Oakland Dance Festival 2007: Company C, ODC/SF & Jo Kreiter

Summer festivals are a great time to see what dance makers have in the pot, and a worthy entrant into the flurry of such local events is the Oakland Dance Festival, organized and presented by Charles Anderson’s Company C Contemporary Ballet. Now in its fourth year, this two weekend event at the Malonga Casquelourd Center now has all the earmarks of a regular and welcome tradition.

Joined this year by ODC/Dance as well as Flyaway Productions, Company C offered an evening-length program of six works that was a not-always-successful mixed bag. But then, what really makes festivals like this one important is that they offer a broader mix of companies – a tantalizing taste which can introduce each troupe to a varied audience of people who might not be familiar with their works.

The action got underway with Charles Anderson’s new work, “Egyptian Two Step,” which, in a bit of a reversal, put the audience members, not in their seats, but standing on the stage itself.

From off to the side, the stage manager intoned, “Dancers, places please,” and after a moment the curtain parted to reveal the fourteen members of Company C strategically scattered throughout the auditorium, on seats, in aisles. Chugging back and forth to the music of Arthur Jarvinen, they performed a jaunty little number that elicited a few chuckles from our side of the curtain.

What Anderson referred to as his amuse-bouche however, elicited an ambivalent reaction. “Egyptian Two Step,” though mildly amusing, was constrained by how many steps could be performed on stairs or over the back of a seat. Then too, it didn’t exactly turn the audience-performer relationship on its head or break down barriers in the way that, say, the audience involvement pieces of the 1960s New York downtown theater scene used to. On completion, the audience dutifully flowed up the aisles into its more usual position and awaited the next piece, making one wonder what all of that was about.

We were still grappling with that question when the curtain went up on Flyaway Productions in Jo Kreiter’s “The Grim Arithmetic of Water.” Kreiter’s work, which has included some interesting site-specific pieces, can exemplify the pleasant surprises of finding art and audience in a new locality, but in that regard, “Grim Arithmetic” is one of her more conventional “we’re on the stage, audience is in seats” sort of pieces.

With only an excerpt of the full work offered without much in the way of context or notes, the subject of the 2004 “Grim Arithmetic” is more than a bit opaque and it seems unfair to overly criticize the content. Visually, Kreiter’s aerial maneuvers have the potential to create lasting images – an illusion of weightlessness that can seem time-stopping. In “Grim Arithmetic” however, the portentous rituals, the nearly nude woman splashing and slumping in a pool in the center, the pairs of dancers swinging from water-carrying yokes looked contrived and oddly limited as dance choreography. Best were the simplest moments, in which a dancer spun through space dangling from a suspended bucket of water, as if parched and struggling towards a life-giving force.

Encompassing the middle portion of the evening were two pieces from ODC/Dance: “Scramble,” a recent premiere by KT Nelson, and Brenda Way’s witty 1994 “Scissor Paper Stone.” Perhaps because it’s a newer work, “Scramble” – a quartet for the powerful Anne Zivolich, Elizabeth Farotte, Daniel Santos and Justin Flores -- looks less polished than “Scissor Paper Stone,” which enjoys the double advantage of a winking, cinematic love triangle and Private Freeman’s wiseacre attitude. Nevertheless, that trademark ODC energy and flair punctuated both works.

Company C closed out the program with Alexandre Proia’s romance for two couples, “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Anderson’s “Bolero,” set to the famous Ravel work and newly commissioned by the Mendocino Music Festival.

The company now boasts a more solid core of dancers than ever before, although the stage at the Casquelourd Center seemed to rob the women especially of their usual attack. Pointe work looked particularly careful, rather than freewheeling or bluesy in the Gershwin “Rhapsody,” but then overall, Proia’s choreography is an awkward assemblage.

The nine dancers of “Bolero” looked far more at ease, although smooth transitions in the partnering work still elude the men. Nevertheless, if this “Bolero” was less about the driving inevitability of fate and more a Spanish-spiced fiesta, it was brought into focus by the eye-catching Beth Kaczmarek, whose beautiful lines and carriage of her back lent credibility to her every step.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Joe Goode's Humansville

You have to hand it to Joe Goode. With “Humansville” --which the Joe Goode Performance Group premiered on Thursday night in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum in San Francisco— he breaks open the theatrical box with a highly effective dance theater installation with a style that few can pull off.

Presented as part of the Deeply Personal Series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the hour-long, site-specific work integrates live dance, music performance and video –both pre-recorded and live--with a dazzling complexity. From a purely technical standpoint, it is perhaps Goode’s most ambitious work, sectioning part of the open Forum theater into four living dioramas, some of which display Austin Forbord’s video projections against Erik Flatmo’s scenic elements. Jack Carpenter skillfully manages the tricky task of unifying the individual scenes with lighting, and the whole space is bound loosely by the ambient score by Joan Jeanrenaud-- a founding member of the Kronos Quartet-- who plays the cello from a mobile platform that can be wheeled throughout the performing area.

Dispersed among the tableaux are the members of Goode’s current group of performers. Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello sit silently side-by-side opposite a gargantuan projection of a woman gesturing “come hithers” at us. Around the corner, Alexander Zendzian and Melecio Estrella, each in a separate tiled cell, fling themselves in synchronized desperation against the grey and blue walls. Dressed in powder pink 50’s crinolines, Jessica Swanson chats with her beau—another giant projection on the side of her wall-papered room, while in a red fuzz-lined alcove, Patricia West appears through a small window to gripe about a restaurant reservation while employing gestures that eerily mimic a weeping woman projected on a TV screen just below her.

As with any installation art there are multiple layers and points of entry. You don’t have to start at any particular place, and you needn’t stay through the end of each of the 7-minute “plays.” In fact, there’s a passageway behind the walls where audience members are free to wander and peek through cut-out windows into the back of each scene, adding both interactivity to the work plus the disturbing sense that we are all peeping Toms, constantly trying to see what the neighbors are up to. Did the audience members who craned forward for a glimpse under the ruffled valance of Swanson’s window realize that their image was being projected larger-than-life on the other side of the wall?

The combination of video with live action is highly persuasive. There is the sense of being immersed in a moment, but as with the installations of Bill Viola or Julia Scher, you also have a slightly creepy feeling that you’re being played. This is a risky and fascinating way to present questions about human nature, voyeurism, our understanding of others and of ourselves. How willing are we to cross over lines and put ourselves out there? When a projected woman holds out her hand and invites us to “touch me,” it takes several minutes for the crowd to figure out that someone has to walk forward and touch the projection before the sequence will continue, but once it becomes clear, the invitation evokes a kind of delight too, as if we’ve been wallflowers who are suddenly asked to dance.

When the piece moves into a more conventional presentation style, however, the momentum wanes. After about half an hour of roaming and peeping, of intersecting with lives that are only partially observed and never fully understood, the lights in the Forum come up, signaling the shift to the second part of the show and the audience sits down obediently in bleachers facing the blank pair of angled walls.

From here, the action moves into episodic dance segments that offer a prismatic view of some of the elements seen in the installations. The dancing is potent--particularly intense duets for Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello. Nevertheless, we glean no further information about the personalities in the boxes and even with a final series of text snippets that address empathy and human connection, it’s not clear how to tie it all together. Plus it’s not nearly as much fun as walking in and around the action.

Even so, “Humansville” is a compelling journey. The overall look is beautiful, melding together all the production elements masterfully and if Goode’s aim is to provoke, to invite us to think, then he succeeds at that-- admirably.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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.



Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Diablo Ballet: The Mirror, It's Not What You Think & Taj Mahal

Diablo Ballet may be facing an uncertain future, but one thing is for sure – the show will go on. As the company took the stage for its last home performances of the season at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts last weekend, co-Artistic director Nikolai Kabaniaev offered firm reassurances that the company will continue on next season.

Diablo Ballet may be facing an uncertain future, but one thing is for sure – the show will go on.

As the company took the stage for its last home performances of the season at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts last weekend, co-Artistic director Nikolai Kabaniaev offered firm reassurances that the company will continue on next season.

With the retirement of Ashraf Habibullah from the company’s board, however, the rush to close the gap in funding is on. Thus far, Diablo Ballet has reached only a fifth of its goal and the company still faces a July 1 deadline for raising the $500,000 necessary to mount its 2007-2008 season as planned, with the announced world premieres from Val Caniparoli, as well as Viktor Kabaniaev’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and Nikolai Kabaniaev’s “Once Upon a Ballroom.”

In the mean time, Diablo has another promising choreographer on its hands in dancer Tina Kay Bohnstedt, whose debut work, “The Mirror” premiered on Friday night. In this quirky episodic piece for two dancers, Lauren Main de Lucia dances a solo to her own reflection in a mirror, only to be joined --not entirely unexpectedly—by Matthew Linzer, a sometime partner, sometime competitor. Dressed alike in Loran Watkins’ pert black mesh and green skirts, they are nevertheless, anything but cut from the same cloth.

The style in which Bohnstedt works-- low squats, pitched torso and turned-in, crooked lines that break apart in key joints – bears some resemblance to that of European choreographers such as Jiri Kylian and Nacho Duato. Often this style is meant to communicate the rawness of internal emotions, the “realer-than-real” that lies under the polite exterior.

It’s an impulse that Bohnstedt leans toward, but never fully embraces, and the choice of Erik Satie’s introspective Gymonopedies and Gnossiennes gives “The Mirror” the air of a movement study rather than a fully completed thought. Percussive strikes of a limb melt into ripples through the body, in a way that tantalizingly implies a larger significance.

But as “The Mirror” continues through solos and duets, it remains unclear just where Bohnstedt is going with the piece. Is Linzer her masculine side, her antagonist, her dream lover? Any of these options could make for interesting explorations, but, though Main and Linzer look quite adorable side-by-side, not enough is established through the choreography of who they are to each other to explore any particular avenue.

Still, Bohnstedt’s work has promise. If her mastery of structure is still under development – the timing of Main’s final solo in silence, for instance, is a jarring miscalculation that seemed to confuse the audience – nevertheless, Main and Linzer create a tone that is both suitably playful, and yet also darkly serious.

The entire company looked at the top of their game though, in the sorbet flirtations of KT Nelson’s “It’s Not What You Think,” danced to songs by Bjork. Nelson’s spirited, offbeat jaunts look appealing on Diablo’s dancers, who are joined this year by Peter Brandenhoff, a former soloist with San Francisco Ballet, where he was notable for clean dancing and an intelligent approach to even the most minor roles.

He -- along with Linzer, David Fonnegra Jekyns Pelaez and Edward Stegge – makes a fine dreamboat, dallying with the flock of women-- Bohnstedt, Main, Mayo Sugano Cynthia Sheppard and Lauren Jonas-- whose pert curlicued steps match the curlicues on Amanda Williams’ foxy little 60s retro shift-dresses.

Also on the program was a reprise of Nikolai Kabaniaev’s “The Legend of Taj Mahal.”

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Smuin Ballet: Schubert Scherzo, Romeo & Juliet Balcony Pas de Deux, Falling Up, Carmina Burana

Dancing without the 'Boss,' Smuin Ballet tearfully honors its founder

The crowd was oddly quiet, even subdued in the lobby of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts before the opening of Smuin Ballet’s spring season. Ushers still smiled as they took tickets and handed out programs and old friends still greeted each other warmly but a muted uncertainty hung in the air as audience members took their seats for the company’s first public appearance since the death of their founder on April 23.

Read on the Chronicle site...

Sally Streets: 'I guess I've come full circle'

MORNINGS are quiet on the residential stretch of College Avenue in Berkeley, where Julia Morgan's elegant Craftsman-style theater rests under shady trees. From the outside, it seems impossible to imagine the few dozen dancers who are inside sweating up a storm in Sally Streets' morning ballet class.

Sometimes sharp, sometimes funny, but always plain-spoken, the 73-year-old Streets presides over the class -- a mix of regulars and drop-ins, older and younger, professional and non-professional -- with equal measures of earthy common sense and inspiration.

Nothing seems to escape her notice, from the tip of a head to the angle of a toe, but then, this is doubtless what has made her one of the Bay Area's most sought-after teachers. Perhaps her best-known student is her own daughter, Kyra Nichols, who in June will retire from after an unprecedented 33-year career in New York City Ballet.

Midway into the class, she stops all the action to give a correction to a dancer -- and it seems she's given this correction before. The young dancer is respectfully attentive, but obviously hesitant, and Streets goes on.

"You know," she says quietly, "you might just want to take what I say seriously. After 70 odd years or so, I think I know a thing or two."

Indeed, in the course of a rich career, Streets has been associated with a dizzying array of ballet companies, including New York City Ballet, Pacific Ballet, Oakland Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Diablo Ballet, and her own Berkeley Ballet Theater, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this season.

Streets took her first ballet classes though at Dorothy Pring's Berkeley studio, only steps away from where she now teaches. "It was on Forest Avenue, just two blocks away," she says with a laugh. "I guess I've come full circle."

A professional from a young age, Streets joined the legendary company of Mia Slavenska's Ballet Variante right out of high school and toured with them for a couple of years.

"It was on an old school bus," she recalls, "with the costumes stored in the back of the bus in wicker baskets. When we got to our destination, we all had to help bring the costumes in, set up ironing boards, steam the costumes, then have class, then do the performance, then get back on the bus. Sometimes we had to ride all night to the next place or late at night to get to the next place. Oh it was all over the United States. For a year you were on the bus!"

After a few years, however, Slavenska's company planned a tour to Japan and Streets learned that she would not be taken along. "Oh, I was furious. I thought, 'I'll show you!' And I went and auditioned for New York City Ballet." She laughs in amazement, "And they took me. It was just luck, because someone had hurt themselves the night before and they needed a corps person. So I just dropped into New York City Ballet."

The young company was then under George Balanchine's careful development, but Streets saw a golden era marked by stars such as Maria Tallchief, Jillana and Tanaquil LeClerq. Even so, the pragmatic young dancer only stayed for a few years, giving ballet up when she met and married her husband.

Dance was never quite out of the picture. Even after Streets had her first two children, she ran a ballet school out of her basement. Nevertheless, after eight years away from the stage, when Alan Howard called her to say he was forming a company called Pacific Ballet, she still felt compelled to sneak out of the house without telling her husband where she was going. "I just knew he'd be very upset that I was going back to this thing that consumes your whole life," she says. "But once I got back to the barre, that was it, I became hooked again."

Under the direction of the charismatic Howard, Streets came back to the stage full force, starring in exotic ballets made for the company by Mark Wilde and John Pasqualetti and honing her teaching skills under ballet masters such as Richard Gibson, who now runs the Academy of Ballet in those same studios. When Pacific Ballet closed, she turned to the Oakland Ballet, dancing for another seven years under the direction of Ronn Guidi.

With the founding of Berkeley Ballet Theater in 1981, Streets finally began a career as choreographer and full-time teacher. For Diablo Ballet alone, she's choreographed 17 new works (she's the company's artistic advisor), and she's taught all over the world.

"You ask about it, I've been there," she observes. "It was a very rich time in ballet."

Reach Times dance correspondent Mary Ellen Hunt at mehunt@criticaldance.com.

WHAT: Berkeley Ballet Theater's spring season: "Cinderella" and "Nonet" by Sarah Marcus, "Le Cirque Magnifique sans Elephants" by Sally Streets, "But Not Forgotten" by Brian Fisher and "Heartfelt" by Damara Vita Ganley
WHEN: 7 p.m. May 18, 2 and 7 p.m. May 19, 2 p.m. May 20
WHERE: Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave., Berkeley
HOW MUCH: $15-$20
MORE INFO: www.berkeleyballet.org, 510-843-4689

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

San Francisco Ballet: Muriel Maffre retires

In a weekend full of dramatic performances, San Francisco Ballet concluded its season at the War Memorial Opera House on Sunday night with a superb gala performance in which Muriel Maffre bid farewell to the company after seventeen years as a principal dancer.

If emotions ran high for the final shows of the company’s 74th season, the atmosphere for Sunday night’s celebration for Maffre--surely San Francisco Ballet’s most respected artist-- was at a fever pitch. Audience members seemed to be conflicted—torn between anticipating the unrivalled feast of seeing Maffre reinvent six of her best-known roles, and dreading the knowledge that her commanding presence will no longer grace the Opera House stage.

The 41-year-old Maffre joined San Francisco Ballet in 1990 as a principal dancer and over her tenure she has danced over 75 ballets, creating 21 of those roles-- more than any other dancer currently in the company. Her range includes everything from classical and Romantic roles like Sleeping Beauty and La Sylphide, to Balanchine works such as Bugaku, or Rubies. Known for her dedication to her artistry, and an inventive approach to her work, she is, unsurprisingly, a favorite with choreographers such as William Forsythe, Mark Morris, Yuri Possokhov, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, and unsurprisingly, as she danced many of those choreographers’ works this season, they took on an extra poignancy.

“Boy, this is really going to hurt,” one audience member was heard to mutter as we waited for the show to begin. “Do we have to start?”

Time is inexorable however, and the lights dimmed as conductor Martin West led the orchestra in Philip Glass’s portentous thrum, which heralded the excerpt of Jerome Robbins’ “Glass Pieces.” This adagio duet juxtaposes a faceless line of automaton-like dancers, who gently sway across the back of a dark stage, against the spectacularly alien couple of Maffre, partnered by a steady Pierre-Francois Vilanoba. And as with most of the evening’s pieces, it offered not only a meditative beauty, but also a chance to examine Maffre’s carefully calculated approach to her work.

Maffre falls into the category of what is commonly called a dancer’s dancer, which is to say that the level of her work draws the awe and respect of her fellow professionals. The audience appreciates the seamless appearance, the cool composure and fluidity of her performance, while other artists marvel at how neatly and intelligently the trajectory and momentum of each limb has been plotted out.

If the pauses between ballets might have, under other circumstances, seemed overlong, instead they became moments to reminisce, to process what had just been seen, and to wonder what she would offer next.

Maffre entered next-- stretching a toe forward with each step-- in George Balanchine’s “Agon,” partnered capably by Tiit Helimets. It’s a pas de deux that can have the look of circus-like contortions, but Maffre and Helimets chose instead to press every bit of drama out from each step.

Perhaps unknown about Maffre, however, is that she’s a comedienne with a sharp sense of comic timing. Partnered by a beaming, boyish and utterly charming James Sofranko, she reprised the short-guy-romances-tall-woman duet, “The Alaskan Rag” from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Elite Syncopations,” complete with perfectly timed dodges and near misses, ridiculously froufrou hat and an exhilarated smile.

Maffre’s best roles, however, are her most considered pieces, some of which have been honed over years of reinterpretation. The mood shifted back to the introverted with the second half of the program which began with her unusual ugly-is-beautiful version of Michel Fokine’s “The Dying Swan,” set to Camille Saint-Saens. Her broken flightless bird with sadly faded grandeur created an unforgettable moment marred only by the shouts of an over-eager audience member at the very end. It brought the packed house to its feet-- not for the last time that evening.

Perhaps her greatest gift, however is that, Maffre-- whose degree from St. Mary’s College has fed her interest in arts curating—offers performances that not only challenge herself and her partners, but also invite, even demand, more complex thought from the audience. Though dancers are not always considered to be the “creative force” in a new work, her performance with Damian Smith in an excerpt from Christopher Wheeldon’s “Continuum,” proves otherwise. Inventive in phrasing and execution, Smith and Maffre reconstitute this slow-moving pas de deux to the music of Gyorgy Ligeti as a series of inquiries directed at us.

To close the program, Maffre was joined by principals Vilanoba, Pascal Molat and Kristin Long, as well as most of the corps de ballet in the first half of William Forsythe’s “Artifact II.” If the dancers seemed to inject an extra measure of abandon into the piece, Maffre’s charges through space and wild pinwheels of legs in mesmerizing kinetic designs looked as grand they always have, only reinforcing the realization that she has never given a performance of this or any other ballet at less than 110%.

As an artist, Maffre is still undeniably at the peak of her powers. She has hinted that her performing days are not at an end, and if the ten minute standing ovation she received at the final curtain is any indication, there will always be an audience hungering to take part in her next challenge.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

Dance community grieves for Smuin

Michael Smuin: 1938-2007

The moment was surreal, by all accounts. One minute, the dancers of Smuin Ballet were in high spirits, finishing a quick allegro combination in company class with artistic director Michael Smuin—he was even poking fun at his own choreographic invention. And then, in a flash, he was on the ground and they were struggling in vain to save him.

Throughout the afternoon, as word rippled through the dance community, there was shock at the death of Smuin, who was 68, to an apparent heart attack. In many ways it still seems laughably strange to imagine the Bay Area’s dance landscape without his charismatic, larger-than-life presence. A vital, lively force, Smuin made a buoyant and outspoken ambassador for dance as dancer, director and choreographer, and he had an undeniable impact on how ballet was and is perceived, both locally and internationally.

“It’s a profound loss for all of us, and a personal loss for me that’s indescribable,” said Celia Fushille Burke, who has been Smuin Ballet’s associate director, and now steps into the gap left by his passing. “The outpouring of love has been amazing. I’ve had calls and emails from all over the world. He was very well-loved.”

By chance-- or as some might say, with Smuin’s impeccable sense of timing and showmanship-- the Bay Area’s dance community was already scheduled to gather Monday night for the 2007 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Onstage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Amy Seiwert, along with five other Smuin Ballet dancers appeared to announce his passing and ask for a moment of silence to remember him.

But it was later at the Izzie Awards, during John Kloss’ freewheeling tap performance, that I had a moment of bittersweet memory. Smuin, more than any other major choreographer of the Bay Area’s scene, had a way of capturing the infectious joyousness of dance. And surely somewhere he had to be smiling, because more than any other ballet choreographer he understood the appeal of a good-looking guy dancing and humming along to his own inner music.

Like so many of his generation the Montana-born Smuin fell in love with ballet through the Ballets Russes. Spotted by San Francisco Ballet director Lew Christensen at the age of 15, he joined the company in 1953. It was at SFB that he would meet and marry fellow dancer Paula Tracy, with whom he had a son, Shane. And in 1973, he returned to co-direct the company with Christensen, overseeing the PBS broadcasts of his “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Tempest,” both of which won Emmy awards.

A gifted character dancer and ebullient raconteur, Michael Smuin brought his zest for telling a story as well as a mischievous sense of humor to his choreography. From his 1968 “Pulcinella Variations” to last year’s zesty “Obrigado, Brazil” Smuin’s ballets were wonderful fun. If they didn’t leave a mark with the intellectual crowd, nevertheless, you couldn’t deny that his were well-made, and entertaining dances. His fault, if it could be called that, was that he was always so eager to give that sometimes he went over the top.

Serious ballets like “Medea” highlighted the dancers’ dramatic abilities, but even small vignettes such as “The Last Song” in his Elton John-inspired “Come Dance Me a Song” offered a special poignancy. Smuin’s romantic adagios, particularly his pas de deux such as “Romanze” or “Bouquet,” remain achingly beautiful. Balletomanes who came of age in the 70s have searing memories of American Ballet Theatre stars Cynthia Gregory and Ivan Nagy in “Eternal Idol,” or Diana Weber being swept off her feet by Jim Sohm in “Romeo and Juliet.”

“He was the turning point for San Francisco Ballet,” says former SFB principal dancer Evelyn Cisneros, who joined the ballet under his direction in 1976 and retired in 1999.

Reached by phone in Southern California, Cisneros recalled Smuin as “a gifted and artistic presence. He was the beginning of a new era for the company and he helped bring it back to international status through his commitment and determination and energy.”

And yet, he never forgot the small things, or forgot what his dancers brought to his work. As a young apprentice, one of Cisneros’ earliest memories of Smuin was from the morning after the premiere of “Songs of Mahler.”

“He came into the studio before class and he went to each of the women who had been in the ballet and gave each one a flower,” she recalls, “and it so touched me to watch that.”

Unlike the stereotypical ballet director, Smuin loved for his dancers to have a life outside of the studio-- to have families and their own projects.

“One thing that set Michael apart from all the others was the love that he has for the individual,” Cisneros said emphatically, “He never saw a dancer as someone to mold – he wanted you to be the person you were. I think that’s why dancers loved working with him, you felt artistically enriched because he asked you to bring who you were to the dancing.”

After his infamous parting of ways with San Francisco Ballet in 1985, the endlessly energetic Smuin picked his dancing shoes up and moved onto a wide variety of projects, including his 1988 Tony Award-winning version of “Anything Goes” on Broadway.

“If there’s one thing he taught me,” Cisneros says, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It’s this: It’s not what is before us, or behind us, but what is within us that matters.”

In 1994, he founded his own fledgling company --Smuin Ballets/SF, later Smuin Ballet – and created new work at a prolific pace, usually two or three ballets a year.
With a brazenly theatrical flair and canny professional instincts, he coaxed in audience members who had never before even considered going to a show that had the word “ballet” attached to it. Ever the entertainer, Smuin put his dancers into new unexpected places—dancing the national anthem at a Giants game in PacBell Park, slithering through the remixed cantina scene in “Star Wars,” at the Macy’s Passport benefit.

There were no stick-figure ballerinas for his company, where the women are sexy and the men bold. The stories he wove through his dances were about real people, and starred real people. It was a winning formula that appealed to audiences who made the company arguably the most consistently popular small dance troupe in the Bay Area.

As with any loss of this kind, the road ahead for Smuin Ballet is difficult to imagine without its charismatic founder and auteur. Nevertheless, Smuin was nothing if not the consummate theater professional, and the organization he built will have no trouble standing on its own legs with Fushille-Burke and newly-arrived Managing Director Dwight Hutton, at the helm.

On Tuesday morning, at the insistence of the dancers, there was company class-- as there is every day --at 9:30 a.m. Fushille-Burke, who was out of town on Monday, flew back that night to be with the company. “We will go on,” she said early Tuesday. “That’s what Michael would want and that’s what he did want.”

Smuin’s final work-- set to the Scherzo of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony-- was mainly completed, and the company will premiere it during their May seasons at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and at the Lesher Center among other venues. Smuin Ballet still plans to tour to the Joyce Theater in New York in August.
And yet, even as they move forward, one can’t help but feel the hole left behind by the buoyant, forthright presence of the man who so loved dance, but even more, so loved to bring dance to anyone and everyone.

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

At City College, you can dance if you want to

Affordable, little-known program celebrates its 70th anniversary

"Do you want to dance with me?" a young man in a bright orange T-shirt asks as salsa music blasts through the air. "Or are you a tango?"

Taken aback, I stammer that I'm just here to observe a few dance classes -- although ... the temptation to join the fun out on the floor lingers. Surely, no one would notice one extra student?

Read on the Chronicle site.

San Francisco Ballet: Concordia, Symphony in C, On Common Ground

San Francisco Ballet continued its venerable tradition of commissioning unusual works from young choreographers-before-they-were-stars with the premiere of Matjash Mrozewski’s “Concordia” on Program 7, which opened last week at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.

Set in a dark, vast space, “Concordia” gives the impression of a binary-star system, in which the neoclassical -- Kristin Long in Christopher Read’s smoky tutu with a prim collared tunic -- and the contemporary -- Muriel Maffre, in the same outfit, sans tutu skirt-- orbit each other uneasily. Joined by their partners, Gennadi Nedvigin and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba respectively, they etch out vaguely confrontational but largely abstracted encounters in tensile, twisting poses and snaking limbs.

Under the idiosyncratic thrum of Matthew Hindson’s music – an alternately romantic and perplexing score, which seemed to be a far stretch for the San Francisco Ballet’s Orchestra under the baton of Martin West -- a quartet of edgy interlopers--Joanna Mednick, Courtney Wright, Jaime Garcia Castilla and James Sofranko—punctuate the transitions from one couple to the other.

Structurally speaking, Mrozewski’s style is not unlike that of fellow Canadian James Kudelka, with a bit of the punchy speed and flash-forward poses of the works of LaLaLa Human Steps’ Edouard Locke. But while his assemblage of steps shows promise and his groupings and intermeshing of trios and quartets of dancers are interesting, on the whole the piece doesn’t manage to make a memorable impact.

It’s a bit unfair that he comes at the end of a season that’s seen the return of William Forsythe’s “Artifact” and the premiere of Wayne McGregor’s startling “Eden/Eden.” “Concordia” simply doesn’t come across with the conceptual richness, or texture of either McGregor’s or Forsythe’s pieces. Still, as an effort from a young choreographer, it looks like a respectable stepping stone on the way to even bigger ideas.

More revelatory was George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” – a powerhouse which comes disguised as a pretty ballet with lovely white tutus and glittering tiaras, and was notable on opening night for the number of debuts in its eight principal roles. A work of exquisite beauty, set to the music of the same title by Georges Bizet, “Symphony in C” is a true test of a company’s mettle – from corps de ballet to principal-- since its technical challenges offer no place to hide. Either you can do it with style or you can’t do it at all.

It was a tough night for the corps de ballet, which largely lacked the expansiveness that the Balanchine choreography and Bizet music begs for. In the first two movements particularly, they seemed ragged and sluggish, as if they hoped that at a slower pace no one would notice that feet were not pointing and arabesques were wobbly.

Nevertheless, leading the first movement, the rock-solid Vanessa Zahorian brought a soubrette’s charm to her pas de deux with Gonzalo Garcia, whose announcement that he plans to depart the company at the end of this season has made his every appearance on stage a bittersweet occasion.

In the sublime second movement, Yuan Yuan Tan offered her accustomed regal composure. If there seemed to be a shade of distant coolness between her and partner Tiit Helimets, it was nevertheless a refined and engaging performance.

Not so, for Molly Smolen, who was largely unsuccessful at conveying a very-much-needed graciousness in the notoriously difficult third movement. Smolen has gotten a lot of the hardest technical assignments of the season, perhaps because she gives the impression of solidity, but the swift, allegro footwork of this hair-raising section of the ballet seemed to sneak up and ambush her. To be sure, it’s never easy to have to jump side-by-side with Pascal Molat, who sails easily through two turns in the air in the time of her single turn, and elicits spontaneous gasps and chuckles from the audience. Molat does more than serve up the lofty leaps, though. His knack for phrasing and warmth shows us that dancing is not just steps, any more than an ode is just words on a page.

Also making a strong debut was Sarah van Patten, newly promoted to principal this season. Van Patten, partnered sometimes unsteadily by soloist Hansuke Yamamoto, has discovered an appealing glamour and warmth onstage that gave her steps--even faltering ones –a sparkle as she led the fourth movement.

Looking more energetic was Lar Lubovitch’s “Elemental Brubeck,” an over-long commission to three recordings by Dave Brubeck that was fueled by a jet-propelled Garcia and an easy-going sweet romance between Katita Waldo and Ruben Martin in the duet. It decently filled out Program 7, running in rep with Program 6, which features old favorites such as Julia Adams’ mesmerizing “Night” and Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” in addition to the premiere of Helgi Tomasson’s newest work, “On Common Ground.”

This last, though not one of Tomasson’s best ballets—the choreography for a fearsome quartet of Tina LeBlanc, Lorena Feijoo, Joan Boada and Davit Karapetyan, plus the trio of Elana Altman, Jennifer Stahl and Rory Hohenstein has a feel of spiky, mid-1950’s Balanchine -- nevertheless has a way of sticking in one’s mind days after the performance.

The program notes gave little hint as to Tomasson’s intentions, however the Ned Rorem score against Sandra Woodall’s visuals – blood red streaks projected on the back, and a raft of gigantic gingko leaves floating above –were striking and clearly invited further thought.

A bit of research reveals the odd fact that in post A-bomb Hiroshima, a gingko tree only a few miles from ground zero was the first thing to bloom after the war. This hardy perennial has since become a symbol of hope and renewal – an apt metaphor for our times, and a forward-looking expression for a company that now looks ahead to its 75th anniversary season in the fall.

Keeping Dances Alive

How do you keep a dance alive?

Dance is perhaps the most fleeting of all the performing arts and I sometimes marvel that we’ve been able to preserve any ballets at all. Sure, there are videos and films, but the real art of the ballet is still passed on in oral tradition and you’d be surprised how much of the ballet repertoire exists only in the memories of the people who danced it.

So, let’s say you had a hankering to put together a famous work created, maybe 70 years ago, or even a work made last year. A musician could pull out a score and set to work learning it immediately. For dance, though, things are a little bit different.

Although there are several notation systems for movement– Labanotation and Benesh are among the best-known –unlike musicians and composers, many dancers and choreographers can’t read or write in either one. Most rely instead on memories, recordings, and the feeling for movements stored in their muscles from years of doing a ballet. Trained to pick up a series of steps within minutes and retain them --plus any changes a choreographer might make – it is the dancers who keep these works alive over the years.

Even though videos and films have helped to preserve dance immensely, recordings can be unreliable—any misstep from a dancer can be carried through the years as choreographic gospel. And a film also won’t necessarily relay the inspirations or feelings that breathe life into a step.

Enter the repetiteur – the ballet master or mistress whose job it is to guard the collective memory of these works.

On a warm afternoon, in the Contra Costa Ballet studios, dancers of Company C Contemporary Ballet are still scattered about the studio readying for rehearsal when Donald Mahler, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman, enters and chats with the Company C’s ballet mistress Lou Fancher and director Charles Anderson.
“You ready?” calls out Mahler finally as he settles into a chair at the front of the studio, “You swear?”

A ballet master of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Mahler is in Walnut Creek for a whirlwind couple of weeks, during which he’ll stage “Dark Elegies,” one of Tudor’s most somber and difficult ballets on this young troupe of dancers.

As the dancers scurry into place for the opening, a sudden change comes over their faces, as if something had suddenly clouded their eyes. The mood shifts palpably and suddenly all focus is on the quietly anguished Gianna Davy and Elliott Gordon Mercer, who dance a pas de deux in the center of the room.

Austere and emotionally weighty, Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” was created in 1937 for Ballet Rambert—now the Rambert Dance Company and Britain’s oldest dance company. Tudor’s Expressionist choreography, filled with angular breaks, and twisting limbs, seems to match the wrenching music, Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” or “Songs on the Death of Children.”

Although there is no explicit narrative, the two scenes of this one-act ballet clearly paint a picture of a small community in mourning for the loss of their children. Through choreography laced with fiendishly difficult steps and jagged body angles, Tudor strives to show the inner turmoil outwardly without launching into histrionics – a balance that is a difficult one to master, and the devil can be in the details.

Only a few minutes into a run of the ballet, Mahler shakes his head.
“No, that’s not right,” he says pointing at the feet of the women corps, “That’s not right. Let’s stop. Let’s fix that.”

He adjusts the emphasis of where they’re placing their feet, corrects the direction slightly. The changes seem small and perhaps very minor, but ultimately, it makes a clear difference to the quality of their movements.

Mahler’s association with the Tudor legacy dated back to his own youth, when he hitchhiked from Syracuse to New York for his first taste of ballet in the big city.

Mahler studied with Tudor and Margaret Craske in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, then danced for the National Ballet of Canada and Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where he would later become the Director of the Ballet. Now considered an expert on the work of Antony Tudor, he spends much of his time staging the choreographer’s works for such companies as American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, Ballet West, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Alberta Ballet.

Like the most skillful ballet masters, Mahler has a mental file not only of each ballet, but also of the many variations that may have been made over the years. Mahler will not just set what he has stored in his memory banks, but he also continues to refines those recollections, enabling him to stage each work in a way that he feels will be true to Tudor’s intention, and yet still work on the dancers in front of him.

Mahler, a cheerful raconteur with numerous amusing and woolly stories, cites a section of the “Dark Elegies” in which the dancers are on their knees on the floor and then tilt backward at an angle. For years, he says, he set the tilt at a 45-degree angle backward. More recently he had an encounter with a dancer who had worked with Tudor and was certain that the dancers had leaned backward all the way until their heads touched the floor.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said, “Because no one else seemed to remember that, but then much later, I saw a very old clip of film of the ballet, and there they were, all the way back.”

Back in the rehearsal, Mahler makes indications with his hands and murmurs to Fancher, “You’ll have to have them work on that. That should be fixed.”
Fancher nods, and you can see her writing the mental note to herself. In another week, Mahler will return home, and it will be up to her and the dancers to carry it on.

Company C Contemporary Ballet performs “Dark Elegies” along with “3 Epitaphs,” “Hush,” and “Firebird” at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton on Saturday (April 7) at 2 pm and 8 pm. For more information, call (925) 931-3444, www.companycballet.org

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.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Words on Dance: Tina Le Blanc

Few dancers of this generation so clearly embody the all-American ballerina as Tina LeBlanc, who steps onto stage for Words on Dance on April 30-- not to dance, but to talk about a career which began in 1984 at the world-renowned Joffrey Ballet.

LeBlanc, who will be interviewed by fellow Joffrey alum Leslie Carothers at the Cowell Theater, danced under Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino for eight years before joining San Francisco Ballet as a principal in 1992. Described as one of the finest ballerinas of her generation, she has danced roles from the classical to the contemporary, and has been widely acclaimed for her technical wizardy and the elegance of her lines. LeBlanc is, nonetheless, down-to-earth and unassuming about her accomplishments, which include juggling a career as one of SFB’s leading ballerinas with her role as mom to two young sons, 4 and 9 years old. But hearing about this sort of balancing act, along with the inspirations that drive artists like LeBlanc to new heights, is just a part of what makes the Words on Dance events so appealing to the balletomanes in the audience.

Founded in 1994, Words on Dance is unusual in the arena of dance lecture-interviews in that the format centers on dancers being interviewed by other dancers. It establishes what Words on Dance founder and producer Deborah DuBowy thinks of as more of an oral history than a lecture, where you’re likely to hear less of the dry facts and more of the kind of fascinating details that bring the dance world to life. The combination of interview, along with rare, archival film clips-- many of which come from the private collections of the artists themselves and often have never been seen before in public-- lends a uniquely personal voice to the recollections of these artists, who often speak frankly about their struggles and personal challenges on the way to success.

Among the luminaries who have conversed onstage for Words on Dance are both internationally and locally renowned guests such as Violette Verdy, Edward Villella, Mark Morris, Peter Martins, Maria Tallchief, Frederic Franklin, Martine van Hamel, Cynthia Gregory, Helgi Tomasson, Michael Smuin, Joe Goode, Alonzo King, as well as San Francisco Ballet principals like Evelyn Cisneros, Joanna Berman, Yuri Possokhov, Lorena Feijoo and Muriel Maffre. In 2006, Words on Dance celebrated the Balanchine Centennial with a an ambitious program that brought together a cross-generational group of Balanchine dancers, including Merrill Ashley, Allegra Kent and Tomasson interviewed by Boston Ballet’s artistic director--and an early Words on Dance participant--Mikko Nissinen. In 2008 she plans a similar tribute, this time with a focus on one of the 20th century’s great choreographers, Jerome Robbins, under the auspices of a grant from the Jerome Robbins Trust.

Given all the history that is recounted onstage, archiving has become perhaps the most important component what DuBowy considers a larger documentation project. This year, DuBowy has announced that the main portion of the Words on Dance archives will go to San Francisco Ballet’s Center for Dance Education, who will also benefit from part of the proceeds of the April 30 event.

LeBlanc’s acquaintance with DuBowy stretches back to 1995, when LeBlanc attended one of the earliest Words on Dance events, Violette Verdy in conversation with Mikko Nissinen who was at the time, a principal with San Francisco Ballet. Over the years, she says, she and DuBowy talked often about offering a WOD event centered on her career, particularly because it would give audiences the chance to hear more about the enduring legacy of the Joffrey Ballet.

From its first tour across America, with the dancers packed into a station wagon and a U-Haul toting their theater cases behind, the Joffrey Ballet has been thought of as the quintessentially American company. With a dizzyingly diverse repertoire and a coterie of highly individual dancers, she laughingly describes it as a company of misfits, but in a good way.

“Mr. Joffrey would bring things into the company repertoire for certain people, he would search out pieces that would show them off,” she recalls, noting that her first breakout role with the company was the full-length “La fille mal gardee,” in which she attracted the attention of the New York critics with her lyricism, as well as her “assurance and emotional range.”

It’s those qualities which endear her to San Francisco Ballet audiences now, in roles from Kitri in Don Quixote to the dreamer in Julia Adam’s “Night.” But there is lurking question as to whether the Words on Dance retrospective means that she’s considering herself at the end of distinguished career? Fear not, at least for this year.

Retirement is definitely on my mind, it’s looming,” says the 40-year old LeBlanc with a wry tone. “I feel like I’m constantly pulling myself together to get through the daily grind, but I’m committed through the 2008 season, which will be SFB’s 75th anniversary.”

This season, she's hosting the Community Matinees sponsored by the Center for Dance Education, which she says has been enjoyable. But she's really hankering to work in the studio with kids, so she sees teaching in her future almost certainly.

"I think I have a gift for working with children," she says, "I love to work with people who are hungry to learn. I love to be in the studio, teaching them and working with them."

Already she's taught for the SFB School's audition tour, an experience that she describes as depressing and exhilarating and exciting.

"It was eye-opening, but it was also hard to see so many kids come to audition, when the reality was we could only take a few," she says with a sigh, " There are just so many kids out there who study and have these hopes and dreams and it's difficult to know that they may never make it."


This article originally appeared in In Dance Magazine.

WHO: San Francisco Ballet Principal Ballerina Tina LeBlanc onstage in conversation with former Joffrey Ballerina Leslie Carothers
WHAT: Words on Dance
WHERE: Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA
WHEN: Monday, April 30, 2007 at 7:30 pm
HOW MUCH: $65
MORE INFO: 415-345-7575 or online @ www.fortmason.org/boxoffice

Paul Taylor: Lines of Loss, Piece Period, Airs

The world is an off-kilter, perhaps incomprehensibly violent place in Paul Taylor’s restive new work, “Lines of Loss,” which had its West Coast premiere when San Francisco Performances presented the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Tuesday night.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” author C.S. Lewis once wrote, and the observation rings truer than ever in “Lines of Loss,” where grief intermingles with danger, and the choreographer offers no easy answers as to why.

Silhouetted against Santo Loquasto’s immense, darkly striated background, the eleven dancers process onto the stage as if entering a church. The mood is one of barely contained emotion, rumbling under the polite white unitards, and running like an undercurrent in the music -- by composers as various as Guillaume de Machaut, Christopher Tye, Jac Body, John Cage, Arvo Part and Alfred Snittke.

Each section of the ballet takes its title from the last name of the composer, which leaves a certain implication hanging in the air. In “Tye,” Lisa Viola’s heartfelt contractions and pulls of the back suggested a soul yearning to break free, while Robert Kleinendorst’s twitchy solo in “Body” described a strange loss of self-control.

But not just portraits of grief, Taylor also turns to scenes that grieve us. In “Cage” spiky pairs of men pound the floor rhythmically, and menace two women who have wandered into their clutches – Julie Tice and Michelle Fleet—and in a second section titled “Tye,” a seemingly idyllic community fractures into fisticuffs.

It was an enigmatic ballet that at times seemed to make the audience uneasy – between sections there was often only rapt silence instead of the usual unnecessary applause. By the time a tempestuous Annmaria Mazzini unfurled a trembling and searing solo in the center of the circle of dancers, the sense of high emotion was palpable in the room.

For the Paul Taylor Dance Company this season marks the last installment of a five-year running engagement at San Francisco Performances, and if you’ve been putting off seeing the company, now is the time to go, because the 53-year old troupe isn’t planning to return to SFP until 2009. A prolific choreographer, Taylor’s works range from the exhilarating abstractions to darkly ominous mediations to bright comic fluff, and this opening program, like the other two which the company performs through Sunday, had a taste of each.

The evening’s comic relief came wrapped up in Taylor’s 1962 “Piece Period,” a relatively jolly, but also relatively forgettable bit of slapstick. You know you’re in for a bit of a romp when the curtain goes up on Richard Chen See in parti-colored tights and tunic with a jaunty beret on his head. “Piece Period” which the company hasn’t revived since 1979, sports an oddball menagerie of characters in some kind of absurdist village, dancing to another mix of Vivaldi, Telemann, Haydn, Scarlatti, Beethoven and Francesco Bonporti.

Daffy without being too dimwitted, “Piece Period” flaunted some of Taylor’s most engaging dancers, Viola in a blue bustier flashing sly glints at the audience, Kleinendorst all bluster in candy red waistcoat and powdered wig, and a mincing triumvirate of women in pie crust collars bouncing hip bolsters under their skirts. The cartoons kept coming, and the dancers played them for all they were worth, with Amy Young notable for her ability to make silliness look classy.

The evening closed with one of Taylor’s most satisfying ballets, the 1978 “Airs,” to the music of G.F. Handel. If Taylor’s choreography idiosyncrasies--those familiar circle dances, the peripatetic meanderings into and out of groups, the characteristic curved arms—look tired in other later works, here the patterns and steps hang together organically, with a sweeping logic that still allows the individual dancers to breathe freely. Parisa Khobdeh’s beguiling zest and Young’s gentle sways into spiral shapes stood out, as did Laura Halzack’s serene arms in the dreamy finale.

Diablo Ballet: Remembering Hamlet, Dancing Miles, Grand Pas d'Action

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has been pared to its essence in Viktor Kabaniaev’s “Remembering Hamlet,” which Diablo Ballet unveiled at its weekend performances at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts last Friday and Saturday.

Staged as a three-person drama, Kabaniaev’s latest work offers an abstract, capsule view of inner turmoil – a meeting in Purgatory of the three lost souls of one of Shakespeare’s most oft-cited tragedies.

The arrangement is simple, like a severe ikebana. Three lonely figures -- who start out sitting primly on black, coffin-like boxes -- each dance one by one in Expressionist, almost emotional solos. Lauren Main de Lucia, in a blood-red dress, devours the stage with deep Martha Graham-like stretches; Tina Kay Bohnstedt, in white, ripples as she pours backwards over the edge of her box; and as the central man of inaction, Edward Stegge turns his solo into a continuous throw of momentum with pulses of movement that seem to ripple outward through his limbs.

There is, nevertheless, some room for refinement in this production, which uses an atmospheric mix of music by Dmitri Shostakovich combined with vibrating basso sounds created on a metal sculpture by local artist and musician Nicolas Van Krijdt. The musical score capably builds in tension, although not-quite-intelligible quotes from the play—read in low monotones—bring no further clarity to the scene and seem unnecessary. We all know who the players are and the spoken lines bring an odd note of literality that jars one out of the meditative experience.

Still, “Remembering Hamlet” made for an intriguingly moody interlude in an otherwise fairly bright and upbeat program, which opened with Main and David Fonnegra in a peppy version of the famous duet for the Liberty Belle and El Capitan from George Balanchine’s rousing John Philip Sousa-inspired “Stars and Stripes.” If Main’s Belle tended a bit too much toward the simpering, still she displayed a satisfying technical strength, while Fonnegra’s cavalier put out loads of jaunty vigor, all adding up to a pleasant pairing with solid chemistry.

Also on the program was former Diablo dancer Kelly Teo’s 1999 “Dancing Miles,” which looked much better in the more intimate setting of the Lesher Center than at its Zellerbach Hall outing in January. Set to tunes recorded by Miles Davis such as “In a Silent Way,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and “Time after Time,” Teo’s loose jazzy, Bob Fosse shoulder and arm moves mixed with some compact bullet-speed choreography bore a lot of similarity to his own style as a dancer. Although the piece as a whole broke no new ground, its light humor and perky energy sat comfortably on the three couples -- in particular Mayo Sugano and Matthew Linzer.

The evening closed with co-artistic director Nikolai Kabaniaev’s humorous 1996 ballet-meets modern diversion, “Grand Pas d’Action.” By turns fluid and then slapstick, “Grand Pas d’Action” pits quotes from the famous classical ballets -- it’s even set to music by the late Romantic composer Alexander Glazunov – against modern freeform. Cartoonish and goofy, nevertheless, it had a few serious moments, many of them delivered by Cynthia Sheppard, who was notable as the modern dancer who throws caution to the wind, and herself at the balletically vainglorious Jekyns Pelaez. Linzer, as Sheppard’s modern dance cohort teamed again with Sugano, in full tutu and tiara regalia, to round out the cast.

San Francisco Ballet: Eden/Eden, Chi-Lin, Spring Rounds, Pacific, The Fifth Season,Carousel, Fancy Free

The landscape is spare, but far from serene in “Eden/Eden,” Wayne McGregor’s ambitious and compelling ballet, which San Francisco Ballet gave its American premiere on Program 4 of their repertory season on Tuesday night. This is risky work for SFB, but ultimately both rewarding and haunting.

Created originally for the Stuttgart Ballet, “Eden/Eden” is ostensibly about cloning, but, never simplistic, it’s also a meditation on the seductive intersection of technology and the human machine.

“The process is as follows,” intones one of the five unseen vocalists in a scientific drone. Over the pulsing Steve Reich score from his opera “Three Tales”—conducted here by Gary Sheldon—their measured monologue sets us initially in the midst of the cloning debate.

Muriel Maffre, in flesh-colored skivvies and skullcap, ascends into a stark spotlight, all androgynous, hairless muscle, while projections assembled by Ravi Deepres unfold like a universe behind her. Maffre has never had a problem with finding the beauty in an ugly line, and in “Eden/Eden” she makes the most of a torqued spine and limbs yanked in every direction. Joined in a weirdly agonistic duet by Gonzalo Garcia, they create a vision of biology gone haywire.

Like Autons, the creepy mannequins of sci-fi’s “Dr. Who,” the dancers seem to multiply, eventually filling the stage with flails, as if the impulses for each movement were directed from the wrong nerve endings. Bathed in Charles Balfour’s sickly green-gray light, the figures in this fearsome gymnasium are nearly impossible to tell apart. And the whole exercise becomes even more disturbing when they shed their skullcaps and don Ursula Bombshell’s tunics to become individuals. There’s a moment of mental resistance--you don’t want to believe that these “Bladerunner” replicants could ever become human.

McGregor--whose metier in his own company, Random Dance, is modern dance-- has his own lexicon of movement that is far from ballet-based, although curiously he utilizes the women’s pointe work effectively, perhaps because his understanding of the technique stems from expediency rather than tradition. Nevertheless, the dancers eat up this style and spit it out like nails, offering performances of surprising depth and aggression. If you find yourself seduced by the physical beauty and apparent perfection of the alien uber-humans before you--including Katita Waldo, Pascal Molat, Rory Hohenstein, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Moises Martin, and notably corps members Dana Genshaft and Hayley Farr-- you might notice that there are no apples on the silvery tree hovering in this Eden. That fruit has been plucked and we’ve all taken a big bite.

Only a few weeks ago, when William Forsythe brought his company to Cal Performances, I wondered idly if San Francisco Ballet would ever perform a piece like his “Three Atmospheric Studies,” a complex, heavily text-based, but thrilling work with almost no traditional ballet steps. We have our answer. SFB Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson has taken an enormous risk in presenting McGregor’s very unpretty, but very absorbing work, and we can only hope that there more of these sort of challenges lie in the future.

In a different vein, two other works premiered on the ballet’s Program 5 on Thursday night—none more anticipated than Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance),” made originally for New York City Ballet. Set to excerpts from Richard Rodgers’ “Carousel” –the grand “Carousel” waltz and “If I Loved You”—this version offers a sketched, dream ballet of Julie’s ill-fated romance with smooth-talking carny Billy, danced on Thursday by Sarah van Patten and Pierre-François Vilanoba. In a lemon-colored dress with matching ribbon, Van Patten brings a lovely unsuspecting freshness to her role, although Vilanoba is perhaps a little too likeable to convince as her no-account beau.

The main weakness in this “Carousel,” though, is the choreography. Wheeldon jam-packs every count with steps and the result, while impressive, hasn’t quite nailed the feeling of giddy freedom. Many of the lifts in Van Patten and Vilanoba’s duet were lovely, but with all the swooning and the swooping happening early in their waltz, there was very little room for emotional build.

Wheeldon might do well to take a look at Jerome Robbins’ “Fancy Free,” which got more than a little lift from Molat, Anderson and Garcia as a trio of roguish sailors on shore leave. The young Robbins—who reportedly refined and pared back the more cartoonish antics of this larky 1944 vignette—offers more bang for your buck with a twitch of an eyebrow than all the swooning lifts in the world can accomplish. If the dancers (and the orchestra) could have been a little looser and jazzier to match the bounding Leonard Bernstein score, it was nonetheless a delightful excursion that brought an instant smile to the lips from the first burst of energy onstage.

Filling out Program 4 were the Arcadian gambols of Paul Taylor’s “Spring Rounds,” led on Tuesday night by Vanessa Zahorian and Garrett Anderson, and Helgi Tomasson’s “Chi-Lin” with an inscrutable Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role. Program 5 saw the return of Mark Morris’ “Pacific” and Tomasson’s “The Fifth Season,” with the music delivered under the capable baton of Martin West.

Alvin Ailey diva gets unexpected -- but wholly appropriate -- 25th anniversary gift

You could say the Earth moved for Renee Robinson, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater diva who celebrated her 25th anniversary with the company in a special performance at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall last week.

Of course, it moved a little more than the dancers might have liked, but the New York-based company seems to take in stride little things like Thursday's 4.2 magnitude temblor, which struck during intermission.

Read on the Chronicle site.

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.

San Francisco Ballet: Firebird, Artifact, The Dance House

Yuri Possokhov surely has a goofy romantic streak in him. In his first commission for San Francisco Ballet as official Choreographer in Residence, Possokhov’s new version of the old Ballet Russes boy-meets-bird classic, “Firebird,” has a sleek contemporary aesthetic, but the moment when it really takes flight is in the sweetly naïve “first love” pas de deux for the Prince and Princess, danced at the premiere on Thursday night by Tiit Helimets and Rachel Viselli.

Possokhov originally created a version of “Firebird” for the Oregon Ballet Theatre in 2004, although the word is that he made substantial changes for this production. Nevertheless, although it had some standout moments—many of which center on a gleeful Pascal Molat, chewing the scenery as the demon Kaschei—this “Firebird” in the end doesn’t quite satisfy.

It’s not for lack of skillful collaborators. Adding the titular Firebird to her list of exotic creature roles, Yuan Yuan Tan gave the impression less of the mercurial critter we’ve come to expect, but a rather grander more haughty bird, and Helimets brings an doodle-headed charm to the not-too-bright-but-very-lucky Prince Ivan, who wins her allegiance and assistance in defeating the demon so he can win his princess.

Costume designs by Sandra Woodall explicitly call up the ballet’s Russian origins, but seem at odds with Yuri Zhukov’s elegant, rather minimalist sets. Taken separately, the pretty Russian dresses and the airy skeletal masses of the décor would stand up well, but seen together, they leave one with the sense of being half-in and half-out of a fairytale. The orchestra, under the baton of Martin West, also sounded unusually sluggish particularly through the dance of the demons and the final apotheosis, perhaps partly accounting for why the finale of the ballet, a scene usually heart-breaking in its gloriousness, appeared a little underwhelming.

Inevitably, however, one can’t help but compare this version with the original “Firebird,” a lavish work created by Michel Fokine in 1910 to a dazzling score by Igor Stravinsky that was seen locally a few years back when the Kirov Ballet brought a reconstruction to Cal Performances. While Possokhov retains most of the original libretto--conceived by Serge Diaghilev out of several Russian folktales-- his choice of the shorter “Firebird Suite,” devised by Stravinsky in 1945 instead of the full 1910 version of the score, has meant that much of the storytelling has been compressed, making for a good ballet, though not a great one.

On Thursday night, the company also returned to the blood red barre of David Bintley’s “The Dance House.” Created for SFB in 1994 in the maelstrom of the AIDS crisis, “The Dance House” had something of a histrionic feel when it debuted, but the years have softened the edges a little and abstracted the ballet into a better, though still programmatic sketch of doomed lives in the microcosm of a ballet classroom. In the central role of the bringer of death, Gonzalo Garcia unleashed a decidedly earthy, oddly sympathetic take on a problematic character created originally by Anthony Randazzo, while Tina LeBlanc and Kristin Long reprised the roles they created in the first and last movements respectively, joined by Viselli who gave a respectable inner quiet to her adagio pas de deux with Helimets.

More eagerly anticipated though, was the return of “Artifact Suite” William Forsythe’s deconstructed ballet which dazzled audiences last season, and which arrived on Program 1 on Tuesday night. With a lead cast as diverse as Muriel Maffre, Pierre-François Vilanoba, Lorena Feijoo, Pascal Molat and Elana Altman, it was clear that Forsythe’s idiosyncratic work is meant to look vastly different on every body. But just as clearly, it’s Maffre who makes the most of this freedom. Surrounded by ranks of corps members signalling enigmatic semaphores behind her, she traces a long arc with her leg that swoops into a teetering dive for maximum effect.

Notable in the masses of humanity that fill the stage was corps member Lily Rogers, whose incised, almost insolent lines brought unexpected clarity to the second movement. Rogers’ debut next week in the role of the Firebird should worth seeing.

A ballet like “Artifact” should always be on the program with a George Balanchine work. On Program 1 it was “Divertimento No. 15,” to the Mozart work of the same name and conducted by George Cleve. Watching the patterned brush of dozens of legs, the push through the hips in a step forward, the wide sweep of an arm, and then seeing it taken to a new extreme by Forsythe was like watching the journey that ballet has taken over the years. Among the five principal women of “Divertimento,” Katita Waldo offered exactly the right delicate pointe placement, turning mere steps into sparkling chains, which is not to detract from Kristin Long, Frances Chung, Vanessa Zahorian and Viselli, who navigated their solos with cheerful aplomb, as did the trio of principal men Gennadi Nedvigin, Jaime Garcia Castilla and Nicolas Blanc.

Also on Program 2 was Helgi Tomasson’s jaunty “Blue Rose,” and rounding out Program 1 was Jacques Garnier’s “Aunis” given a speedy slingshot velocity by Garrett Anderson, James Sofranko, and Rory Hohenstein.

San Francisco Ballet: 2007 Opening Gala

It’s not often that pieces on a gala program surprise you, but San Francisco Ballet’s Opening Gala at the War Memorial Opera House on Wednesday night went beyond the usual star-studded pieces d’occasion to offer an evening of thoughtful, often provocative dance.

None was more surprising or engrossing than Yuri Possokhov’s “Bitter Tears,” a world premiere unveiled by Muriel Maffre, accompanied by countertenor Mark Crayton singing the famous “Stille Amare” or “Poison Aria” from G.F. Handel's “Tolomeo.” Combining spare modernism with a formality that evoked the court ballets of the 17th and 18th century, this startling work melded theater, opera and dance to explore tantalizing imagery. Even if Possokhov’s intentions were not immediately apparent to anyone unfamiliar with Handel’s tale of betrayal and death in ancient Egypt, the drama playing out onstage was nonetheless compelling. From her stately entrance, clad in a pale flesh colored leotard and a flame gold skirt, to her shedding of the skirt to reveal a diaphanous tutu frame, to her final throes in beautifully ugly sharpened angles, Maffre embodied the wisping vapor of poison itself twining around Crayton as he described his slow descent into death. This was not your usual gala fare.

As devotees of the company know, Maffre has announced her retirement from the company at the end of this season, though clearly she is still at the height of her artistic powers. Maffre has never seemed to worry much about going out on a limb in any performance, as if somehow she respects her audience enough to know they’ll appreciate the challenge of even the most esoteric interpretations, and the audience responds in equal measure.

An enigmatic air also surrounded Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith, who floated through dreamy, peripatetic acrobatics in a duet from Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain,” set to the music of Arvo Part. No less impressive, if more violent in its undertones was the Armenian-born Davit Karapetyan’s “Last Breath,” an impressively caustic solo to music from the film “Matrix Revolutions.”

The program also included several revivals of works from the 1970s-- among the most successful, Jacques Garnier’s 1979 ballet “Aunis,” which kicked off the entire program. Aunis is the old name for the area of France on the Atlantic coast around La Rochelle, and appropriately enough it was up to the trio of Frenchmen -- Nicolas Blanc, Pierre-François Vilanoba and Pascal Molat – to put their own stamp on the winged contractions and flights across the stage to Maurice Pacher’s arrangements of folktunes on accordion.

Tina LeBlanc and Gennadi Nedvigin gave their own wholly convincing spin to Gerald Arpino’s “L’Air d’Esprit,” a Romantic-tinged tribute to the great ballerina Olga Spessivtseva set to the music of the “Giselle” composer Adolph Adam. Nedvigin was more than suitably airy, but it was bravura precision and speed from LeBlanc – who surely has the fastest feet in the West -- that dazzled with its unexpected edginess.

In a different vein, San Francisco Ballet’s newest principal Molly Smolen offered a solo, “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan,” accompanied on the piano by Roy Bogas. Smolen was coached in the role by Lynn Seymour -- for whom Sir Frederick Ashton originally created the piece in 1975 -- and she evinces something of Seymour’s wildness as she throws herself almost instinctively into the pure sensation and feeling of the arches and twining arms. If the deceptively simple-looking “Five Dances” seems a touch dated, it is nevertheless a credit to Smolen’s expressive powers that she kept it interesting to the end.

In a more classical vein, Lorena Feijoo and Tiit Helimets worked hard to infuse the duet from the second act of “Giselle” with a Romantic glow. Vanessa Zahorian gave her Aurora a bit of American attack in the grand pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” which SFB will perform in its entirety later in the season. Partnered by Gonzalo Garcia, who whipped through his solos with panache, Zahorian looks like the details of the role are still in development, even as the dancing hits a solid note technically.

Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun and Vilanoba unfurled a quiet air of composure and the intensity from the inside out to Helgi Tomasson’s contemplative “7 for Eight,” while Kristin Long and Joan Boada put the champagne fizz into Tomasson’s “Soirees Musicales,” a frothy display of virtuoso sauciness to the music of Benjamin Britten.

The evening, under the baton of Martin West, ended with the buoyant finale from George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” led by a sunny Frances Chung and Garrett Anderson.