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Shen Wei
I’m in the Chronicle today with a review of Shen Wei Dance Arts. I entered the theater skeptical about Shen’s “The Rite of Spring” but exited a believer:
“Shen uses the two-piano reduction of Stravinsky's score, played with spine-tingling physicality by Fazil Say (at one point he plucks the piano's strings) and heard here recorded. The result is less bombastic than full orchestra but equally fearsome. The dancers shuffled with arms held rigidly by the sides in the focused manner of Chinese opera performers, charging the negative space like ionized atoms. At the first clashing chords, one dove into a somersault. The movements that followed were obsessed with the rotation of the joints, shoulders and hips torquing so that energy passed through like the crack of a whip. The dancers executed them with stark straight faces and incredible anatomical precision.
Shen's gift for visual tension is unflagging. A limb-by-limb collapse became more desperate. When the full company began walking tight circles, each in their individual orbit, you thought the stage might explode from centrifugal force.”
September 29, 2004 · 02:24 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
More delays and another take
My review of Shen Wei Dance Arts will actually run in the Chronicle tomorrow. And Thursday I’ll be checking out the National Ballet of Canada at Cal Performances, with a review appearing in the Chronicle on Saturday. In the meantime, Allan Ulrich has a very different (and as always, passionate) reaction to Shen Wei up on Voice of Dance:
“Sooner or later, shooting stars are destined to come to ground somewhere in the universe. The time may come sooner, rather than later for Shen Wei Dance Arts, which made its Northern California debut last weekend at the University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, a presentation of Cal Performances, and one that drew a smallish house at the final performance Sunday (Sept. 26). Talk about fame and its caprices. On the basis of a couple of programs, a smattering of festival dates and a handful of reviews (including what might be construed as an anointing from The New York Times), the company has been launched, inexplicably, on the national and international circuit.
Truth to tell, there was much less than met the eye and much less that pleased the ear in Shen’s vaunted The Rite of Spring (2003), and possibly more than one might have expected in the more opulent and less publicized Folding, the work on the second half of the program. Why all this interest in a dancer-choreographer who, three years ago, was scarcely a blip on any dance fan’s radar? Flavor of the decade, perhaps?”
September 28, 2004 · 04:59 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
A title at last
It's really happening. My memoir, due out from Dutton next June, now has an official title:
The Lost Night
A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder
To celebrate I thought I'd post my favorite picture of me with my father, who was killed in 1986:
The manuscript is now off to the copy editor. I think my father would like the book. It captures him.
September 23, 2004 · 12:22 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Possokhov's "Study" in England
The Financial Times’ Clement Crisp has an interesting perspective on SFB principal Yuri Possokhov’s “Study in Motion”:
“The succeeding Study in Motion is very odd.
Skryabin piano music is realised by Yury Posokhov in dance that recalls the later choreographies of Kasyan Goleizovsky, a fascinating experimentalist in 1920s Moscow who fell victim to Stalinist artistic policy. When he returned to grace in the 1960s he produced concert numbers (using Skryabin) having the non-specific intensities we see in Posokhov's work.
Watching SFB's fine soloists surge through it (with disastrously unbecoming costumes for the women) is like time-travelling, and not a little disconcerting. Rampant anguish. Dance and emotions flung to the winds.
Posokhov catches Skryabin's weirdnesses and makes well-shaped movement but it is rather dated.”
The Guardian’s Judith Mackrell agrees:
“Yuri Possokhov's Study in Motion, the second of these, does, however, look like slightly exhausted family stock.
Dancing to Scriabin is always tricky - there's a diffuseness in the music that rarely focuses a choreographer's attention - and Possokhov's use of seven discrete piano pieces makes for more vagueness still. Ensembles, duets and solos flit by in unlinked progression, and while the steps are neatly assembled they don't transport either the performers or the music to a different place.”
The Telegraph’s Ismene Brown is rather more partial to it, and taken with Lorena Feijoo:
“Possokhov is an SFB dancer from Russia, and an intriguing emergent choreographer whose Russianness is writ thoroughly through his Study in Motion, premièred this year. White net curtains waft, silhouetted figures moon about, and Scriabin's thick, luscious, odd-flavoured piano music takes us on rather too long a journey into gracefully choreographed love business between four couples.
The leading female, Lorena Feijoo, makes it worth watching – you can split ballerinas into dancers and women who dance, and the latter are often the more rewarding artists. So it is with Feijoo, with her down-turned Jeanne Moreau mouth and inflammatory moodiness.”
So you win some, you lose some when you look overseas to shore up your critical evaluations. I found Possokhov’s latest dance stunning when it premiered last year—I saw it three times. But the Brits bring their own contexts—and fresh eyes—to the table. I respect their viewpoint but I retain my fondness for the work.
September 23, 2004 · 12:18 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
London calling
The reviews of San Francisco Ballet keep rolling in from London. Raves for the dancers and for Tomasson’s leadership, and pans for Bolshoi director Alexey Ratmansky’s “Carnival des Animaux.” I could not agree more. I was in the minority when this ballet premiered at SFB, sitting baffled as the crowd around me roared with glee. The work served its purpose, I suppose, as comic relief, but I don’t see it enduring as a repertory staple.
One of my favorite critics, the delightfully acerbic Clement Crisp, also singles out Katita Waldo, an elegant veteran ballerina often underappreciated here in San Francisco. Writing of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Continuum”:
“I must salute the Klee-like way that the elegant Katita Waldo takes a line for a walk, and hail the duet for Muriel Maffre and Yury Posokhov, who are grown-ups in a grown-up situation, and wonderful. And so to the suicide-attempt that closed the evening. For inscrutable reasons SFB asked Alexey Ratmansky (now director of the Bolshoi Ballet) to realise Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals". Lumpen dance; the musical wit of an enraged rhino, loathsome costuming, and a feeling that this was intended to show how silly ballet could be, made for something repulsive that was greeted with peals of merry laughter (especially when Fokine's Swan was mauled).”
The Telegraph’s Ismene Brown admires the strength of SFB’s rep:
“San Francisco is collecting the hearts of great choreographers – first Mark Morris and recently the English expatriate Christopher Wheeldon have fallen in love with its ballet company. This American company has also captured British affection on its increasingly frequent tours, with its warm-hearted spirit, an eager but disciplined corps de ballet and some remarkable and varied leading artists.
In this turbo-charged week in London, SFB are performing 11 ballets on three programmes, their opening one showing, for better and for worse, how widely they range. Starting with a charming Balanchine, then a simply magnificent Wheeldon, and ending with the tritest of animal ballets by the Bolshoi's new director, Alexei Ratmansky, it runs the gamut of taste and admiration.”
And the Times’ Debra Craine offers similar laurels, though alas a paid subscription is required to read her review online:
"For this, its third visit to London in five years, San Francisco Ballet has brought 11 ballets, including four UK premieres and two London premieres. It’s a most impressive lineup which puts British companies to shame.
Under Helgi Tomasson’s long-standing direction, the California company — America’s third largest — is a hotbed of creativity. And, as it showed at Sadler’s Wells on Monday night, the San Francisco troupe is also a glittering showcase for fine dancing.”
Links via Criticaldance, which—true to form—has gone hog wild with coverage, and via Ballet Alert!.
September 22, 2004 · 01:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Eureka?
Voice of Dance’s Allan Ulrich is unmoved by John Jasperse’s “CALIFORNIA”:
“There is a moment in John Jasperse’s CALIFORNIA when you suddenly sit up, giddy with delight. A man bends and nuzzles his female partner like a youthful gazelle expressing affection for another of its own kind. It’s not a revelatory gesture, but in the context of the gelid, but smoothly honed formalism of this 55-minute piece, the moment arrives like a minor earthquake. Here, for an instant, we happen upon a recognizable human emotion. We can, in the cheesy parlance of an earlier era, relate to the movement scheme before us.
Jasperse’s work, premiered in France last year at the Festival International de la Danse a Cannes, marked the New York-based postmodernist’s Bay Area debut, while the weekend’s two performances at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater also inaugurated the first extensive season of presentations by the center’s new executive director Ken Foster. It’s genuinely comforting to discover that Foster is making an effort to book out-of-town companies overlooked by the more conservative presenters. The substantial number of local dancers and choreographers in the audience last Friday (Sept. 17) testified to the community’s interest in Jasperse. But I wonder what they could possibly have taken away with them - except for a certain satisfaction in their own work, the knowledge that they weren’t missing anything.”
I found the work respectably intelligent, though it neither excited me nor lingered long in mind. Of my native state California it told me nothing, though with conceptual work of this nature you hardly expect illumination on such literal matters. I must have arrived with excess caffeine in my system, because I found my attention holding steady to marvel at how thoughtfully the movement mirrored the construction of architect Ammar Eloeuini’s overhead sculpture. It was made of sort of translucent plastic scalene triangles joined together to create an undulating plane (if such a thing is possible) of rectangles. I need an illustration. At any rate, the dancing folded in the same way the sculpture did. Much of it took place with the dancer bent at the waist, touching the floor, arms and legs walking side to side to create an endless series of triangles. Interesting too was the final appearance of the leaf blowers, when the dancers lay with them across their stomach, turning on the machines in little huffs. It was like breath made extra-noisy, a kind of electric-powered resuscitation.
September 21, 2004 · 12:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
The first (short) reviews of San Francisco Ballet’s London engagement are in. Judith Mackrell in the Guardian:
“As director of San Francisco Ballet, Helgi Tomasson has started to acquire an aura of infallibility, his expertise in laying down repertory, and in balancing great evenings of dance is held in envy by the rest of the profession.
Certainly his choices for the company's opening programme make for an unusually adroit mix, setting the frisky grace notes and velvet elegance of Balanchine's Square Dance against the potent secrets of Christopher Wheeldon's Continuum and the whimsical romp of Alexei Ratmanksy's Carnaval des Animaux.”
And Zoe Anderson in the Independent:
“San Francisco Ballet opened their Sadler's Wells season on buoyant form. This is an outgoing company, crisp and characterful. They dance a varied repertory with confident style.”
For anyone in London wanting to study up before attending, I recommend Paul Parish’s colorful preview on the website Ballet.co:
“Tomasson as director has turned a company that used to sacrifice classical equilibrium for effects which brought down the house, where principal male dancers did sloppy glissades, into a beautifully disciplined cadre of musician-dancers. His own ballets, while not great choreography, are finely crafted, often beautiful works that give the dancers wonderful chances to shine. His Concerto Grosso displays five men from the lower ranks who look like principal dancers in this ballet. And his new Bach piano-concerto ballet looks like the music sounds - it gleams in the dark (especially when leBlanc dances it).
The least of the current dancers are technically adroit, and they are quick studies - they have to be, they don't get enough rehearsal time. (No American company does, really.) These dancers can execute the most complex transfers of weight and the trickiest rhythms without loss of poise; they can show the transitions cleanly while phrasing the steps with a grand sweep. They share a similar talent and gusto for movement and hunger to perform, which makes for consistency of spirit. On the other hand, they don't have a consistent basic style. It shows least in new works, where the choreographer has coached them, and the details are freshest in their imaginations. But... Head positions are not the same throughout, nor are backs, arms, shoulders, hands, not even feet, and certainly not attack. The roster is packed with fantastic dancers - they come from all over the world (especially Russia, Spain, Cuba, and France). They come in all shapes and sizes and colors, and do not by any means have the same training. The weaknesses of the company show in ballets that require character, epoch, nationality in the background; we have Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, La Sylphide, Don Quixote, Giselle, but only a couple of corps dancers can make convincing peasants (except in a splendid new version of Sylvia by Mark Morris, who has put the qualities he wanted into the steps themselves).”
September 21, 2004 · 12:17 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
I reviewed the Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company’s Cal Performances appearance yesterday for Voice of Dance:
“Watching the Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company explode across the stage with color and good cheer, it’s easy to understand why former ballet master Pavlo Virsky felt drawn to his region’s folkloric traditions. Bounding 85-strong through Zellerbach Hall Sunday, faces brighter than the most solicitous of airline attendants, the Virsky company was big and bold but also remarkably refined. The matinee crowd roared approval for the tricks and the artistry.
The troupe has both elements in spades. Virsky left a career in classical dancing to establish his ensemble in 1937 and direct it from 1955 until his death in 1975. The ballet training continues under Myroslav Vantukh, who assumed leadership in 1980. Arms are light and elegant above vigorously stamping feet, and the heel clicks in the women’s Kozachok dance are as fleet and fluttery as brises. The polish detracts nothing from the men’s powerful leaps and the women’s earthy charm.”
Fun show, fun review to write. What more can you ask for?
September 20, 2004 · 07:07 PM · Dance · Comments (1)
DTH Disbands
Sad news from Dance Theatre of Harlem today:
“The Dance Theatre of Harlem, one of the most acclaimed dance troupes in the world, plans to disband its 44-member company and shut its doors for the rest of the 2004-05 season until its finances can be restructured, a dance union official said yesterday.
"They are taking a hiatus to restructure finances. It's no secret it has been quite challenging . . . so they made the decision with conversations with us that they want to go on hiatus for one year," said Deborah Allton, national dance executive director for The American Guild of Musical Artists, the dance union.”
Interestingly,
“The Dance Insider Online, a popular website magazine, first reported the story yesterday.”
The story reports that the dancers will still appear in City Center’s “Fall for Dance Festival.” Other than that,
“ “It's horrible," Allton said. "It's an incredible institution: Mr. Mitchell has great courage for his artistry and everything, but it takes a business side and artistic side to keep something going and I think it's probably a wise decision. Actually -- the only decision. He did everything he could. It's time to step back and regroup.’”
Link via Ballet Alert!.
September 18, 2004 · 01:05 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Recommended this week
I’ll be checking out the Bay Area premiere of John Jasperse’s “CALIFORNIA” tomorrow night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Jasperse, whose heady approach to creating experimental dance environments has generated buzz on the east coast, is still little known out here. This new evening-length work uses a fractured set designed by architect Ammar Eloueini, and five dancers wielding leaf blowers.
If you’re intrigued, Voice of Dance has arranged a two-for-one ticket deal for their newsletter subscribers. Sign up for the email list and you’ll receive frequent alerts to such specials: Last spring I got 50 percent off my ticket to Ballett Frankfurt. Plus you’ll get the heads up when either I or my colleague Allan Ulrich have a new review on the site.
For details on the Jasperse show, click here.
September 16, 2004 · 03:03 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Dance Tidbits
This Washington Post story on the extension of Michael Kaiser’s Kennedy Center contract reveals that next year the Suzanne Farrell Ballet will present “a full-length version of the George Balanchine ballet ‘Don Quixote,’ which has not been done in two decades.”
This is good news not only to a new generation of ballet lovers hungry to see that historical curiosity, but to those wondering whether the Suzanne Farrell Ballet would present anything next year. The company had to cancel its fall tour after a major engagement fell through. Here’s hoping the troupe returns with a vengeance. The Farrell Ballet’s performance of “Serenade” at Cal Performances was a highlight of my dance-going life last year. I had never seen a ballet ensemble use their feet with such thoughtfulness. Farrell may work with young, somewhat unpolished dancers (though soloists like April Ball are fully formed artists), but the care of her coaching is stamped upon every step.
Meanwhile, Sarah Kaufman finds D.C.’s fall dance offerings scant, Laura Bleiberg sounds a note of concern while surveying the Southern California dance calendar, the New York Times offers a nine-month overview to spark envy (if you missed the print edition with gorgeous photographs, my sympathies), and Jennifer Dunning keeps an excited eye on the $10-per-seat “Fall for Dance Festival”.
September 15, 2004 · 06:49 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
critical apathy
I’ve got a review of Huckabay McAllister’s tenth anniversary show up on Voice of Dance:
“Honey, I’m Home!, the title of Huckabay McAllister Dance’s 10th anniversary program, perfectly captures this company’s goofy sense of theatricality. HMD’s nine dancers are wide-eyed and wily; they exchange heaps of knowing winks whether the joke has to do with wife-swapping or simply turning in place like a ballerina in a jewelry box. You can’t help giggling at the performers’ total commitment, and sometimes the choreography truly earns your laughter. But even comedy that keeps you chuckling brings varying degrees of satisfaction, as the evening of eight dances proved. There’s cleverness and then there’s cloying—and it’s hard to say which wins out at an HMD show.”
This was a tough one to write. Sometimes you go to shows that don’t quite work, but you’re so drawn to their strengths that it’s fascinating to tease out what went wrong. Hagen & Simone was such a case: I could have written about them for pages. I find HMD’s work competent but not terribly sophisticated—it doesn’t fail in interesting ways. And HMD has its own dedicated audience who like what they’re doing just fine. As a critic lacking a passionate reaction either positive or negative, you almost wonder whether there’s much need for your response in this somewhat closed circle.
One thing I wish I had noted in the review: the production values were solid. Sara Linnie Slocum did the lighting and Plastique contributed the costumes.
September 13, 2004 · 08:09 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Book Bites #4
I inhaled Toni Bentley’s Winter Season in 24 hours and two sittings. I can’t believe that I, a lover of all things Balanchine, didn’t discover this 150-page piece of near-perfection years ago. Blame a generation gap and unfairly low expectations. I’d heard of Bentley’s 1982 book, of course, and knew it was a journal of her time as a corps member at the New York City Ballet. I’d heard it was “well written”—but I suppose I’d imagined competent sentences bubbling over with the naivete of youth. Little did I realize that “well written,” in this case, meant truly literary. I can almost pluck a passage at random:
“Five years ago, when I was first in the company, when I was first behind the big gold curtain at the New York State Theater, I saw strange things every day. I saw pretty, flirty, ballet girls in pretty, flirty, flimsy ballet clothes talking to Balanchine. I heard things like: ‘. . .and my left toe shoe always gets softer than my right—I just don’t know what to do,’ and ‘They said it would rain, but it hasn’t, has it?’ and ‘Mr. B, how can I improve my hairdo?’ And as if that wasn’t strange enough, he answered them. Not only did he reply, he replied in an altogether shocking way—he was genuinely interested and attentive.
I could not fathom this. It was absurd to me. How could the man who made Serenade and Apollo in the beginning, Union Jack and Vienna Waltzes a few years ago and
Violin Concerto in between talk about the weather? . . .
. . .I attempted to dispel this by talking to him about it. He said, ‘But, dear, why? I’m just like you or any other man.’ Then we talked of Paris and champagne. For a few moments I almost believed he was like me—until I went onstage and watched Concerto Barocco.”
Winter Season is a vivid portrait of the religious dedication of a dancer’s life, but also something much more specific and precious. Bentley does not claim to speak for all ballet dancers at all times: she writes as an apostle of the New York City Ballet at a poignant moment in its history, the years just before Balanchine’s death. The inevitability of his passing shrouds the company in dread and devotion. There are lighter moments of dish, too—Peter Martins behaving lecherously—and hopes for the future as, for instance, a 16-year old Darci Kistler has her first triumphs. But it’s Bentley’s intelligence that makes the book compulsively readable and gives it a kind of existential weight. If only I’d known! It’s been more than two decades since Winter Season’s publication. It’s ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of dance lovers.
September 09, 2004 · 01:25 PM · Books · Comments (0)
SFB in 2004
My review of San Francisco Ballet’s 2004 season is out in this month’s Dance Magazine. The article is not online, but here’s a taste:
“It took a full-length world premiere by Mark Morris to draw the international press to San Francisco Ballet in 2004, but that choreographic coup was only the high-point finish of a landmark season.
Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson pulled out all the programming stops during his nineteenth year in charge, offering two bills in tribute to George Balanchine’s centennial and one in recognition of Frederick Ashton’s, and topping it all with well-crafted premieres by in-house choreographers. In the process he showcased a diverse company that, from the youngest corps members on up, can make a blinding array of classicism’s facets sparkle.”
If you want to read more, you’ll have to buy the magazine. And if you haven’t picked up Dance Magazine since the redesign, I recommend getting reacquainted. The new look is clean and bold, with an emphasis on artful photographs that convey motion—no more endless gallery of tutu studio portraits with cotton candy pink backgrounds (though I have a soft spot for those, too). American Ballet Theatre’s Erica and Herman Cornejo zoom across this month’s cover, with a package of stories on Latin dancers inside. I also contributed a small report on Margaret Jenkins’s new CHIME (Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange) program, which fielded some interesting pairings for its first year, including Erika Shuch with Joe Goode, and Alma Esperanza Cunningham with Robert Moses. Check it all out and let me know what you think.
September 08, 2004 · 05:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Women in Ballet
The Houston Ballet assembles a program of choreography by women: Lila York, Natalie Weir, and former San Francisco Ballet principal Julia Adam. Molly Glentzer seizes the occasion to talk with Lynn Garafola, whose new book due out in January includes a chapter on, as Glentzer calls it, “ballet’s glass ceiling”:
“When George Balanchine said so famously, "The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman," he was thinking of dancers, not choreographers. Offstage, women still haven't come a long way, baby.
But Houston Ballet and its artistic director, Stanton Welch, will celebrate women dancemakers in the season-opening program Women@Art on Thursday. It offers the world premieres of Julia Adam's The Accidental and Natalie Weir's The Host, plus the company premiere of Lila York's popular Celts.
And it's rare air. Among the five largest U.S. companies, the only other ballet by a woman being staged this season is Susan Stroman's Double Feature, commissioned last year by the New York City Ballet.”
September 07, 2004 · 12:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Parental Advisory
Toni Bentley, the former New York City Ballet dancer whose wonderfully revealing first book, Winter Season, I’m finally reading, has a new nonfiction title slated for publication in October. If you thought Sisters of Salome, her book about stripping, exposed all, The Surrender goes, er, deeper still.
Naturally the highly literate dance lovers at Ballet Alert! keep their discussion within the bounds of good taste.
September 07, 2004 · 12:18 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
SFB's new soloist
San Francisco Ballet is on tour to London, and the company’s new soloist, 18-year-old Royal Ballet School grad Nutnaree Pipithsuksunt, talks to the Independent:
“Before being signed up by San Francisco Ballet, she was offered contracts with Birmingham Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Houston Ballet, Hamburg Ballet and La Scala Ballet. "I don't know if that is lucky or not... I worked very hard. I didn't audition as such for any of them. I went to New York to do some classes with the American Ballet Theatre, but when San Francisco Ballet - who had seen my end-of-term performance - wanted to see me again, I had to miss a week of school in London."
Can’t wait to see this young woman come Nutcracker season. Thanks to Ballet Alert! for the link.
September 02, 2004 · 01:00 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
