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Got home to San Francisco yesterday for one of the hottest days of the year and . . . a ski-jump competition. In the middle of my neighborhood. Tons of shaved ice paved down that roller-coaster-worthy slope of Fillmore Street between Broadway and Vallejo, thousands of people playing hooky to watch snowboarders launch themselves in the air with the Golden Gate Bridge as backdrop. It was spectacular. Apparently the more upper-crusty of my neighbors weren't pleased, but I hope they bring this thing back every year.
September 30, 2005 · 10:28 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Dive In
My hunch is most of the dance fans who check this site are in the Bay Area, but if you’re in New York—whether you’re a dance fan or not—go check out Noemie Lafrance’s latest work, “Agora,” extended through October 1. Of the many spectacular things I saw during my East Coast trip last week, this sight has lingered longest: 47 performers kicking and whirling away in the bottom of a vast empty swimming pool.
Lafrance has staged previous works inside vertiginous staircases and—more recently—in a parking garage, where viewers sat in cars and listened to music piped in through the car stereo. This time she’s turned to the McCarren Park Pool on the edge of Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighborhoods, given over to vandals and skateboarders since it closed in 1983. She’s mobilized her own forces and the Brooklyn powers-that-be to pull up the weeds and sweep out the glass. And she’s filled the yawning space with an hour of entrancing kinetic images, both comic and haunting.
The dance begins with a ghostly possession and then becomes a panorama of Brooklyn’s social communities, past and present. There’s a herd of 90s hipsters club dancing in a corner of the pool one minute, a clutch of Latinos imitating a flamenco dancer over in the shallow end the next. A clever series of duets has dancers strapped to skateboards, able to drop onto their backs and spin across the concrete. At one point, the lights go out, a disco ball flies in on an unseen wire, and the whole pool fills with shards of light as a lone disco star struts. The sound system is immense, with the medley of pop songs and a creepy ambient score by Brooks Williams projected from two sides. Lafrance excels at carving this wide landscape with theatrical moments big and small. A side bit with a man desperate for privacy as he showered had the audience in giggles. A jumpy unison routine to “Higher Ground” takes on NFL half-time show proportions. Another attraction: Lafrance once worked as a fashion designer, and the costumes by Karen Young are all wonderfully whimsical and hip.
There are shortcomings: It’s not clear what kind of statement this tour of Brooklyn’s history and societies adds up to, and a Middle Eastern bazaar ending, with the audience invited to enter the great bowl of the pool and sample hookahs, left the crowd perplexed on opening night. But the only other site-specific choreographer I can think of who’s currently working with such deep interest in the connections between history and place is San Francisco aerial artist Joanna Haigood. In the end, “Agora” bewilders the senses not just in scale but in scope.
For info on how to attend, click here.
September 23, 2005 · 11:40 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Catching Up
Flooded with assignments and deadlines and churning out pages of the novel (they're crap for now, but it feels so good to move forward) and so just catching up with this site.
I reviewed the National Ballet of China the other day for the Chron:
"The obligatory pre-curtain announcements had a different flavor Friday night at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. The usual stream of welcomes and warnings about cell phones ran on and on -- but in Chinese. In the middle of the flowing foreign tongue came a single, blunt English phrase: Wells Fargo. A highly expectant audience, nearly filling the house, chuckled.
Movement has its languages, too, and ballet must have seemed as out-of-place as that "Wells Fargo" when the dance began taking root in China last century. Ballet traces its history back 400 years in Western civilization; the National Ballet of China, presented by Cal Performances over the weekend, was founded in 1959.
Over the decades the company has struggled valiantly to reconcile a Western dance form with Chinese culture, producing Chinese versions of staples like "Swan Lake" on the one hand, and Communist propagandist ballets like "The Red Detachment of Women" on the other. "Raise the Red Lantern," created in 2003 in collaboration with famed film director Zhang Yimou, has been positioned by the company -- and received elsewhere -- as a breakthrough in merging pas de deux with Chinese elements: in this case, Peking Opera."
I wasn't quite blown away. Click here for the whole enchilada.
And, the Mark Morris Dance Group returns to Cal Performances tomorrow night for two weeks and two programs. I interviewed (or attempted to) Mark Morris for last Sunday's Chron:
"Everyone knows Mark Morris gives good interview. He's everything you think the reigning genius of American modern dance should be: confident, imperious, larger than life.
He breezes into rooms trailing a pashmina wrap or billowing in an oddly flattering dress-length tunic. He tosses his head of famously unruly curls (now cropped) and owns the space with the same full-bodied magnetism that made the Mark Morris Dance Group a critical sensation when it debuted in New York in the early 1980s. Morris narrows his eyes as he exposes the ludicrous assumptions underlying your impertinent questions. If you're very lucky, he takes a shine to you and makes you a conspirator in his antics, while casually dispensing gems of insight about everything from obscure Milhaud compositions to the state of American arts criticism.
But woe betide the journalist charged with interviewing Morris via phone, disarmed of eye contact with which to fend against his impatience.
It's not that Morris is cranky, though he has every excuse to be: His Mark Morris Dance Group is in the midst of a taxing 25th anniversary tour, which will take it everywhere from Kansas City to Glasgow, and bring it to UC Berkeley's Cal Performances on Thursday. After Berkeley, the group will tour the United Kingdom for six weeks before returning to the Bay Area to dance "The Hard Nut," Morris' loony, much-loved take on "Nutcracker." In the meantime, Morris has Purcell's "King Arthur" to adapt for the English National Opera and a "big premiere" for next summer, which he "can't talk about yet," to get rolling.
It's just that Morris holds his interviewers to high standards. Some of his demands are invigorating; others are impossible to satisfy. On this particular day, on lunch break from frenzied rehearsals at his $7.4 million dance center in Brooklyn, he's tired of vague questions -- a reasonable enough complaint. So what kind of specific question might an interviewer ask?
"Why doesn't 'Sylvia' travel?" he says, referring to the sumptuous three-act commission for San Francisco Ballet that made such a splash in 2004. "That's a question to ask. Everyone in New York wants to see it."
OK, then: Why doesn't "Sylvia" travel?
"I can't say because I don't get into that part of the business," Morris counters. Subject closed."
We did manage to talk a bit more. Click here for the rest.
September 21, 2005 · 02:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Vassilii Mountian
I'm back in San Francisco, and in the Chronicle today with a story about one of my favorite programs for kids in the Bay Area:
"It's a stampede. Sixteen children marching like toy soldiers on speed, spinning and stomping so hard the floor shakes. And the only thing louder than their footfalls is the voice of the Russian man shaking his feathery gray mane like an impatient lion as he prowls the studio.
"Faster, faster, faster!" Vassilii Mountian thunders as the kids run in place. A gold cross nestled in his ample chest hair shines beneath fluorescent lights. "Why you not smile, eh?" he says to the little girls in the front row, but as they clap their hands above their heads, a grin sneaks onto his lips. "Polka, polka!"
He fixes his eyes on one of the older girls and points to his nose held high. "Emotion! I need more from you." She raises her chin an inch, gaze fiery and determined. Two boys race to the front and drop to hands and knees, kicking wildly as they crabwalk. Mountian shrugs as if to begrudgingly give credit. "This is good!"
It looks like a pint-size Bolshevik boot camp, but the longer you watch, the more you notice: Most of the kids are smiling. And all of them are throwing their bodies around the room as though possessed by the music. They don't have to be here. They love it.
Forget the New York boroughs of "Mad Hot Ballroom." If you want to see children transformed by the discipline of dance, you need venture no farther than 1158 Gorgas St., where the edge of the Presidio National Park touches Crissy Field and the Palace of Fine Arts.
There, in a former Army base convenience store, more than 100 kids learn the folk dances of 32 countries as students of the Presidio Dance Theatre Academy. An additional 100 take dance in the Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods as part of the academy's outreach program, along with 40 kids in Bayview. The most promising and dedicated become members of Presidio Dance Theatre's performing company, taking class three times a week and rehearsing two hours every Friday, dancing everything from the Pennsylvania Polka to the Serbian Tzigane in resplendent, sumptuously authentic costumes each spring. One-third are on some kind of scholarship. Many pay no fees at all."
For the full article, click here.
September 16, 2005 · 10:33 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
St. John the Divine
It was chance that put me at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine yesterday, September 11. I’m in New York on business this week, and since I was baptized Episcopalian three years ago I have always meant to see the Cathedral during a jaunt to Manhattan. I lost no friends or family on September 11 and can’t claim to have come to St. John’s out of a memorializing impulse. So I was neither expecting nor prepared to be so moved.
To begin with, the church is gorgeous, and in a completely unexpected way. It’s Gothic in style, and one of the largest Cathedrals in the world, of course, but four years ago much of it was damaged in a fire, and strangely this has only made it more beautiful. The back of the church has been boarded up, the end of the nave now marked not by ornamented stone but by gray-painted plywood. This has a stunning inadvertent effect when you enter and gaze down the row of impossibly lofty arches: You seem to be looking straight through a portal to the unknown, the incomprehensible. Because of the fire, there are no pews, and the displays of tapestries and fineries are surprisingly sparse. Instead, in the back corner of the church, rusty wood-and-metal school chairs have been placed in the round. The altar stands in the middle, atop a rather rickety makeshift platform. An ornate lectern has been rolled in as though from the half-struck set of some opera. The Cathedral’s Great Organ, installed in 1910 by no less an organ craftsman than Ernest M. Skinner, has been silenced by smoke damage. A digital electronic organ makes do.
And yet St. John the Divine still does everything “high church”: Glittering vestments, every possible word of liturgy set to music, clouds upon clouds of incense. And as if this weren’t testament enough to the perseverance of the sacred in the face of destruction, the day’s service posed the message so eloquently that at half a dozen moments I thought I might cry. I was in too meditative a frame of mind to take notes, and so can’t quote from the sermon by the Reverend Canon Storm Swain, or the remarks by the New York Fire Department chaplain who welcomed uniformed men and women from an early morning memorial at Riverside Park. But I can let pieces of the service speak for themselves:
From the first hymn:
Mortal pride and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray our trust;
Though with care and toil we build them,
Tower and temple fall to dust.
But God’s power,
Hour by hour,
Is my temple and my tower.
From the collect:
Hear our prayers this day as we remember those of many nations and faiths whose lives were cut short by the fierce flames of anger and hatred. Hasten the time when the menace of war shall be removed. Cleanse both us and those perceived to be our enemies of all hatred and distrust.
From the solo sung at offertory by New York City Opera soprano Verda Lee Tudor, with text by St. Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon . . .
It is in pard’ning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
I have a persistent and painful nihilistic streak, and I attend church every Sunday not because I am faithful but because the Anglican church is the only way I have found to counter this, to persuade me to see meaning in the world. (My deep-seated nihilism is also, I have realized in recent years, the reason I write: My need to create meaning is in direct proportion to my fear that life is devoid of it.) In recent weeks the nihilism has mostly overcome any inclination toward spirituality. Last week I watched footage of the New Orleans floods with my husband, and we turned to each other and bantered back and forth: A force that is all-powerful, all-knowing, sees everything you ever do and, oh yes, loves you—right! Ha! But listening to the words at St. John the Divine, watching the incense rise like pure spirit from the altar, hearing the fireman’s chaplain say that we are all broken, but in Christ’s broken body we are made whole—I felt again the profundity of religious symbolism, and I crossed myself during the final blessing feeling that life was far richer than the mental reductions I’d been making of it.
On my way out of the church I spotted the “Poet’s Corner,” and read every carved stone there, scribbling resonant quotations onto my service leaflet.
Thoreau: Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
Dickinson: Captivity is Consciousness—so’s Liberty.
Frost: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Edith Wharton: There is no end to life in its mercy or its pain.
And my favorite, from William Deans Howells:
Ah, poor Real Life, which I love!
September 12, 2005 · 07:13 AM · Personal · Comments (2)
Not Here
It’s Labor Day, and I am happily laboring on writing—but not, as you may have noticed lately, on much writing for this site. I can’t say how long this state will continue. I’ve been working on my novel, and on short stories, and on a personal essay—a little bit of everything because I have so much, at the moment, to teach myself.
The novel, which I’ve been working on intermittently for the last year and a half, has grown more ambitious than intended. So in the same way that I spent four years reading and analyzing dozens of memoirs to teach myself how to write one, I must now get deeper into the nitty-gritty of studying fiction craft and technique. For instance, it would have been a lot easier to try writing a novel in the first person point of view, or at least in the third person aligned with just one character. But no, I’ve taken on third person through three separate characters’ points of view, which means I’ve been working on developing a narrative voice that is convincingly within each of these characters’ heads. One character is coming through very clear to me at the moment, and it’s the character who is least like me in every way, and that’s not at all what I expected. And of course, the sections of story that each character tells overlap. Which means I’m working a lot on grouping events into coherent chapters, so that the tellings bump against each other like tectonic plates.
I take some encouragement in the fact that I’ve recently written some short stories that I think show a good deal of advancement. Two months ago I wrote a particular short story because I wanted to practice/experiment with an omniscient narration that moves fluidly back and forth between two very different characters’ thoughts. It’s a lot more difficult than you might think, and it took a lot of revisiting Flannery O’Connor and Joy Williams to pull it off. I also wrote that piece for the fanciful reason that I wanted to set a short story in a water slide park. I finished revisions two weeks ago and I’m feeling pleased with it.
Between all this and Chronicle assignments, I’ve tended to want to invest whatever writing energy I have left into my personal journal, which is my lifeline to sanity. So I’m sorry I haven’t been around here much. But I’m feeling really torn between journalism and my private (i.e., as-yet-unpaid) writing endeavors, and I’m wanting to horde time to myself.
I can’t promise I’ll post here much in the coming months. I can promise that I’ve got lots of Chronicle articles on the horizon as the fall dance season launches. I’ve got one or two pieces for the Chronicle’s Datebook section each week for the next month, and of course I’ll link to them all here as soon as they’re up.
I’m also heading to New York for a few days at the end of next week, and looking forward to some thought-provoking dance there, including Noemie Lafrance’s newest site-specific work. I’ll write about it here, of course.
So I’m writing. I’m just not feeling chained to the blog. Which I think is a damn healthy thing. Blog-mania, for me, has been like dot com déjà vu. I remember when I moved to San Francisco in 2000 and all anyone could talk about was e-commerce, and it felt as though if you were a writer and you weren’t becoming some kind of “content provider” or making inroads with Salon, you were going the way of the Dodo bird. It was ludicrous, of course, and so is this pressure floating in cyberspace—don’t tell me, if you’re a writer, that you haven’t felt it—that if you don’t blog every other day you might as well cease to exist. E-commerce is a tool, a wonderful tool, but it wasn’t about to replace physical stores. And a blog is a publishing tool, a wonderfully useful publishing tool, nothing more or less. It’s changing the way we share information and publish and write, no doubt. That doesn’t mean we have to continue talking about it ad nauseum, and so it’s been a relief to me to see blogs become more integrated with traditional media, to watch them become as normal as the notion of buying stuff on the internet, to notice the blog-frenzy hitting a tableau.
But then I’ve always hated trend-watching. It makes me feel so temporal and mortal.
And I’ve gone on longer than intended here, and with less coherence than I ought to employ. And a night of wrestling with the novel, with a piece of writing that gives anything but instant gratification, that will take years to be ready for publication, if it ever is—God willing!—awaits.
September 05, 2005 · 05:55 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
If you haven't seen this yet, Arts Journal has swiftly assembled an informative page on Hurricane Katrina and the Arts, including how you can help. Click here.
September 02, 2005 · 06:21 PM · Misc. · Comments (0)
