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Fresh Faces at ODC
ODC Dance kicks off its annual "Dancing Downtown" season this Thursday, giving three programs with two premieres each by artistic directors Brenda Way and KT Nelson. The company has a clutch of gorgeous new dancers right now, with four fresh women swelling the ranks. So when the Chronicle asked me to talk with married dancers Justin and Andrea Flores, I was happy to oblige:
"It's quitting time at ODC Dance, which means the dancers are packing up the floor. The screech of peeling electric tape rings through ODC Theater. Two by two, the company members roll the rubbery top layer from the wood stage, lug the Marley onto platforms, and wheel it off with a Clydesdale's uncomplaining efficiency. They shake out tired muscles, grab their sweats, trade jokes and go separate ways.
Except Andrea and Justin Flores, who head to a funky Mission District bar one block down 17th Street. Nirvana plays in the background as gin and tonics arrive at the table. They've been dancing together all day, but they can't get enough of each other. "She was on tour with Lines Ballet for our first anniversary," Justin says, raising his lush blue eyes toward the ceiling. "Now when we travel with ODC, it's all day long we're hanging out with each other."
"It feels like vacation," Andrea says with a happily tired smile.
Long rehearsals and no-frills bus rides: The Floreses have an unusual idea of the good life. But it's one that fits well at ODC Dance, San Francisco's contemporary troupe with a roll-up-the-sleeves collective spirit. Married for four years, Andrea and Justin are thrilled to work with dancers who know how to pull together as a company just as they've had to do as a couple. They're part of a fresh infusion of talent into the group, and they'll never be far from the stage when ODC opens its annual "Dancing Downtown" season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday."
February 27, 2005 · 10:18 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Heavenly Bodies
I led a small discussion group at Grace Cathedral last night on “Art and Spirit,” with a particular focus on dance. They asked me to bring videos, and I was happy to oblige. My participation was somewhat on the fly, so I reached for two perhaps predictable, certainly safe choices:
--Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins dancing the opening pas de deux from Balanchine’s “Chaconne,” as included on the must-have Balanchine DVD.
--Paul Taylor dancing his solo from “Aureole” (spliced with footage of Patrick Corbin learning the role), as captured in the beautifully edited documentary Paul Taylor: Dancemaker.
Then, to spice things up, I finished with a less-than-ideal, commercially unavailable recording of the final section from Doug Elkins’ “Center My Heart.” It’s set to Islamic devotional songs but much of the movement clearly arises from Elkins’ hip-hop background. I think it’s gorgeous, but I have a hard time second guessing audiences, and I was worried the sub-par video wouldn’t allow the work’s beauty to shine through. I was wrong—the group members were thoroughly taken by it. And I was thrilled to share something I love.
February 25, 2005 · 09:48 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Crotch Shots
New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella gave a cheerfully frank lecture on "Ballet and Sex" at UC Berkeley last night. As soon as I heard the title, I knew she'd be pontificating on the female crotch--after all, she is the only critic I've ever seen refer to a plie in second position en pointe as the "cunt dip." She showed clips from Balanchine's "Progigal Son" and "Agon," Frederick Ashton's "Monotones," and a Karole Armitage work whose name now escapes me--all striking illustrations of the pelvis as a locus of power.
Acocella is never one to mince her words. And she's speaking at UC Berkeley several times more before the week is out. I hope to attend Friday's panel on "reviewing art." Click here for full details on her doings as an Avenali lecturer.
February 23, 2005 · 02:56 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Proofs
I sent the first-pass proofs of my memoir "The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder" back to Dutton Wednesday feeling excited. These proofs are the typset pages, which are being bound into advance galleys by next week. I thought I'd celebrate by posting another photo of my dad. This is the picture that Dutton ended up using on the book's cover.
I hope he'd approve of the portrait I tried to paint of him.
February 21, 2005 · 07:13 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Four times the fun
I reviewed LEVYdance's appearance with the new California Regional Dance Touring Project for the Chronicle today:
"Talent: You've got it or you don't. And from the start of Benjamin Levy's precocious choreographic career, it's been clear this guy has serious gifts.
Levy's five-member LEVYdance debuted in 2003 and quickly generated a buzz on both coasts with engagements in New York and Washington, D.C. But his troupe is based here in San Francisco, and it was spellbinding Friday night during the first of two programs designed to bring notable California dance companies to fresh audiences.
The slate, dubbed "Four on the Floor," is produced by the new California Regional Dance Touring Project, and it travels to Santa Barbara and San Diego in April. Friday's opening double bill also featured the lush movement and unabashed emotionalism of Jean Isaacs' San Diego Dance Theater. But it was two works by Levy that had the crowd at ODC Theater on its feet. "
The other two companies--Santa Barbara Dance Theater and L.A.'s TONGUE--weren't too shabby, either. Check out the review link for details.
February 21, 2005 · 07:07 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Kin is in
I reviewed San Francisco company Robert Moses’ Kin for the Chronicle today. The dancing looked fabulous, the world premiere less so:
“The company looked as if it had arrived Thursday night, dancing with bite in a program of three Moses favorites and one misfire of a world premiere, which repeats at the Jewish Community Center's Kanbar Hall through next weekend.
The disappointment in question sounded good on paper. Moses is a choreographer of impressive emotional range, and in his works about the African American experience especially, sparks fly. "The President's Daughter" purported to investigate the double lives of men like Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond, who both secretly fathered black children. Hypocrisy and outrage: Past Moses works have covered this terrain with no-holds-barred intensity. But "The President's Daughter" kept warming up to an explosion that never quite ignited.”
February 19, 2005 · 11:07 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Theater of the People
I just love 848 Community Space, San Francisco’s tiny arts venue that could. And now the theater is moving, and getting bigger. Today I report in the Chronicle on a dance benefit to fund the new 848’s sprung dance floor:
“The dancing was scrappy and determined, a fitting reflection of 848's spirit. The space is one of those only-in-San Francisco stories, a tale of three anarchist pagans who believed that if you claimed a cramped apartment for the community, the art would come.
It started in 1991 when dancer Hennessy, sculptor Todd Eugene and saxophonist Michael "Med-O" Whitson needed a place to live. Whitson and Hennessy were the creators of "Mud People" street theater, staging social protests in which participants doused themselves in dirt and crawled among the skyscrapers of the Financial District scantily clad and speaking only in grunts. Hennessy saw the live-work unit at 848 Divisadero St. and knew his politically rebellious brand of expression could find a home there.
The place had limitations: a rickety platform for a tech loft and just 49 seats. A hulking heating unit hung from the stage's far corner, necessitating some crafty choreographic maneuvers, and performers entered and exited through the back door leading to the kitchen.
The art that followed was free-spirited and eclectic, as the co-founders wanted. Sex-positive clothing-optional nights shared the schedule with Contact Improvisation jams and Winter Solstice celebrations. Within a decade, 848 had two problems: Overwhelmingly large audiences and the threat of eviction during the dot-com boom. The eviction threat faded; the audiences did not. The company got serious about moving and merged with the Bay Area Center for Art and Technology to form CounterPULSE.”
February 17, 2005 · 10:44 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
I’m back—or trying to be. I spent the last week in Santa Barbara with my mother and my brother Emmet, who’s on leave from Iraq, trying to absorb the stories of how he’s lived there, trying to simultaneously remember and forget the fact that he must return for eight more months. We walked along the ocean-side bluffs and shopped and bickered like the best of families. It was bucolic and banal and surreal and discomfiting, and I can’t write about it yet (except in my journals), because it’s not over: Emmet’s off to Tahoe for a few days, and then I’ll see him again before he flies back to Mosul.
In the meantime I’m attempting to get back to work. The first-pass proofs for my memoir just arrived; I’m required to inspect them by Thursday. I reviewed two shows this weekend, and I’ve got several articles due by mid-week. And of course the novel cries out for me at least to make some glacial progress.
No surprise then that the vivid impressions left by last week’s dance-going have somewhat faded. A pleasant serenity lingers from Stanton Welch’s premiere “Falling” for San Francisco Ballet. Michael Wade Simpson reviewed for the Chronicle, and Allan Ulrich covered it for Voice of Dance, recording a far more vivid description than I could possibly muster at this point:
“Welsh’s fourth commission for the company attempts the least of the bunch and accomplishes the most through its directness and charm. A larky abstraction for five couples set to two Mozart, all-string Divertimenti, K. 136 and K. 138 (the so-called "Salzburg Symphonies") and clothed in Holly Hines’ folksy, pastel-tinted costumes, Falling (in which virtually nobody falls) mingles the classical vocabulary with idiomatic touches in its string of duets (with the odd trio and ensemble gambit for punctuation) and it passes so quickly you barely have the time to think.
Welch, the precocious Australian dancer-choreographer who has risen to artistic director of the Houston Ballet and studied at the S.F. Ballet School back in the late 1980s, seems to have soaked up a wealth of influences. The specter of Jerome Robbins hovers benignly over Falling; so does Helgi Tomasson’s 1991 Meistens Mozart (which will be revived later this season). But Welch is very much his own choreographer here. The couples emerge from an inner black curtain, do their thing and melt back into the darkness. This presentational aspect lends Falling much of its individual allure.”
Stronger in mind is Rennie Harris’s “Facing Mekka,” which finally made it to San Francisco last week (all due credit to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which presented). A fellow dance writer asked me “Did you go yet? It’s fascinating—and it’s not hip-hop.” I can only think it’s not what she imagined hip-hop could be—not commercial but meditative, not competitive but communal. My husband Bill and I stayed for the post-performance discussion (Harris held forth for a generous 40 minutes), and I asked Harris about the connection in the choreography between hip-hop and traditional forms of African dance. He obliged with a demonstration of how he had stripped down the hip-hop vocabulary to its most elemental, which looked not at all dissimilar to the North African dancing I’d seen Oakland-based Fua Dia Congo bust out a few days earlier. It was fascinating, and listening to Harris wax philosophical on hip-hop culture, I couldn’t wait to see what he’ll do next.
Allan Ulrich reviewed briefly for Voice of Dance, and Mary Ellen Hunt covered it for the Contra Costa Times.
Alas, I never made it back to the opera house for a second glance at Welch’s “Falling,” or to see Vanessa Zahorian take on “Theme and Variations.” Sometimes real life takes priority over ballet-going, though I’ll be jumping back into theaters this week.
February 13, 2005 · 08:30 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Black is Back
Fua Dia Congo raised the roof at the opening night of the first annual Black Choreographers Festival. I reviewed for the Chron:
"Feet were tapping and voices were yipping Friday night -- and the dancers of Fua Dia Congo hadn't even left the wings. The musicians, standing tall behind 4-foot-high drums, began to pound. The company stamped on in an explosion of furious rhythms, shaking more muscles than anyone ever knew the human body possessed. Oakland's Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts erupted in helplessly excited screams.
It was a triumphal finish for the first annual Black Choreographers Festival, and one 10 years in the making. A decade ago, a similar showcase called Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century took its final bow in the Bay Area. This new festival recovers what was lost but stands adamantly in the present. At show's end, Halifu Osumare, founder of the Black Choreographers Festival's precursor, offered a telling benediction. "What I have seen on this stage is all contemporary," she said. "It is all happening here and now, in this moment." "
February 07, 2005 · 02:13 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Epic "China"
I took a sneak peek at Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley's latest premiere for the Chronicle today. It's a three-act collaboration between artistic director Dennis Nahat and Chinese choreographer Yong Yao:
"Nahat was undaunted a year ago when his friend Ann Woo came to him with an ambitious scenario. Woo, the executive director of San Jose's Chinese Performing Artists of America, had been paging through the writings of 17th century British philosopher Francis Bacon. Bacon hailed printing, gunpowder and the compass as the West's three most important technologies -- without realizing that the Chinese actually invented each. Woo was on a mission to set the record straight -- through dance.
"Now the question was, how do you make dancing out of these ideas?," Nahat said during a break from recent rehearsals at Ballet San Jose's downtown studios. Tall, imposing and freshly showered, he wore a long terrycloth robe, like a boxer just exiting the ring. Woo slid a coconut milk health drink across the table. "You see, she takes care of me," Nahat said. On the other side of the table Yong Yao, CPAA's choreographer and Woo's right-hand man, laughed knowingly.
"How do you dance gunpowder?," Nahat continued, winking at Yao. "Well, we don't dance gunpowder. We dance the explosion. We dance the fire." "
February 06, 2005 · 04:20 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
City Ballet Stars: Hot or Not?
John Rockwell offers another curious and provocative Sunday column in the NY Times, this time mulling the comeliness of New York City Ballet's current roster:
" "Woman is the goddess, the poetess, the muse," Balanchine once said. "That is why I have a company of beautiful girl dancers."
Would he have been happy, in that regard, with the current company? There are some very attractive women (and men, but Balanchine cared less about them) in today's City Ballet. Yes, when he came to the United States he sought to make a company of all-American dancers, fresh-faced and perky. But some of the company's biggest female stars now are spectacular dancers without being spectacular beauties. Is it merely sexist to lament that the current roster is not "a company of beautiful girl dancers?" "
I half-expected him to start handing down "hot or not" verdicts on each of the principals. Fortunately he segues into a consideration of whether the company should do more to cultivate "personality."
February 06, 2005 · 04:16 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
With the ballet season starting and SFB on everyone's radar, there's another show in town this weekend you shouldn't miss. Hip hop innovator Rennie Harris and his company Puremovement are finally returning to the city. A few years ago the company brought his B-boy version of "Romeo and Juliet"; now at last we get to see "Facing Mekka," which reportedly pushes hip hop even more boldly in the direction of concert dance, and was much hailed in New York. Performances run tonight through Saturday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. For details, click here, and see you there.
February 03, 2005 · 02:30 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
All eyes on Yuan Yuan Tan
The real San Francisco Ballet season is underway. I review the company’s first rep program in today’s Chronicle:
“The War Memorial Opera House belonged to Yuan Yuan Tan on Tuesday night as the San Francisco Ballet got back to business with its first program of the 2005 season. Great dancing from an inarguably great company followed the Chinese-born ballerina's star turn in Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's "7 for Eight." But nothing eclipsed the image of her delicate arms wavering like water under gentle moonlight. Not even the ostensibly big news of the evening, the company premiere of Lar Lubovitch's "... smile with my heart," a ballet that looks better in excerpt than in full.
Perhaps "smile" would have looked better juxtaposed with something other than "7 for Eight." Though entirely different in its technique and its classical values, Tomasson's 2004 work also offers a string of shadowy, intimate pairings -- and it set a high bar for the evening.”
In other SFB news, the company has announced an exciting summer return trip to Paris, offering three programs. The first stacks world premieres by Lar Lubovitch, Paul Taylor, and Christopher Wheeldon. David Wiegand announces the news in the Chron and basks in the gala’s afterglow.
February 03, 2005 · 07:55 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
