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The Chronicle asked me to check out the live tour of the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance?" Friday, and I gamely obliged:
"It was an astonishing sight Friday: Oakland's Oracle Arena packed with screaming fans who had shelled out handsomely to see not the latest Disney tween machine or some overproduced pop starlet, but dance. Just dance.
Or rather, the U.S. tour of "So You Think You Can Dance," the Fox show that, unlike "Dancing With the Stars," boasts not a single celebrity yet regularly draws upward of 10 million viewers. The show that, alongside the inferior parade of ballroom B-listers on "Dancing With the Stars," is being embraced by anyone who cares about dance - sometimes reluctantly, sometimes excitedly - as marking a new Golden Age of dance in popular culture, and a great hope for drawing new audiences to dance as high culture, too.
And so, among the unceasing stage fog, the preshow "American Idol" alumni videos, the $4 Pepsis, and, oh yes, plenty of truly impressive dancing Friday from Season 3's top 10 finalists plus a few special guests, the question remained: Is "So You Think You Can Dance" God's gift to the dance world?
One thing you couldn't question Friday was whether these are talented dancers. The high points of last season's competition look even more impressive live: Sabra Johnson and Neil Haskell cold-staring through the table dance set to the Eurythmics; Pasha Kovalev and Sara VonGillern lightly quickstepping to Fat Boy Slim; Pasha and Lauren Gottlieb popping their way through that fabulous Shane Sparks robot routine; Danny Tidwell doing absolutely anything.
Sure, ragged jumps, circus extensions and melodramatic flailing sometimes count more than control and line. And sure, a few contestants have allowed themselves to become trick ponies, especially Bay Area local Shauna Noland, who whipped out her patented turn-with-one-leg-overhead at every opportunity. But whether it was Dominic Sandoval spinning through B-boy head spins or Anya Garnis flinging herself across the stage in yet another Mia Michaels three-hankie special, these are dancers who move with precision and professionalism, not slickly produced reality TV personalities.
As to whether they might inspire crowds to check out less commercial choreography, a highly unscientific crowd poll yields uncertain results."
Click here to read the rest.
November 26, 2007 · 04:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Pina, Sean Dorsey, and Hip Hop
The Chronicle had me experiment with a new form over the weekend, writing three reviews in one. One unfortunate consequence is the story's generic headline, and perhaps there are others--I'd like to hear what you think of this approach. Doing three-in-one was the only way I could get the paper to fit a Pina Bausch review into its pages, believe it or not. My relentless advocacy and my admission to less than absolute knowledge of the Bausch ouevre did not win favor with this indignant Chronicle reader. Nevertheless, thoughts on Bausch:
"To hear the buzz, you might have thought the messiah was returning to UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Friday, and, to her followers, that may not be too exalted a description for Pina Bausch, whose Tanztheater Wuppertal made its first Cal Performances appearance in eight years. Bausch is a choreographer so iconic that people in the dance world tend to forget that other reasonably culturally educated people may not know who she is. And for more than 25 years she's been a choreographer so influential that to see her work is also to recognize the legions of emulators and imitators she's spawned.
"This is just absurd!" cried the woman behind me as dancer Helena Pikon announced, "This is a bear, I am naked, we are in the forest, and it's a little dark," then threw a fur rug over a hunched man and rode off on his back. Um, yes. Absurdity, surrealism, existential non sequiturs - Bausch didn't introduce these elements to dance, but she combined them in her patented way.
I am not a longtime member of the cult of Bausch; I can't tell you how "Ten Chi," created in 2004, stacks up to her mud-heaped "Rite of Spring" (though I did enjoy it less than her carnation-carpeted "Nelken"). I can tell you that "Ten Chi," supported by a consortium of Japanese cultural organizations, is part of a series of dances inspired by place, and that the Japanese references come in the middle: Nazareth Panadero turning a compendium of words like "Fuji" and "sushi" into baby babble; Azusa Seyama running around snapping pictures like a Japanese tourist; two men taking fierce samurai stances only to sit when chairs are placed beneath them.
Whether this captures any essence of Japan is dubious. It all seems raw material rather than subject matter. If there is a staple subject, it's Bausch's usual - love and sexual manipulation - often rendered unforgettably."
(More if you click here.)
And on Sean Dorsey:
"Sometimes deeply transgressive material is most powerful when it's channeled into non-transgressive, almost conventional form, and that's the case with San Francisco's Sean Dorsey. Dorsey is gender-ambiguous, tilting toward male, and uses the pronoun "he." His dances are usually about the female-to-male transgender experience, as were the two premieres on "Lost/Found" Saturday at Dance Mission Theater, rounded out with storytelling by writers Kirk Read and Max Wolf Valerio.
Dorsey tells stories too, in a plainspoken, warmhearted style. He then records them and lays them over a collage of sweet, warm-hearted music. His further brilliance is to bring these stories to life with an uncanny knack for matching movement to the rhythms of speech and planting simple but pungent gestures that have the innocent charm of a parent reading to you at bedtime."
Again, more if you click.
And finally the SF Hip Hop Dance Fest:
"Meanwhile, across town, bass was pounding through the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, and the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest was pumping. Hot tip for 2008's 10th anniversary edition, which founder and inspired producer Micaya is already cooking: The earlier you arrive, the more you get to watch of the opening freestyle, and the more you realize that the soul of hip-hop is wit.
Every group on Program A had its distinctive style: from the Chicago FootworKINGz with its mad, fast steps to Oakland's Neopolitan convincingly merging Afro-Caribbean forms with funk. New York's Mop Top staged a "Wizard of Oz" with master of popping Buddha Stretch as the Tin Man, and Colorado's Elements of Motion won my vote for overall excellence, marrying unreal B-boy head spins to consummate theatricality."
(Yet again, a smidge more if you click.)
And I've just noticed that the editing cut off my last sentence and added some random text below. Chalk it up to attempting an awkward solution to that ever-worsening problem of finding column inches for dance.
Please, if you'd like to comment--I've had to disable comments on this site to avert spam. But you can comment away on the Chronicle link. Good or bad, go for it.
November 20, 2007 · 02:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Howard "Howdy" Cullen, 1947-2007
As his obituary in the Merced Sun-Star read, "Howdy died after a long and courageous battle with everyone he ever knew." He helped dozens and perhaps even hundreds of recovering addicts as an AA sponsor. He will be missed.
November 20, 2007 · 02:21 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
My review of American Ballet Theatre at Berkeley:
"There was a moment at American Ballet Theatre on Wednesday night when everything changed. Herman Cornejo came tearing out of stage left at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall and launched himself so high you wondered if he'd used an invisible vaulting pole. It was the kind of jump in which the dancer seems to have created a ladder out of air.
The "Corsaire" pas de deux that followed was an intoxicating combination of recklessness and control. Cornejo's pirouettes torpedoed right through the moment where most dancers give themselves a little break with the waltz step known as balancé. He threw himself into the next set of pirouettes, threatening to veer across the stage like a Tasmanian devil - but when he centered himself by turn four or five, he looked as if he'd known what he was doing all along. Cornejo is small and muscled - he has a body like a Corvette. And watching him vroom through "Le Corsaire" was like watching an expert race car driver in the Grand Prix. No wonder his partner, Xiomara Reyes, no slouch in the technical department herself, looked on top of the world riding high aloft in his hands.
It was one of the more remarkable dance moments I've seen, all the more so because it created such a clear dividing line during a very odd show. The first half of this first of two repertory programs (Program B opens tonight) was so lackluster - almost like a graduation recital with the world's most precocious students - that you wondered what had happened to American Ballet Theatre in the six years since it last visited Cal Performances. The second half was so scintillating that you wondered how the Bay Area has lived without seeing this troupe for so long."
Click here to read the rest.
November 10, 2007 · 10:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
My SF Chronicle review of the Faustin Linyekula:
"Pain is all-consuming, but the intensity doesn't always translate. Ken Foster, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has brought us a steady series of African contemporary dance companies in recent years, and in each of them you see the same image: piles of bodies. But more than that, you feel the same disconnect.
You know the image must be powerful to artists from these war-torn countries; you feel a twinge of guilt because it isn't instantly powerful to you. But it's just a pile of bodies, and you don't share the experiences behind it. There's a bridge between you and the image that the artist, immersed in how much it means to him, hasn't led you across.
At first, Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula's "Festival of Lies" looks as if it's going to fall into this trap, despite some novel attempts to counteract the distance. Billed as part installation, part dance performance, the show (continuing with an expanded six-hour rendition tonight) turns the YBCA's Forum into a party, with free African food, a bar and a grooving band, Soukous Connection, from Oakland.
Gradually, Linyekula and the three members of his company, Les Studios Kabako, take over the dance floor as the crowd settles into the tables and chairs placed on two sides. It's a Brechtian removal of that theatrical "fourth wall," and the practical effect works: You feel closer to these performers, immersed in the environment. Thursday a healthy crowd of attendees even got up and danced during the intermission.
And yet, for the first half, a disconnect persists. "
Click here to read the rest of the review.
November 10, 2007 · 10:37 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
To hear the latest episode of "This American Life" with my interview with Ira Glass as the introduction, click here. To read more about my book about my father's murder, click here or here.
November 04, 2007 · 11:12 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Lines Ballet at 25
My review of the Lines Ballet fall season, in Monday's Chronicle:
"Lines Ballet threw itself a big party Friday night, and for a big occasion. The troupe is officially 25 years old, but longevity is just the start of what's worth celebrating.
In a quarter-century, Alonzo King's small, sleek company has risen from playing tiny theaters to touring the country and now the world; worked with a dazzling array of musical collaborators hailing from Morocco, Central Africa, Japan and beyond; and essentially, through these nine dancers' twisted, tangled movement and King's earnest yet urgent spirituality, broken the mold of what ballet can be. With its bustling dance center, Lines has also - alongside San Francisco Ballet and ODC/Dance - become one of the hubs of the San Francisco dance scene, one of its great successes and its magnets.
Rest assured all this was marked with due pomp at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: fancy dinner, sparkling dresses, Champagne. And yet, if at some galas festivity trumps substance, that just isn't possible with King in charge. The man does not know how to be frivolous. There were luxuries aplenty Friday: fabulous live music and a guest appearance by former San Francisco Ballet ballerina Muriel Maffre. But the greatest richness was the dancing: purposeful, powerful and luscious. And that's a richness that should only deepen as the home season continues through Sunday.
There are two King world premieres on this program. "Irregular Pearl," to a smattering of Baroque composers with music from the pit by members of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, has moments but will probably not go down as King at his best. On the other hand, "Rasa" is extraordinary. The music for "Rasa" is a mesmerizing commissioned score by the tabla master Zakir Hussain. The heart of "Rasa" is an epic pas de deux for two of King's most touching dancers, Laurel Keen and Brett Conway.
King's finest duets have an arresting way of moving between superhuman ballet curvatures and all-too-human postures of vulnerability, and that is the case with "Rasa," but taken to new heights. As Hussain's score floats through mournful cries and atmospheric effects that sound like footfalls in the distance, Keen and Conway cling and entwine. She cradles his calf and foot; he straightens his leg to eject. She climbs back up his legs; they roll pressed to one another all the way across the stage. Romantic desperation this is not - some solemn, struggling communion is happening."
Click here for the full review.
November 04, 2007 · 09:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
