Features

The Sniper’s Sister, an essay for the SF Chronicle about my brother’s leave from Army service in Iraq, part one.

He was the same Emmet, only buffed. He zipped up the street on his tricked-out mountain bike, dismounting with unruly grace. He’d grown his hair well past Army-regulation length — it was fuzzy on the sides, like a puppy’s. Frayed cut-off corduroys stopped short of chiseled calves; a green T- shirt stretched across his muscled chest. He grinned with that brand of wry mischief that has always made my mother and me do whatever he pleased.

The Sniper’s Sister, essay about my brother’s leave from Iraq, part two.

There were photos of Emmet holding a stray puppy his platoon had adopted, of his teammates loaded with 40 pounds of hand grenades in specially equipped vests, of the crew arrayed around the Stryker vehicle, the soon-to-be-dead platoon leader at the edge of the shot. Nothing remotely Abu Ghraib worthy, to my immediate relief.

And yet Emmet’s stories kept coming, about cars rushing toward the convoy, no way to tell if they were carrying bombs or if the driver was just plain scared. About swooping in on houses via Blackhawk in the middle of the night with only the most rudimentary language skills to help the soldiers find weapons, and physical force to fill in where words couldn’t. About women holding dead children in the street, little more Emmet’s team members could do but bandage wounds and stare with stricken faces.

Two-part series on the Jewish partisans of World War II for the San Francisco Chronicle. Part One:

“Sonia Orbuch does not like weakness. But today, safe in her Corte Madera townhouse with its swag curtains in soothing shades of peach, Sonia is getting teary.

You might expect tears, given the story she’s telling: how 16-year-old Sonia Shainwald fled impending slaughter in the Jewish ghetto of Luboml, Poland, and finally arrived in the forests to join the Soviet anti-German resistance. There she served as a doctor’s assistant, treating the injuries of partisan fighters who embarked on regular missions to blow up Nazi trains and disrupt communications. The amputations were horrific. Her uncle was killed. But the partisan leaders imparted one key lesson: You are not allowed to cry.

And today, Sonia insists, she would not be crying were it not for her arm, recently broken in a fall and held in a sling. Sonia, 82, is dressed down in a brown velveteen tracksuit, her weight supported by a cane and her eyes less alert than usual.

“I’m a little more emotional now because of the pain medication,” she says matter-of-factly in her faint Polish accent. She gestures to a box of See’s candy. “Have a chocolate.”

She wears her amber hair well coiffed and holds her regal nose high, and even with her eyes damp there’s no mistaking the inborn strength that must have sustained her through those war years. Sonia was always one to face hard realities. When a teenager, hiding in a crawl space from the Germans for two days with 16 other Jews, Sonia realized that her mother would not live much longer, and matter-of-factly told her father that they would have to run, as Germans were beginning to liquidate the ghetto.”

The Jewish Partisans of World War II, Part Two:

German police murdered Mira Shelub’s mother during World War II; Mira, as a youth, lived two years in the Polish forest, fending off cold and lice and typhus and hunger until liberation by the Russians in 1945. These are not happy memories, and yet when Mira welcomes a visitor to her Stonestown neighborhood home to talk about them, she is bubbling with excitement.

Her face, with its tasteful eyeliner and fuchsia lipstick, remains squeezed in a bright smile; she strokes her interviewer’s hand, calls her “dear” as they enter her immaculate living room with its shag carpet. Mira sits in a chartreuse armchair, her tiny 5-foot-1 frame leaning forward with eagerness. She looks like she can hardly keep from rising.

“I like to talk about my story, because it’s the only time I can talk about my husband,” she says in her exuberant accent, with its richly rolling r’s and crisp t’s. “And besides, I am proud of our story. Because we did not go to death without doing anything. We fought the Nazis for a better tomorrow. We were young and brave, and we put up a fight.”

To Mira, her years with the Jewish partisan fighters are as much a tale of romance as a tale of survival and revenge. Mira met her future husband, Norman, a partisan leader who blew up trains and attacked German police stations, in the forest. They found a will to live, and to fight back, in each other.

Tina LeBlanc to Leave SF Ballet, a profile of the retiring ballerina, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/11/09

Tina LeBlanc is getting teary, but not because of her impending farewell to the ballet stage.

“I was totally crushed,” LeBlanc says in a quiet room at the San Francisco Ballet Building, remembering the day she auditioned for the summer training program at American Ballet Theatre in New York. She had made it into the school the summer before; even though she was just 15, she knew her dancing was strong.

“One of the judges saw my confusion when my number wasn’t called. She called me over and said, ‘You’re just too short. You haven’t grown.’”

LeBlanc, 5 feet 1 – “I have been measured lately at 5 foot 1 1/2!” – raises a hand to a watery eye and laughs. “It was all I could do to walk out of that audition without bursting into tears. It was a blow. Not that I regret anything that has happened in my career.”

It is hard to imagine what in LeBlanc’s 27 years of professional dancing – 17 with San Francisco Ballet – she could have to regret. At 42, faint traces of gray framing her no-nonsense face, she has entered the growing pantheon of mold-breaking Ballet ballerinas who prove that skill, artistry and passion trump body-type strictures. With her pliant feet and diminutive-but-strong-as-nails legs, she is a supreme technician, lending sparkling clarity to ballets by George Balanchine and Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. But her gala goodbye performance May 9 will surely also show what has made her a total dancer, valuing nuance, precision and musicality over gymnastics and flash, whether weeping as “Swan Lake’s” Odette or hoofing it up as the cowgirl in Agnes DeMille’s “Rodeo.”

The “Sensible” Way, a profile of ODC/Dance founder Brenda Way, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/25/07

Brenda Way is not the kind of woman you’d think of as flitting, but that’s what she’s doing this gray morning in the kitchen of her Oakland home. She twirls to put on the teakettle and reaches for sugar on a high shelf with an agility that belies a recent hip operation. She takes a seat at the table almost giddily, eager to share her reactions to Trisha Brown’s latest dance at Cal Performances. But when the conversation turns to her own work, her blue eyes become serious and her makeup-free face assumes its usual expression of formidable thoughtfulness.

“I feel so compelled by what’s going on around me,” she says, cradling her mug in both hands. “The political situation has just been dire. And what you’re doing when you make new work is saying, ‘Consider this.’ ”

Way, 64, who founded the company now known as ODC/Dance 36 years ago, has been uncannily prescient in what she’s asked her audiences to consider. In 2000, her “Crash” evoked the irrational exuberance that preceded 1929’s Black Tuesday — and the dot-com stock market faltered soon after. But Way’s most arresting moment of topicality came in 2004, when her “On a Train Heading South” adorned the stage with hanging blocks of slowly melting ice — two years before Al Gore made us all acknowledge a certain inconvenient truth.

Normally, after such a socially charged piece, Way would retreat to pure movement invention, but last year she pressed onward with “Time Remaining,” an allegory about religious extremism. Now she’s unveiling what she conceives as the final installation of a trilogy. “A Pleasant Looking Woman in Sensible Clothes,” premiering during ODC’s annual home season this week, uses video by the Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa. In the early frames, a toy plane flies around a house. Soon more join it to form a horde.

“I thought that was how I felt about the use of terror in our lives,” Way says. “It’s invaded our homes. And this fear debilitates us.”

The title comes from a New York Times story on Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

“It’s the phrase they used to describe Samuel Alito’s wife,” Way says. “And it’s such a slam of every woman that I thought, ‘Well, excuse me!’ And I think it’s that kind of person who’s terrified by what’s going on, an ordinary housewife.”

If Way takes the Times’ phrase so personally, that might be because it evokes aspects of her. Way, who had two children before age 20, has always been domestic. And like a good wife and mother, she has often stood quietly in the background of great accomplishments — not only her children’s but also her dance company’s.

‘Damned’ if he does,: Choreographer and dancer Yuri Possokhov, the Village Voice, 10/02

“I never like obvious things,” Yuri Possokhov proclaims in his endearing Russian accent, between rehearsals at San Francisco Ballet’s bustling Civic Center headquarters. The city’s lovingly restored Opera House stands just across the street, though you’d never know it inside this borrowed windowless office, and the Ukraine-born dancer’s larger-than-life physicality seems to strain against the close confines of the room. The troupe he belongs to, America’s oldest professional ballet company, opens at City Center October 8, bringing one of his first choreographies.

“If a story says, ‘I love you, you love me,’ it should involve reality. It’s not ‘Mmmmaa!’ ” he says, bringing his hands to his lips and throwing a giant kiss. “It should be movement to show that it’s love. If it’s concretely ‘mm! mm! mm!’ “—he smooches the air frantically—”I hate it, it makes entire art go down.”

Lorena Feijoo followed mom’s pointe steps and soared on her own. Now the two are reunited, San Francisco Chronicle, 3/21/05

“I insisted I wanted to be a ballerina,” Lorena Feijoo remembers during a rehearsal break at San Francisco Ballet. She is clasping the hand of the woman next to her. Same tawny skin, same commanding brown eyes, same proud carriage: Lorena Feijoo and Lupe Calzadilla look like Russian nesting dolls, one a smaller copy of the other. Feijoo wears a red leotard and a smudge of lipstick where her mother has just kissed her cheek; mama has borrowed her daughter’s red shawl and draped it across her shoulders with theatrical elan. “How old was I when I said that, madre?”

“Dos años!” Calzadilla shouts, with her hand in the air.

“Two years old,” Feijoo says. “My God. I didn’t even know this.”

Ballet Standout: Profile of San Francisco Ballet soloist Rory Hohenstein: San Francisco Chronicle, 4/8/07

Rory Hohenstein sets down his coffee and raises his arms, and suddenly it’s as if he’s a different person.

“It’s weird internal movement all the time,” he says, describing the steps in the ballet “Eden/Eden,” stretching his chest wide and undulating his shoulders to demonstrate. His pale face, with its dusting of freckles, no longer looks so boyish; his slight 5-foot-10 frame becomes larger than life.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, his brown eyes excited. “Some ballets your body just goes crazy for.”

Hohenstein looks transformed — and it is a transformation that San Francisco Ballet audiences have been seeing a lot of lately. Six years ago, as an 18-year-old corps newbie, Hohenstein had an onstage persona more like his presence in real life: friendly, sweet, a little shy. But when Hohenstein steps out in the Opera House these days, he is something else: impassioned, unabashed and possessed of leading-man intensity. Choreographers have taken note.

“Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris, William Forsythe — everyone has singled him out,” says company ballet master Ashley Wheater. “Whenever a choreographer new to the company watches rehearsal, they always say, ‘Who’s that boy in the corner?’ And, inevitably, it’s Rory.”

What retirement? After four years, ballerina Joanna Berman takes a turn with ODC/Dance: San Francisco Chronicle, 2/23/06

A love story is playing out in a first-floor studio of the ODC Dance Commons, where two dancers push and pull and fretfully embrace as the strains of Mozart’s clarinet concerto waft through the room. The man walks toward the studio mirror and lies on his back, bent legs in the air; the woman climbs atop them and curls up like a cat. Then she stands again and, never taking her eyes off the man’s, takes slow, tender, regretful steps away.

“That was perfect at the end,” ODC/Dance Artistic Director Brenda Way says, clasping her hands with pleasure. “But don’t walk back like this.” She bows her legs like a duck and waddles, an unmistakable parody of the ballet dancer’s customary turnout.

“Really?” Joanna Berman says teasingly. “I was going to ask if I could finish like this.” She rises high on her toes, arms forming a halo around her face, and takes tiny nibbling steps, bourreeing like a perfect toy dancer in a jewelry box.

more coming soon