.

Part mythos and part morality play, “Kali Yuga” unfolds in seven episodes. There are ritualistically paced Balinese dances from the Rice Goddess – an elaborately costumed Tjokorda Isteri Putra Padmini -- and her four acolytes. I Ketut Rina unleashes savage gravelly screeches and raucous laughter as the demon Bursasana, who tempts “Kali Yuga” choreographer I Wayan Dibia, as the Man with Four Faces, while they dance an unsettling series of topeng or masked dances. There’s a nightclubbing rave, a kind of contemporary version of the Balinese warrior’s kecak dance. And as a modern tourist, Oakland rap artist Rashidi Oman-Byrd even throws in a few hiphop moves as he raps the words of Jakarta-based poet Goenawan Mohamed.

Ambitious in scope, “Kali Yuga” gets at a multiplicity of concepts, but underlying it, there is the sense that in a world wracked by violence, nightclub bombings, vice and corruption, there is still the hope of order and consonance rising from the chaos.

If the ending -- a few lines spoken by children -- seems inconclusive and vague, still “Kali Yuga’s” emotional resonance hangs in the air like the reverberant sounding of the gongs.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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.

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

Chitresh Das and Kathak at the Crossroads: Innovation within Tradition

For three days at the end of September, San Francisco played host to one of the biggest gathering of Indian dance gurus in the country. The brainchild of the Bay Area’s resident kathak guru Pandit Chitresh Das, this symposium cum festival brought a roster of kathak experts whose names might not be familiar to the casual dance-goer, but who, in Indian dance circles – represent the legends of this classical form.

The evening performances, held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, were long – running for at least three to three and a half hours – more Indian dance than I had ever seen all put together in my life. But the sum of it made for a fascinating primer on the form, as well as a heartening look at an age-old genre of dance that is undergoing conscious reinvention at the hands of its own preservers.

For many kathak fans, without doubt, the highlight was the appearance on Friday night of the legendary Pandit Birju Maharaj, descendant of the famous Maharaj family whose influence on modern kathak cannot be underestimated. Credited with bringing the element of choreographed theater into the world of kathak, Maharaj was in his own time a modernizer and innovator. Perhaps he still is, if the busy schedule on his website (http://birjumaharaj-kalashram.com) is anything to go by.

True to the Lucknow gharana’s style, (Maharaj is considered this school of kathak’s leading exponent) his invocation to Govinda had an expressively elegant and subtle character. Clad simply in white with a gold and saffron belt, Maharaj gave us a slow burn of twining arms and hands along with the occasional whimsical quirk of a brow.

Is it because of the nature of the dance’s structure, or because of the gurus’ natural pedagogical leanings that each performance became a bit of a lesson? Whatever the reason, for those of us who have had little exposure to the form, it was a welcome part of the performance. It was during this point that I realized that something on the order of 80% of this audience lived and breathed these dauntingly complex rhythms – they clapped along with the musicians easily and were delighted by the challenge of a nine and a half beat metric. I’m lucky if I can discern the difference between ¾ time and 6/8 time, so unraveling the complex rhythms and bols of kathak, learning the tihais had become a little like trying to learn the game of chess simply by watching. I was fine up to a point, and then inevitably someone castled.

Maharaj, though, interjects small nuggets into his performance. “We see that there are different views, different ways,” he says, speaking of the symposium’s focus on the modernization of kathak, “but always, it’s dhaa-dhin-dhin-dhaa,” -- the simplest start to the rhythmic 16 beat cycle that kathak dancers call the “teental.” “The teental is symmetrical,” he continues, “but it always reaches to ‘1,’ to Krishna, to home.”

Maharaj, at 68, is a charming raconteur as well, and probably could have danced an entire evening of stories by himself. In one segment, he does what the jazz musicians call “trading fours” with the tabla player, using the rhythms of his ankle bells and the rolls of the tabla to depict a heroine (bells) being playfully chased through the forest by a hero (the tabla). And a padhant or recitation of rhythms, sketching out various kinds of birds, including a chicken running down the street with her chicks scurrying after her, was both dazzling and amusing.

Sharing the stage that evening with Maharaj was an accomplished group of musicians, including the renowned sarangi player, Pandit Ramesh Mishra.

Notable performances from the other dancers included that of Maharaj’s student Madhumita Roy, who has trained in both the Jaipur and Lucknow gharanas. Her explanation of the tukara as a rhythm that to her feels like a person trying to move forward even as someone else pulls them back from behind emerged compellingly in her composition depicting the childish impulses of Krishna, held back by his sense of duty as a king. A technically brilliant Prashant Shah also startled the audience with unusually secure turns and lightning fast footwork, as did Charlotte Moraga’s whirlwind manege of fast turns around the stage in Chitresh Das’ “Pancha Jati.”

Kathak, especially the Jaipur gharana brand, lends itself to a kind of rock star, virtuoso performance and it’s that side of kathak that comes forward most forcefully in Das’ recent collaboration with tapper Jason Samuels Smith in “India Jazz Suites.” Less a “fusion” per se, and more of a East-shakes-hands-with-West, this showstopper piece -- which features both Das’ Indian musicians as well as the jazz compositions of Marcus Shelby – brought down the house on Saturday night.

It was an evening that started at a high level of energy, with the wild and hot-blooded Rajendra Gangani, and a more delicate, but equally intense performance by Saswati Sen (also a disciple of Birju Maharaj). Sen’s compositions to a time cycle of nine and a half beats – a gift to her from Maharaj – was both seductive and a challenge intellectually. Everywhere in that rhythmically savvy crowd, we were visibly trying to keep up with the beat. In the dark, I could even see Gangani, who slipped into an empty seat after the break, keeping time along with her.

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.

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

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.

Dance: little seismic dance at CounterPULSE

little seismic dance company
CounterPULSE
August 25-27, 2006

The spiffy CounterPULSE space was home to the debut of Katie Faulkner’s little seismic dance company in late August. What a perfect name for this new troupe, which delivered a small-scale, yet ground-shaking performance.

Over the last few years, Faulkner has appeared around the Bay Area, notably with AXIS Dance Company and Randee Paufve. This time, she presented a thoroughly stimulating program of mainly her own works, with an emphasis on varying textures and backgrounds delivered with the utmost care. One could only wish that every evening of dance was produced so well and with such taste.

From the outset, Faulkner’s choreography seemed to take in stride the constraints of the CounterPULSE space. Once a gallery for ICAN, the narrow stage -- which is deeper than it is wide -- has sometimes been a challenge for dance groups, although in this show, the dancers appeared to relish the unusual proportions. In “Fit of the Survivalist,” which opened the program, Janet Collard struggles to walk a long skewed line down the narrow space and the bodies compacting against each other, stacking on top of one another only heightens the sense of self-conscious dysfunctionality.

The canny use of environment and structures is there too in the “Shadow of Matter,” which premiered on this program. An investigation of physical and Newtonian mechanics between five dancers, (Collard, Margaret Cromwell, Rebecca Gilbert, Sonshorée Giles and Renée Waters), this rather lengthy piece was perhaps not as successful as “Survivalist” and yet, the stories of attraction and repulsion that Faulkner constructs between each dancer with their elastic and inelastic collisions had a visual momentum that carried not only from one dancer to the next, but also from one segment of the piece into the next.

In between on the menu of dances, Randee Paufve’s angular “In Exhale,” danced by Rebecca Johnson, was the only piece not created by Faulkner on the program. Johnson’s loose low hip swivels and double-hinging leg and arm swings were nicely counterposed by the almost runic shapes she created, but in the end the abstract piece felt fragmentary, like a movement study that didn’t seem to really go anywhere.

More finished was the clever “Decorum,” which Faulkner created for AXIS last year. A sly portrait of insiders (the gossiping Giles and Faulkner on a Victorian divan) and outsiders (Bonnie Lewkowicz, in her wheelchair in a square of light downstage), “Decorum” is detailed with specific phrases– a push here, a nod there – that repeated inexactly and sometimes off balance, adding up to an overall effect of emotive watchworks that swiftly devolve into chaos.

A filmed piece, “High Tide” gave the program an added dimension. Filmed out near the old Sutro Baths by J.C. Earle, this short subject follows four women-- Faulkner, Collard, Stephanie Ballas and Rebecca Gilbert—as they roam the ruined walls by the oceanside. In this conception, the film makes the choreography as much about what you don’t see as about what you do. Movement happens in fragments, or just out of reach of the camera, inviting instead, a much more specific focus on shape and form rather than on the overall spectacle.

Faulkner has pursued that impulse in her 2004 “Still,” danced with disquieting serenity by Collard under a bare light bulb to music by Slow Blow and sound design by Jacques Poulin-Denis. Swathed in a filmstrip garnished dress that could give any Project Runway outfit a run for its money, Collard’s strangely plumed odd bird gave her movements the occasional jerkiness of a silent film played at 24 frames per second. A fading silent film star or perhaps an embodiment of the entire era of the silver screen drawing its last gasp, Collard was riveting in her performance.

For this new venture, Faulkner has gathered a group of dancers who are clean, well trained, but most importantly, display no doubts or vagueness about the motivation of their movements. When Collard grasps her leg to lift it forward or shuffles the celluloid fringes of her skirt, we may only be guessing as to why she needs to do so, but she herself is clearly motivated by a lucid internal logic. It means that as an audience, we can continue to watch, satisfied in the knowledge that whatever we don’t comprehend at the moment will unfold and become clear as the piece progresses.

That clarity of purpose may be Faulkner’s greatest asset as a choreographer. She is undoubtedly meticulous – the costumes she created for each piece had none of the bargain-basement thrift store look, but were instead assembled with an eye to both color and functionality, with the added benefit of actually flattering the dancers. And her choreography is organically and engrossingly structured in a way that leads the viewer in gently and then traps them in a maze of unpredictable and yet compelling patterns. Ultimately it added up to a top-quality debut from a dancemaker we will hopefully see much more of in the seasons to come.

Theater Review : Super Vision

The Netizens of the world are in the midst of an identity crisis -- there is more information publicly available about each of us, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we have less to fear from the government's Echelon agencies snooping on our reading lists than we do from Amazon.com's patented shopper profiling technology. Heck, even the government is turning to the online giants to get its info. AOL recently ignited a firestorm by making public a detailed record of their users' online searches. They didn't have names attached to the searches, but the New York Times found it almost laughably easy to identify user No. 4417749 simply by analyzing what subjects she searched on.

This mounting identity crisis is precisely the subject of Super Vision, an elegantly, beautiful and disquieting multimedia production by The Builder's Association and studio dbox, which I caught at the Yerba Buena Center forthe Arts. Mixing cutting-edge computer technology with real-time action, it's a show that makes a powerful impact, visually and viscerally.

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

Dance Review: West Wave Dance Festival

There are those who think of San Francisco's four week, eight program West Wave Dance Festival as a marathon, but I prefer to consider it an investment in the future. It's true that with works by 48 different choreographers -- and not all of it good -- it can seem like a bit of a slog. And I must confess that amongst the 24 that I saw at the Project Artaud Theatre, the dances ranged from seriously absorbing, to "Are you kidding me?" Still, West Wave's summer festival represents a bargain of a chance to sample a broad variety. If you tried to see all these dance-makers in their individual shows during the year you'd have -- well, you'd have a fulltime job as a dance critic.

In this year's lineup, many of the choreographers were new-ish to the San Francisco scene -- many of them look fresh out of college, and so do their dances. (I hope they still teach form and structure of choreography in school -- it wasn't always apparent.) But the festival also intersperses works -- often in progress -- from more experienced hands, and hopefully the opportunity to cross-pollinate and watch other work will be an education in and of itself.

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

Dance Review: WestWave Programs 2 & 3

West Wave Dance Festival: Programs 2 & 3
Project Artaud Theater

At fifteen years old, the West Wave Dance Festival, which opened last week in the Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco has become one of the best places to see what the Bay Area’s modern dance choreographers are up to in the long summer months that stretch between one season and the next.

Boasting the work of some 48 choreographers, this year’s festival is a three week extravaganza that offers the many small companies and young choreographers of the area the opportunity to put their work -- some still in development, some excerpts of finished pieces – in front of an audience.

True, the festival’s early programs can be something of a mixed bag, with more polished pieces appearing side by side with ones that have the feeling of a college dance concert. Nevertheless, being there at the start of a young modern choreographer’s ventures is a tempting draw and the format of six to seven pieces per performance which the festival has settled into means that each program is nicely varied, but doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Both last Thursday and last Saturday night (Program 2 and 3), for instance, featured stark duets, a bit of theater, some dance played against video and a dash of slapstick humor.

In fact, it was pleasant to see a little levity in an arena where the dance is often about serious issues. In Kerry Mehling’s “Just a Little One,” Mehling takes on the persona of a 20s lounge lizard visiting a speakeasy. Her inebriated solo, accompanied by an equally inebriated monologue -- the text was Dorothy Parker’s short piece of the same title – from his young flapper date who appears larger than life on the video screen behind. Another video-dance work in Thursday night’s Program 2, Rebecca Wender’s “Afterward” took less advantage of its video component, failing to mesh the onscreen with the live action movement.

If Jenny McAllister’s “Only in Fairytales” – a series of miniature “Fractured Fairytales” -- was less rigorously executed, it still brought a few chuckles, but generally, the more literal “literary” pieces were often a weak point in the program. A danced version of Prospero’s Act V “but this rough magic I here abjure” speech from “The Tempest” took little advantage of the richly descriptive word imagery available, and Apryl Renee’s “Trope of Seuss” -- a riff on “Green Eggs and Ham” – couldn’t get past it’s own absurdity to evolve into more than a one-note vignette.

On the serious side, Sue Roginski and Christy Funsch’s “Alone Together” was easily the most clearly structured and cleanly executed investigation of space and form on the program. At times languid, and yet highly specific in the way they fit shapes together, Roginski and Funsch gave the work an internal logic that had a focus missing in other pieces.

Interestingly, the program also demonstrated the limitations of presenting a work in a theater setting. An excerpt of Cheryl Chaddick’s “Landslide” -- which her company performed last May in the underground rave hangout, the Gingerbread Warehouse, now called the Danzhaus – made less sense out of context and took on a histrionic tenor that missed the elegant sweep of Chaddick’s more choreographed sections of the same piece.

The nice thing about the West Wave Dance Festival is that these programs promise to only gain momentum as the festival continues this week and next and some of the strongest and most experienced contributors are yet to come.

In the next two weeks’ lineup of choreographers and dancers are reliably inventive dance-makers, including Manuel Biag’s always intriguing SHIFT>>> Physical Theater with a sneak preview of his latest work “The Shape of Poison” and the talented Amy Seiwert, whose “Tonic” will close Program 6 (Friday & Saturday, July 22-23).

And there will be no shortage of form and structure on Program 7 (Thursday & Friday, July 27-28), which will feature work from such experienced hands as Janice Garrett, Heidi Schweiker and the always exciting mixed-ability troupe, AXIS Dance Company. Benjamin Levy will reprise his “Violent Momentum” and there will be new pieces from Alex Ketley, and the promising Kate Weare. And Viktor Kabaniaev, who continues to develop a unique contemporary choreographic style, will be presenting a duet for Smuin Ballet’s Ethan White and Diablo Ballet’s Tina Kay Bohnstedt on Program 8 (Saturday & Sunday July 29-30).

WHAT: West Wave Dance Festival 2006
Program 4- Tuesday, July 18: Martt Lawrence, Patricia Banchik-Bell, Carmen Carnes, group A, Aura Fischbeck, Vanguard Dance Company

Program 5- Thursday, July 20: Linda Bair Dance Company, Katie Faulkner/little seismic dance, Monica Marks/UDanceElectra, Pappas and Dancers, Vispo Dance, Ross Dance Company

Program 6- Saturday-Sunday, July 22-23: Amy Seiwert, SHIFT>>> Physical Theater, Dance Ceres, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, Facing East Music + Dance, Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement

Program 7- Thursday-Friday, July 27-28: Alex Ketley, LEVYdance, AXIS Dance Company, Kate Weare, Janice Garrett & Dancers, Heidi Schweiker

Program 8- Saturday-Sunday, July 29-30: KT Nelson (special guest appearance), SPOON, Navarrete x Kajiyama, Lisa Townsend Company, Viktor Kabaniaev, Randy Paufve

Program 9- Monday, July 24: A night of all dance and no tech, curated by Anna Dal Pino & John LeFan, At ODC Theater , 3153 17th Street at Shotwell, SF. This Program only, tickets: $10

Dance Review: Dandelion Dance Theatre's "Anicca"

Dandelion Dance Theatre
“Anicca”
Theatre of Yugen
July 14, 2006

A thoroughly naked man with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck and a clipboard in his hand greeted latecomers to a recent evening’s performance of Anicca. They shuffled apologetically into the Theatre of Yugen’s tiny Noh Space, clambering over the row of unclothed people sitting serenely on the floor, and tried so hard not to stare. Was it me, or did they all look just a little disinclined to remove their coats?

Lesson? Don’t be late to performances of Dandelion Dance Theater’s “Undressed Project” – the latest installment of which played at the Noh Space last weekend.

Anicca or Night Marsh II is not Oh! Calcutta! But neither is it a coy production. It’s all hanging out there, right from the start. Oh, sure, there are some clothes on the performers, but they mainly exist to be removed in this series of vignettes that start in the intimate box of the Noh Space, and then continue on the winding site-specific installation segment to culminate outside in the garden overlooking Alabama Street.

Nakedness, or clothedness, as relates to power is the core concept that lurks behind this anti-sartorial bit of dance-theater. It’s certainly not a new concept, choreographers have been doing this since time immemorial – recent exponents include Karen Finley, Pina Bausch, Glen Tetley, to name just a few -- but one begins to suspect that the performance is more of a culmination of a course of healing therapy than serious choreography. There’s a lot of tension-easing ribaldry in the spoken sidelong comments and the movement of the piece, but underlying it all is the question – how naked did it really need to be?

The assemblage of dancers features as wide a variety of shapes and sizes as you can imagine, with two mixed-ability performers, one who performs with a leg prosthesis and the other who works from her wheelchair. A circus barker spotlight, people running amok in BVDs to the music of the hyper-falsetto chansons of the Tiger Lilies, a guy playing Dvorak’s Humoresque on the violin as he’s denuded-- it all starts to look like a cross between healing arts therapy and burlesque.

Still there are a few moments of intriguing dancing. An opening duel between two tough guys who assert primacy by pants-ing each other is amusing, and there’s a gracefully contentious fight over a prosthetic leg and a pair of glasses that covers roughly the same territory. Perhaps the most touching is a solo in which a woman whose leg has been amputated recount the moments she spent locked in the remains of a grisly car wreck.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz once told dance critic Clive Barnes "The naked body hides every bit as much as it reveals." And what is of greatest interest in Anicca is the untold stories of these bodies, those tattoos and stretch marks. Frustrating, though, is the sense that the piece ultimately just scratches at the idea that a body is the story of one’s life -- that it can be just another costume, one more suit that we wear. The typical disinclination to reveal a body part (“The sleeves cover that scar,” “A high neckline hides the flabby skin,” etc.) is the story.

Anicca is hardly prudish and yet, it’s also hardly revelatory. As we rose to begin the walk through of the installation-art portion of the show, I couldn’t help thinking, “nakedness and emotion, vulnerability, a walk down the ‘Hall of Impermanence’ -- yes, I get it. But, then what?”

We entered the outside garden, where I observed -- over the heads of the twenty-odd naked performers who mingled among us -- the familiar San Francisco fog gently roiling over the streets toward us. Swathed to the lip in my typical summer attire – which includes a field jacket over a Polartec fleece, sealed with a 48-inch pashminette scarf -- I placed my well-clad derriere on the metal chairs next to a quizzical ceramic garden goat and thought to myself, “Brrr.”

And yet, the performers stood stoically quivering amongst us as yet another drama played out on a blood smeared carpet under the trees. I pulled on a pair of lined leather gloves and tried politely not to think about shrinkage. And I tried to concentrate on what was going on. “Difficult. Very cold,” it says in my notes. Other audience members huddled under blankets and finally, at the conclusion of the show, one of them tossed a blanket to the performers.

“Here! Now you can cover up!”

They made a beeline for the great indoors. The show was over.

This review originally appeared on KQED.org

Theater Review: "Permanent Collection" at the Aurora Theatre

I remember the first time I was ever drunk on art. Early in my college career, my Dad called. He was coming to Philadelphia by train and we were going to visit a mysterious place that a friend had told us about called the Barnes Foundation. He secured an appointment and I met him at the station in Merion, PA, about ten minutes outside of Philly on what is familiarly known as "the Mainline."

To get to the Barnes, you must pass the kind of immense mansions and neatly manicured estates that inspired Agnes Nixon to create the people and places of soap operas like All My Children and One Life to Live.

"What the heck is inside this place, anyhow?" we wondered as we walked through the Doric portico decorated with tiles of clearly African motif. Inside? A treasure trove of not just African but Egyptian, Greek, and Navajo art, not to mention some 181 paintings by Renoir, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses, and more Cezannes than I had ever seen in my entire life. It was like seeing hundreds of old friends -- ones you'd known for years, but had never seen before. We had entered the playhouse of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, educator, art collector, and something of a cranky old codger.

That was back in the early nineties, shortly before the history of this mind-bogglingly priceless art collection took the tragic turn documented in Thomas Gibbons' intriguing play Permanent Collection.

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

KQED Profile: Gang Situ

"Actually, I hate to use the words, 'East meets West.' We're getting closer. I see these lines ... disappearing."

-- Gang Situ

Music is in the blood for composer Gang Situ, whose mother was a mezzo-soprano with the Shanghai Opera and whose father was the music director and conductor of the Shanghai Philharmonic. Born in 1954 in Shanghai, Situ studied piano and violin at an early age. But as a teenager, Situ -- whose given name means "steel" -- was swept up in China's Cultural Revolution and was sent for a four-year "reeducation" that found him harvesting rice and gathering firewood in the countryside. Ironically, the experience would indirectly bolster his love of music, as he and his fellow workers would secretly listen to banned recordings of Western artists, such as David Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.

In 1985, Situ arrived in the United States. He had only $40 to his name and spoke only a few words of English. By 1994, just nine years later, he had attracted notice as a composer with his Double Concerto for Violin and Erhu, which has since been performed by more than a dozen orchestras around the world, including the San Francisco Symphony.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: headRush

The Oakland-based guerrilla performance group headRush is serious when it comes to taking their message to the streets. You can find them performing their brief but high-energy sketches not only in theaters, festivals and cafés, but also on sidewalks and in parking lots. The group brings its brand of urban poetry and satire to audiences wherever it finds them.

The brainchild of a trio of teacher-actors -- Rosa González, Simón Hanukai and Xago (Luís Juarez) -- headRush debuted at Oakland's Jahva House in September 2003. Calling themselves a "psycho-politico spoken-word theater crew," González, Hanukai and Juarez hoped to exhort and incite their viewers out of passivity using Chicano "teatro," a satirical agitprop style made popular in the 1960s by Luís Valdez and the farmworkers' El Teatro Campesino. Setting up wherever there is space to move, headRush's off-the-cuff improvisations and audience involvement recall the immediacy of Campesino's "actos," or one-act plays, which might have been performed on the back of flatbed truck or on a picket line.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: San Francisco Young Playwrights

Giving young Bay Area playwrights the opportunity to develop their work is the goal of the San Francisco Young Playwrights Foundation, created in 2005 by Lauren Yee.

The author of over a dozen plays that have been produced for festivals and theaters around the world, Yee knew first-hand the benefits of gaining early writing experience. In high school and later as a Yale University student, she won awards and recognition from the California Young Playwrights Festival to the Florida Teen Playwright Festival. But despite the many programs available in her hometown of San Francisco for teen performers, Yee saw a lack of opportunities for students to hone their skills writing for the stage.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Theater Review: Bigger Than Jesus

Rick Miller
“Bigger Than Jesus”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley
Jun 20-24, 2006
Nobody has more issues than a lapsed Catholic. “All of the guilt, with none of the calories,” is what one of my friends used to say.

And lapsed Catholics lurk everywhere. I myself wanted to be a nun when I was nine years old. Maybe it was the ritual, the easily memorized litanies and the clear-cut rules that appeal to those at that first level of Piaget’s stage of moral development. No doubt my lapsed Catholic father was very much relieved when I stopped serving pretend Masses with Necco Wafers and talking about taking the veil.

Rick Miller’s one man show “Bigger than Jesus” -- which plays this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse as part of Cal Performances’ season –reminded me of the view of religion that comes through childlike – which is not to say childish – eyes. I want to say it’s a naïve view, but not naïve in an ignorant sense, but rather in an innocent one.

Miller, a one man tour-de-force, gathered kudos for his “MacHomer” a Simpson’s-inspired telling of Macbeth, which Berkeley Rep presented earlier in the year. In Bigger Than Jesus” though, he delves into the story of the Messiah and the underpinnings of Christianity.

Loosely framed on a Catholic mass, Miller’s 75-minute play ranges across space and time, with Miller playing Jesus as, variously, a drawling professor-cum-Borscht Belt comedian, a proselytizing minister, and a hyperactive flight attendant. It’s a versatile performance that Miller reels off with deceptive ease, but like a child’s game of playing Mass, at the end it left me unmoved and oddly uninterested in asking any of the bigger questions like, Who is this God anyway?

Early on, we find ourselves at the start of Mass. Those with any kind of Catholic background found ourselves murmuring “Thanks be to God,” at appropriate moments, without even thinking about it. Someone speaking with priestly intonation in a darkened room and then pausing for our response – it just seemed natural.

The production itself, designed by Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates and directed by co-writer Daniel Brooks, is superb. A video screen in the back and a smooth white floor that doubles as a white board make a simple set, but Chaisson and Kates meld video and sound together to make the kind of seamless experience that is incredibly difficult to achieve. Live video cameras that feed real-time images merge with pre-recorded tape and live action with a skillfulness that eludes a lot of theater productions these days.

It’s a clever production, and Miller makes a genial host – never too pushy with ideas, always inclusive.

Often lurking under the rational skin of a lapsed Catholic is an undercurrent of rage, or at least indignation. But there’s no rancor to Miller’s performance and his journey plays more like a didactic lecture, rather than any kind of commentary. I wished he had a little more bite. His notes on the portrayal of the historical Jesus, the development of the Christian faith and its place in the world today aren’t new, by any means, and it felt as though he were perhaps a little afraid to utilize the fullness of sarcasm that I sensed lurking behind the words.

Still, Miller attacks the stage performance with phenomenal vigor and he can be raucously funny at times. At one point he prowls the house, planting a kiss on the mouth of a surprised man in the front row of the audience. He turns the camera on us and exhorts us to wave our arms ridiculously in the air as if we were at a revival meeting.

“Quick, get your arms up before he comes over here!” my husband hisses at me. “You saw him, he’s crazy!”

And a re-enactment of the Last Supper using a five-inch plastic Jesus action figure (I believe I’ve seen the package and it says that he has “poseable arms and wheels in his base for smooth gliding action”) bopping along to a send-up of “Gethsemane” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” is utterly hilarious.

But Miller can also be touchingly honest and open about his own confusion. Perhaps his best moments are the revealing ones, where we find out little snippets of what he himself believes. But so much of the show is him not being Rick Miller that I began to wonder if he were afraid to directly address his own religious confusion.

In the end, the bigger questions were still there, waiting to be asked.

This review originally appeared on KQED.org.

KQED Profile: Basil Twist

“Puppetry is much deeper than people give it credit because it’s about life and death and what is the frontier there.”

-- Basil Twist

A San Francisco native, Basil Twist first became interested in puppetry through his mother, who was president of the San Francisco Puppeteers Guild. After stints working with designer and Broadway director Julie Taymor and the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in New York's Central Park, Twist became the first American to study at France's École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette.

He lives in New York's Greenwich Village, where he dreams up his shows and constructs puppets in a basement workshop. Spark caught up with Twist in San Francisco, where he was collaborating with dancer Joe Goode and playwright Paula Vogel to stage "The Long Christmas Ride Home" at the Magic Theatre.

Twist first made a splash in 1995 with "The Araneidae Show." Since then, he has won a Bessie Award for the show and been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for "Tell Tale." Though well versed in traditional forms, Twist often creates his own blended styles, pushing boundaries to adapt them to new theatrical expectations.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Dance Review: Joe Goode's "Stay Together"

Joe Goode Performance Group
“Stay Together” and “Deeply There”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
through June 11, 2006

Given the polished intellect and sheer professionalism that the Joe Goode Performance Group gives to maverick theater, it’s a little bit surprising that the company has never before paired up with that other maverick leader in town, Michael Tilson Thomas. But if the success of Friday’s premiere of their first collaboration “Stay Together” is anything to go by, this won’t be their last joint effort.

At twenty years old, the company is something of a San Francisco institution and the articulate Goode himself is well-deserving of his reputation as one of the most intriguing and offbeat theater masters around. And given how strong and carefully assembled his shows always are, it’s not a heavy criticism to say that the music has always been the weakest element. But the singsong tunes often seem to imply that this is a group of dancers not wholly comfortable with singing onstage, and the musical interludes scores were more often than not stitched together from a variety of sources.

Inspired by one of Tilson Thomas’s offbeat songs, and with an original score by the maestro, however, “Stay Together” knits concept with musical execution in a satisfying way, and at last, we feel that the wit of the music matches that of the theatrics.

And theatrical it is, blending video with stage and recorded with live, in a seamless and yet quirky and thoughtful way.

Suspended over the stage are two large screens, mirrored by a pair of small television screens to one side that display rotated versions of the same images. Strong dark lines run across a wash of red in the back of the space -- almost like a screwy horizontal hold on a TV screen broadcasting a Mark Rothko painting. And below in the darkened space, the dancers seem almost dwarfed by their surroundings.

In “Stay Together,” Goode plays Bob, a visual artist whose relationships loosely tie together the characters – notably his lover Bertie (Melecio Estrella), a manager played by Liz Burritt. It’s never quite clear what kind of artist Bob is. Perhaps an avant-garde video artist like Bill Viola, or a Mark Rothko sort of painter -- though the occasional voiceover intoning instructions to the dancers as they appear on the screens seems to indicate the former.

It’s a fractured view of existence, reflected in the fractured video effects and the zany episodes scattered throughout the work.

Goode’s ever-talented mainstay, Burritt creates yet another disarmingly neurotic character as she mugs in front of an onstage camera with her face projected in IMAX proportions behind her. Lines that could read as banal, are instead in her hands droll and amusing.

“I tell myself, ‘Stay together, listen deeply and something good will happen,’” she drawls, “I don’t know how that’s going to work out…” Meanwhile, four dancers move beside her slowly, like architectural exclamation points to her monologue.

As always, Goode’s monologues are wordy, and the work as a whole comes in many layers, like a neatly packed portmanteau. But the pleasure of it ultimately is in our mental unravelling of the imagery. Occasionally, the words pass us by, barely registering as we focus on disembodied heads running through a gamut of expressions as they floating over the space. Curiously, this has the effect of magnifying small moments and snippets of the monologue, without ever bringing them clearly into focus. Then just as you begin to get a grip on the deeper meaning of what a character might be saying, the faces melt away into storm clouds drifting lazily across the screens leaving behind a ghostly echo, a mix of taped and live effects that happens seamlessly.

The second half of the program is given to “Deeply There,” a work created in 1998 and trimmed here from evening length to fifty minutes. It is probably Goode’s best known work and to many, his best work.

The setting takes us back to the height of the AIDS epidemic, which coincidentally began twenty-five years ago. But anyone who’s ever kept vigil at a dying person’s bedside will instantly recognize the scene. Relatives and friends tiptoeing quietly about a house and warning newcomers not to be shocked by the fragility of the person in the bed.

There is truthfulness in the duet for Goode and the young Joshua Rauchwerger, who show that in essence, Goode’s choreography and drama is really about getting back to what some might call child’s play and others might call simple honesty. The silly comic moments -- a Jackie O dance led by Ruben Graciani, the rising hysteria of Burritt’s musings on the gay lifestyle – are interposed with tender poignant ones, such as the affecting Marit Brook-Kothlow’s turn as the family dog who considers what it means to be left alone.

Compared to the elegantly assembled “Stay Together,” “Deeply There” can seem wordy, even fussy. The video effects are less experienced and the transitions are less graceful, but there is a core of rage and raw feeling that suffuses this particular piece, and leave a deep impression of the bittersweet experience of saying farewell.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

The world in Inbal Pinto's "Oyster"

Inbal Pinto – ‘Oyster’
San Francisco Performances, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
May 7, 2006

That sense of unease began with the sound of the wind, blowing across a vast, deserted space. As the twilight glow came up on Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s “Oyster,” a little shiver went down my spine.

Outside of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, crowds of people were lolling in the green lawn, enjoying the warm sunny afternoon, but the less fortunate they, because those of us who had wandered into Pinto’s dark cavern of circus freaks were in for a wild ride.

Pinto, who is a former member of Israel’s acclaimed Batsheva Company, incorporates many familiar theatrical touches into her sideshow – the white-face makeup, zany costumes, a bare stage framed by naked light bulbs that suggest a dilapidated carnival – but the pleasure of “Oyster” is not that it breaks new ground, but in how expertly she and collaborator Pollak have put the elements together.

We’ve seen duets with aerial work before, but rarely done with such ease and insouciance. Dancers have been strung and manipulated like puppets before, but rarely with such creepy implications. But “Oyster’s” cavalcade of sideshow freaks displays a canny understanding of the real art of pantomime, and though it has been categorized by presenter San Francisco Performances as “dance,” it’s really a skillful theater piece.

The twelve members of the troupe take on personas that defy adequate description, ranging from circus animals – performing dogs, elephants, etc. – to a double headed barker, whom I found to be as disturbing as “Laughing Sal,” the coin-operated doll that used to stand in San Francisco’s Musee Mecanique. The music runs from Astor Piazzolla to Yma Sumac, from old standards to throaty humming, many of which never before seemed so sinister or unfamiliar.

Faded carnies every one, the characters run through their paces, and at the end of the day, doff their accoutrements and sit down to amuse each other. The weary atmosphere has a tincture of forlorn sadness about it – though not of the self-pitying variety, but rather the kind that made characters like Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willie or Chaplin’s Little Tramp so compelling. Why do we watch them? Why do we watch sideshows? Is it that they evoke macabre fascination or empathy? And, Pinto seems to ask, what does that say about us?

San Francisco Ballet: Saying good-bye to Yuri Possokhov, Stephen Legate and Peter Brandenhoff

San Francisco Ballet
Farewell Gala, May 5, 2006
War Memorial Opera House, Van Ness Avenue at Grove, San Francisco

In a specially arranged, almost impromptu tribute at the War Memorial Opera House for retiring San Francisco Ballet dancers, Yuri Possokhov, Stephen Legate and Peter Brandenhoff, an introspective program of solos, duets and trios created an atmosphere tinged with wistful romance not unlike that of a love affair that’s ending.

It was an evening of was ballet for grown-ups, with nary a fouette to be seen, but loads of the finely-honed dancing of the sort that speaks of the years of experience these men bring to the stage.

Jerome Robbins’ dreamy nocturnal ballet, “In the Night,” opened Friday night’s program. This intimate and subtle series of duets for three couples isn’t for everyone -- the dancers often do no more than merely walk to the introspective Chopin piano nocturnes, which were delicately rendered by Roy Bogas -- but in the hands of the right artists it can be transporting.

Robbins had a knack for drawing back the curtain on the internal life of the characters of his ballets and “In the Night” offers a study of introspection, sensitivity and temperament. It’s not a psychological ballet, but it requires a perceptiveness about human interaction which makes it a perfect vehicle for the talents of Legate and Possokhov not to mention their colleagues.

Partnering a lovely Rachel Viselli, Legate was attentive and self-effacing, bringing both finesse and freshness to the portrayal of the youthful rush of passion. In the second duet, Muriel Maffre and Damian Smith presented a different portrait, with Smith a dashing and somewhat haughty partner to Maffre’s pensive consort.

Lorena Feijoo was wild and heartfelt with Possokhov, who looked remarkably boyish in their contentious pas de deux. Possokhov’s reliability and generosity as a partner never fails to bring out abandon in his ballerinas, who look like they trust him implicitly, even if the characters they are playing are quarreling.

On the surface, “In the Night” looks like individual sketches – the sweep of first love, the serenity of a married couple, the tantrums of another couple – but there is more to the story than that. The six dancers here imbue the ballet with a past subjunctive mood that evokes regrets, longings, desires, all underlined in a moment when the three couples encounter each other. Smith and Legate face off silently in the background while Maffre looks on, abashed. A rivalry, a failed love affair? The finale leaves you with many more questions than when it started.

After a brief intermission, the crowd went wild for Possokhov in “Revelation,” a solo choreographed by Motoko Hirayama to the violin theme from “Schindler’s List.” Clad in dark pants and an open red shirt, Possokhov expertly drove the audience through the emotional highs and lows of the vignette. Though no one would claim he is at the peak of his physical powers, he can still loft tours into the air with whisper soft landings, and this deeply felt meditation brought the audience to its feet.

Hans van Manen’s fiendishly rapid-fire “Solo,” danced by three men to a recording of a Bach violin solo, was the only opportunity of the evening to see Brandenhoff dance, and he made the most of it, delivering his complex steps with acuity. Joined by Legate and a brilliant Pascal Molat, the three men gave the rat-tat-tat of the choreography extra dimension with sly interplay between them.

Possokhov returned with Yuan Yuan Tan in the fervid balcony scene from Helgi Tomasson’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Tan is all airy grace, but you have the sense that the illusion is accomplished by Possokhov who is mysteriously at her side to sweep her into the air.

In “My Funny Valentine,” an excerpt from Lar Lubovitch’s “…smile with my heart,” Tina LeBlanc and Legate effortlessly meshed together in a quirky pas de deux. At the end a fan lobbed a bouquet onto stage as the two came forward for a bow and LeBlanc scurried forward to snatch it up and knelt to present it to Legate – knowing that if he got to it first he’d give it to her instead, because that’s the kind of guy he is.

The evening closed with Maffre and Possokhov taking the stage in the “Summer” pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s “Quaternary.” The audience in the War Memorial Opera House was so intensely concentrated on the performance, so silent, that you could literally hear the 60-cycle hum of the fluorescent bulbs framing Jean-Marc Puissant’s pale, oblong backdrop.

Possokhov will dance it again in New York when the company tours to the Lincoln Center Festival in July, and then he’ll take up his post as Choreogrpher-in-Residence at San Francisco Ballet – an offer that relieves those of us who feared he’d would be snatched up by another ballet company and we’d miss the pleasure of seeing his work. Legate will move on to study chiropractic medicine in Southern California, where his wife, the incomparable Evelyn Cisneros, will take over the helm of Ballet Pacifica’s school. And as for Brandenhoff, one suspects that we have not seen the last of him onstage.

In the mean time, we will have to comfort ourselves in the knowledge that, with Smith, Molat, Maffre, Tan, LeBlanc and the many other beautiful artists of the company, dance of this caliber will return next season.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Diablo Ballet: Sleepless Nights

Diablo Ballet
‘Who Cares?’ ‘3 A.M. Suite,’ ‘Pas de Quatre et Pas de Six’
Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts
March 24, 2006

Dancers kick in their sleep.

Like catnapping felines, they twitch and jitter as they dream about arabesques and passes, and sometimes they deliver a good swift battement that sends the covers flying. Could such a

“3 A.M. Suite,” Viktor Kabaniaev’s restive new ballet sends Bohnstedt on a journey through vaguely dreamlike terrain, populated by bodies moving with an ominous undercurrent. Kabaniaev doesn’t sketch out the details of these characters, and there is no need to. Are these people, dream-ideas, the embodiment of worries preying on her inner mind? We may never know, but, in fact the piece seems all the more intriguing for not knowing.

As “3A.M. Suite” begins, to an insistent, thrumming score created by Sam Chittenden, Bohnstedt is a diminutive figure in space, apparently tossing in her sleep with legs dangling over the orchestra pit and arms writhing in a slow semaphore. Against the expanse of the Lesher Center stage – looking wider than usual with the bare walls, backstage emergency exits and light trees exposed -- Mayo Sugano slips by looking fearless and precise, as does Edward Stegge, who looks exceptional in this clean, modern-ballet style of choreography. Cynthia Sheppard, Matthew Linzer and David Fonnegra lurk in the shadows of the stage, asserting themselves briefly only to vanish.

Kabaniaev’s work looks like it takes cues from the William Forsythe philosophy of pulling the impulse of a step from different areas of the body and creating oppositional lines of movement. Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet delivers a similar effect, but where King’s choreography can often look too introverted and self-absorbed, Diablo’s dancers have turned the focus outward in “3 A.M. Suite,” bringing a layer of added dramatic intensity that is, quite frankly, a little chilling. It lends the perfect feeling of unease to the dreamy theme.

Linzer, who was brightly gallant in “Who Cares?” -- which opened the program -- was dark and mysterious here. And Fonnegra – dancing with Fred Astaire grace in the “Liza” segment of Who Cares?” -- made a understated partner for Bohnstedt in a duet in which every move, every lift, every balance, looked both calculated and inscrutable.

Linzer and Fonnegra, along with Jekyns Pelaez, made handsome partners to Lauren Main de Lucia, Amy Foster and Sheppard, respectively, in “Who Cares?” Diablo Ballet performs a concert version of this George Balanchine crowdpleaser, which includes the duets and solos for three couples, and it makes for a pleasant enough diversion, although it does lack a bit of context.

For all its lightheartedness, “Who Cares?” is not fluff. It demands a certain technical brilliance along with an offhanded delivery and among the women, only Main really served this up in her solo of hair-raising turns to “My One and Only.” Foster needed a bit more lightness in the jumps and beats to match her engaging smile in “Stairway to Paradise,” while the intricacy and speed simply seemed to elude Sheppard, whose footwork was blurry and not well-syncopated in “Fascinating Rhythm.” Still she and Pelaez made a relaxed and likeable couple in the opening “The Man I Love” number. Fonnegra also brought a jazzy elegance to his duet with Foster danced to the title song.

Jazziness is the watchword for Nikolai Kabaniaev’s saucy “Pas de Quatre et Pas de Six,” which closed the evening. After dancing all night, the company gave this signature ballet – a deconstruction of the classical idiom to modern backbeats – a thoroughly energetic push, to the delight of the crowd, who responded warmly to every solo.

ODC: Part of a Longer Story...

ODC/SF
Dancing Downtown Season
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard Street @3rd, San Francisco
through March 19, 2006

Sentiment was in the air at last week’s opening gala for ODC/SF’s annual Dancing Downtown Season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Even the most jaded couldn’t miss the bittersweet edge to the special program that included premieres from both Artistic Director Brenda Way and co-Artistic Director KT Nelson. But even as ODC lures retired San Francisco Ballet principal Joanna Berman back into the spotlight for the company’s three week home season, it also marks the retirements of favorite sons Brian Fisher and Private Freeman.

It was the glamorous Berman who opened the show in Way’s “Part of a Longer Story,” a work set to W.A. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A that the choreographer has returned and added to in stages between 1993 and 2002. Way’s group sections -- created most recently, in 1995 and 2002 -- are disarming and sexy. She establishes encounters between dancers sketchily and then immediately melts them away in a flurry of sinuous movement. However, nothing is quite satisfying until Freeman and Berman emerge in the central movement, originally choreographed in 1993.

Guest artists often have a hard time fitting into a company’s signature style, but not so with Berman, who looks at least a lovely as she did when she retired from SFB in 2002. Though at the start of their duet she looked pensive, perhaps even a touch self-conscious, within a few measures of music, both she and Freeman seemed to release themselves to the moment, created a lyrical impression of a romance joined in progress. Partnering with an almost quizzical sensitivity, Freeman and Berman offered a transporting glimpse of how to make much more than just sense of a series of steps—of how to create nuanced shades of grey in between the black and white.

If the duet struck a chord of emotional depth, the last movement returned to a festive mood, highlighted by Fisher’s mischievous antics. It was a light-hearted if also light-weight showcase for Fisher, who was joined by Justin Flores, Corey Brady, Anne Zivolich and new apprentice Elizabeth Farotte.

One can only wonder if it’s the personalities of dancers like Freeman and Fisher, who have inspired the zany air of works like Way’s “time remaining,” which received its premiere on Thursday night.

Though packed with amusing imagery – dancers in saucy little tan tunics with peekaboo underwear, dancers sliding behind and tangling with dressmakers mannequins scattered like soulless stand-ins about the stage, a smarmy duet for Freeman and Andrea Flores – ultimately the meaning of time remaining is elusive. Is it a meditation on religious fanaticism, an investigation of the modern search for meaning, or a sketch of Heaven’s Gaters waiting for Comet Hale-Bopp? Ultimately, it is Freeman who entertains the most, with his jovially absurd holy-roller type. Seemingly unperturbed at the idea of looking ridiculous, Freeman plays his faith healer to the hilt with a consciously cheap twinkle in his eye to match the cheap twinkle of the giant blue rock on his ring finger.

ODC’s women of the moment – Andrea Flores, Zivolich, Yayoi Kambara, Marina Fukiyama and Quilet Rarang – ably displayed the their power-pack punch in KT Nelson’s premiere, “Stomp a Waltz,” to the music of Marcelo Zarvos. Flores, who was faintly subdued in “time remaining,” here blends sex appeal with knowing shrewdness in her quick glances at the audience from under her eyelashes.

Clad in black with pert splashes of red, the company headed into the final work of the evening full throttle, as if working off of the adrenaline push of a runner’s high. Nelson’s choreography, which bears the company’s trademark high-energy intricacy, is the kind of fast-moving and complex work that demands boldness. But though the strokes of each step are carefully calculated for the greatest effect, the dancers add a pleasant looseness as well, giving “Stomp a Waltz” a forward momentum to match the rhythmic drive of the music.

Watching the closing moments of the performance, with a freewheeling Freeman partnering Kambara, or Fisher and Andrea Flores cavorting, we suddenly remembered that there are only two more weeks to see them in action. At the reception after the show, an audience member murmured the same thing that was overheard at Berman’s retirement gala, “After that, it just won’t be the same again.”

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Ailey: Everyday Superhumans

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
through March 5, 2006
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley

Program A (Mar 5): “Night Creature,” “Solo,” “Ife/My Heart” (Bay Area premiere), “Revelations”
Program B (Mar 4 mat): “Shining Star,” “Caught,” “Reminiscin,” “Revelations”
Program C (Mar 4 eve): “Love Stories,” “Urban Folk Dance” (Bay Area premiere), “Acceptance In Surrender” (Bay Area premiere), “The Winter in Lisbon”

If you're seeking the perfect antidote to a cold, damp winter evening there is no need to look any further than the heat of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's annual Cal Performances season at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall.

With three different programs, the company has brought along a little bit of everything, from hip hop to ballet, classic to modern, but it almost doesn't matter which progam you choose to see -- with Ailey, you're pretty much guaranteed a night of rip-roaring, terrific dancing.

One of the Ailey company’s most compelling qualities is the conviction they bring to their performances. There’s a core of integrity that each dancer shares on the stage and an argument could be made that it is this sincerity that has won them such a loyal following wherever they tour. Sure, the strength of their unparalleled athleticism is evident everywhere – the men mix flexibility with speed, the women are sharp-minded and unbelievably sleek. They could dance the hokey-pokey and it would be the most exciting and enthralling thing you ever saw in your life, but most importantly it would be deeply felt. Ailey never does anything halfway.

The company has been accused of becoming too acrobatic in the years since founder Alvin Ailey’s passing. Certainly, it’s easy to believe that this group has more tricks, bigger split jumps, higher legs than ever before, but the current company still boasts dancers like Dwana Adiaha Smallwood, Matthew Rushing, Linda Celeste Sims and Renee Robinson, who bring elevation of a different sort. Ailey is now a company of the new century, and they are cannily planning how to make relevant the works of the past for new audiences who have grown accustomed to extreme performances.

Has too much of the emotional core of the company been lost along the way? Without having seen them dance in the 1960s and 70s, it’s hard to say, but surely there is no company in the world that dances with more heart.

Given that, it’s no surprise that “Solo” a work for three men by Hans van Manen to the music of J.S. Bach that was most recently performed here at the San Francisco Ballet Gala is a terrific acquisition for the company. The three men -- Clifton Brown, Glenn Allen Sims and Rushing – put a stamp of humor and quickfooted sureness on this piece that is 100% Ailey. On this trio, van Manen’s choreography looks less like Ballet with a capital “B.” But if the look is more like speedy wrestlers rather than sleek racehorses, the men locate the mixture of humor and hubris that draws a reaction from the audience instantly.

It’s a boon for anyone who choreographs to be able to develop his or her work on these dancers, as was evidenced in the local premiere of “Ife/My Heart,” by hip hop phenom Rennie Harris. “Ife” refers to the location of the spiritual center for the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the nine dancers have clearly embraced the concept of a metaphorical as well as geographical heart to this work. The recent performances of his works by Harris’ own company, EVIDENCE, were intriguing, but not nearly as effective as this.

In white loose-fitting clothes that range from African dashikis to slim modern dresses, the dancers enter in a procession of small groups – a more African inspired quartet led by an earthy Renee Robinson, an Afro-Caribbean pair and three dancers who seem more generically modern. There’s a hodge-podge of a recorded soundscape that ranges from Art Blakey to the recited poetry of Nikki Giovanni, which almost, but not quite detracts from the pleasure of watching Brown’s hip hop phrases –the quick switches of weight from foot to foot, the scooping sweep of the hands— that Linda Celeste Sims and Asha Thomas perform with razor sharp focus. Among the men, Rushing, Jamar Roberts and Amos J. Machanic stood out whether solo or in a group for that same intensity of focus.

Brown typically structures his work around certain anchors – the opening processional, unison sections punctuated by ecstatic tribal dances, a communal circle, etc. His ballets often finish up in a free-wheeling house-music finale and “Ife/My Heart” is no exceptional, although in the case of Ailey’s performance the beat seeped palpably into the entire Zellerbach audience in a sort of low- throbbing pulse that was visible in bobbing heads and shoulders. It was the kind of dance that somewhere deep in your cells, you felt you already knew.

The program also included the sinuous “Night Creature,” a slinky, caterwauling Ailey standard to the music of Duke Ellington. Smallwood leads the pack of distinctly feline night creatures with hepcat, high-stepping style. If hers are not the most perfectly balletic jetes, there is no one in this troupe to match her for deep sweeping back arches and hip swivels. She’s having such fun that you can’t help but have fun yourself just by watching her stray cat strut as she pulls faces at every dancer on stage.

As usual, the company closed with the rousing Alvin Ailey classic “Revelations.” Every year Ailey brings it back but if you think that you’re “Revelation”-ed out, trust me, you only think you are. See it one more time, and you’ll be amazed at how easily you can be swept into a Baptist fervor. After 46-years, the dancers still pour inordinate amounts of energy into this gospel inspired crowd-pleaser, and they are rewarded at nearly every performance with hoots, hollers and standing ovations.

Tuesday night’s cast delivered all the usual pleasures: Dion Wilson hitting an edgy tone in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” the husband and wife Simses adding perfectly tuned empathy and humanity to “Fix Me Jesus” and Amos J. Machanic, Jr. making classroom contractions of the abdominals look stunning in “I Wanna Be Ready.”

It was a performance made remarkable by the very fact that this is how Ailey dances every day.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Smuin Ballet: Bluegrass/Slyde

Smuin Ballet
“Bluegrass/Slyde,” “Romanze,” “The Eyes That Gently Touch,” “To the Beatles”
Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts
February 11, 2006

It’s possible that on hearing that Michael Smuin’s latest work, “Bluegrass/Slyde” involves dancing with poles, your eyebrows went up at the thought -- but rest assured, it’s a better concept than you might think.

Set to the Appalachian-inspired compositions of bassist Edgar Meyer – as well pieces by the uncredited virtuoso banjo-player Bela Fleck, fiddler Mark O’Connor, and James Taylor -- “Bluegrass/Slyde” saw Smuin Ballet taking a pleasantly athletic turn on the stage at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts.

The fire-engine red set, built by James Beaumont, has the look of a rock band rig, with three poles arranged across the middle of the contraption. The poles themselves revolve smoothly, and with a small step attached to the bottom, the dancers can jump on and spin like kids in a playground or fly through the air and grab onto the poles, swinging around à la Spiderman, or at least Gene Kelly.

The effect is compelling and gives the dancers a kind of ice skater speed along with an unusual flow of movement. The laconic swizzling perfectly fits the bass and slide-banjo twang and the dancers look like they’re enjoying the sailing through the air, particularly Ethan White who brings a genuine energy and zest to the task.

“Bluegrass/Slyde” isn’t a perfect piece. Once the novelty of the convention wears off, it’s hard not to notice that there’s an awful lot of running onstage. A tap number to “Limerock” doesn’t have quite the clarity it enjoyed when the piece premiered in San Francisco last September. And the sections choreographed for pointe work -- which look overly classical – make it apparent that, for this piece, the women are far more comfortable and rangy when they’re in soft jazz shoes and grounded.

Still, Smuin is at his best in a lazy diversion for three couples to O’Connor’s “Misty Moonlight Waltz.” Amy Seiwert and White deftly set up the mood within a few minutes, with White floating compellingly over her head as they spin lazily around the center pole, a picture of mellow romance.

“Romanze,” which followed on the program, remains one of Smuin’s loveliest small vignettes, and one of his most imaginative creations. Inspired by a Victorian diary that detailed a real and a fantasy day in the life of a young couple, it’s a clever blend of dance with film. The “real life” portion, supplied by Francis Ford Coppola’s film of Catherine Batcheller and Alexander Topciy (the original dancers at San Francisco Ballet) is shown on a scrim, through which we watch their inner passions unfold as danced by Easton Smith and Celia Fushille-Burke. As the screen image zooms in on a grassy meadow or ocean shore or a flower, the dancers appear through the projection seemingly floating through the visual space.

Though some of the choreography looked spatially compressed, as if the dancers themselves felt a bit limited despite the sweep of Antonin Dvorak’s music, it was a pleasure to see Smith, who returns to the company this season from Sacramento Ballet, and who has found a lengthened line, refinement and more confidence.

That kind of fully realized concept was missing from “The Eyes That Gently Touch,” a work choreographed by Kirk Peterson for three couples to the music of Philip Glass, which was pretty, but less left impact. Despite a flowing style with striking abstract sculptural qualities, on the whole, the ballet looked safe, both in its conception and execution.

Also on the program, which seemed a bit lengthy, was Smuin’s 2001 “To the Beatles, Revisited,” in a revised form that included only 11 sections. To judge by the costumes – by Sandra Woodall -- and steps, which included moonwalks and breaking moves to Fab Four favorites like “Help!” and “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the ballet seems set in the era of 80s nostalgia for the 60s. Still, there was a sense of fun that cut through some cheesiness, and the stellar Benjamin Stewart, who joined the company this year from Atlanta Ballet, dove into numbers like “Day Tripper” and “Come Together” with intelligence to match his good-natured energy.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.