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My review of SF Ballet's program one for the Chronicle is now online:
"Ah, maturity. San Francisco Ballet opened its 75th anniversary season Tuesday with the dance equivalent of a gloriously grown-up dinner party. There's nothing cutting edge or challenging to interfere with the digestion on Program 1, only great dancing that flows with the ease and civility of fine conversation. If you're looking for innovative choreography, this is not the evening for you. But if you like walking out of the opera house gently glowing from the pleasure of two hours in charmed company, you could hardly do better.
There was no shortage of exceptional dancers a guest would want to spend more time with - Rory Hohenstein in Lew Christensen's "Filling Station," Tina LeBlanc and a freshly confident Elizabeth Miner in Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's "7 for Eight." But the heart of the evening was Yuan Yuan Tan presiding like a generous hostess over George Balanchine's "Diamonds."
Yuan Yuan Tan and Ruben Martin in "Diamonds," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
That Tan could make "Diamonds" an event speaks to her position as the Ballet's most glamorous star principal, a bird-boned wonder of fluidity from her impossibly long fingers to her sweetly puppyish big feet. "Diamonds" is only as good as the ballerina dancing it - despite its huge corps arrayed in baubles and its enchanted Tchaikovsky score, this is the weakest panel of Balanchine's evening-length 1967 triptych "Jewels," lacking the deeper poetry of "Emeralds," the naughty verve of "Rubies." But with Balanchine's muse Suzanne Farrell performing the role created on her, "Diamonds" had drama. And with Farrell coaching these latest performances, Tan gave it drama, too, though it was a drama all her own."
Click here for the full review.
More photos:
Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun and Tiit Helimets in "7 for Eight," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
Rory Hohenstein in "Filling Station," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
January 30, 2008 · 06:50 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Today, a little behind-the-scenes peek into the world of arts journalism. First, critics don't write their own headlines. Copy editors do. And fortunately for me, at the Chronicle they usually do a pithy and succinct job, far better than I could hope to. But every now and again, the headline doesn't quite sync with what I meant to communicate in the review, and that was the case today with my review of Company C, which ran with the headline "Company C enters A-list ballet scene."
Certainly my review was enthusiastic. Here's the top of it:
"Attention Bay Area ballet fans: There's a new contender in town. The progress that the East Bay's Company C Contemporary Ballet has made in the six years since its founding has surely been slow and gradual, but Saturday at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, the transformation seemed sudden and complete.
Company C's latest program, which repeats at San Francisco's Cowell Theater Feb. 9 and 10, puts the chamber troupe in league with such other local favorites as Smuin Ballet and Diablo Ballet, while also carving a distinctive niche. It is a full, lively program, with plenty of lightweight diversions and one heavyweight classic. It is also handsomely danced.
The classic is Antony Tudor's "Dark Elegies" from 1937, and it illustrates the strategy that has set Company C apart. Founder Charles Anderson, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, is reportedly an inspiring teacher but frankly an uninspired choreographer. Yet, rather than make Company C his vanity project, he has set to balancing his own works with dances by luminaries. In the past two years, Company C has taken on two dances by Twyla Tharp and one by Paul Taylor - but the performers, though clearly motivated to rise to the level of the works entrusted to them, still looked a little green.
That changed Saturday with a credible and often stirring performance of Tudor's mournful masterpiece."
And here's the link to the full review.
Am I happy for little Company C? Certainly. Would I label them (or Smuin or Diablo) A-list? Hardly, no offense intended. They're great companies for what they do. So chalk that headline up to a lucky score for Company C's PR materials.
Behind-the-scenes revelation number two: I don't always have say over how to cover shows. Though generally the Chronicle changes very little of what I write (and almost always for the better--thank you to every editor who has ever saved my butt from committing an error or just an inanity of phrasing), I am sometimes called to cover shows in ways I wouldn't myself have chosen. That was the case with my coverage of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Stanford over the weekend. My editor asked for a review-feature hybrid with audience quotes, and thus in addition to my opining, you get a little sampler of crowd reactions to using the iPods deployed for "eyeSpace":
"It could have seemed gimmicky in the hands of almost any other choreographer: a dance set to music played on each audience member's individual iPod.
But the concept is this: Each viewer presses "shuffle" on a personal iPod simultaneously, randomizing the tracks of composer Mikel Rouse's music and creating his or her own private experience of the dance unfolding onstage. And the choreographer was Merce Cunningham, the 88-year-old maverick who revolutionized movement's relationship to music and decor.
So the crowd at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on Friday night was game for Cunningham's 2006 "eye- Space," happily queuing to use their cell phones or credit cards to borrow an iPod, tickled by what for many was still a newfangled technology. "It looks manageable, and I'm willing," said 77-year-old Tom Trier of Belmont, who had never used an iPod before.
For the younger generation, the experiment made perfect sense. "I like how I can take it off or put it back on," said Stanford undergrad Claire Slattery, before her friend Laura McDonald offered, "I like that there's shared control of the piece." But then Stanford audiences get Cunningham better than most, their grasp bolstered by 2005's weekslong, university-wide "Encounter: Merce" project, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's last visit before this latest Stanford Lively Arts presentation. The Stanford crowd knows that for more than half a century, Cunningham has used everything from a roll of the dice to a consultation of the I Ching to juxtapose what music or sets might accompany which dance - and to liberate viewers with the heady responsibility of making from the chance combinations what they will.
And what audiences learned Friday was that an iPod was simply the latest tool to realize an artistic mind-set that never grows dated. For, in truth, the real excitement of this engagement came long before the program-capping "eyeSpace," in two Cunningham classics that were created three decades apart, but both looked as though they could have been made yesterday."
here's the full review.
More than a little ungainly in form, in my estimation, but I hope reasonably informative. As always, reactions welcome.
January 28, 2008 · 08:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Helgi, In-Depth
You can actually click here to read the full text of my in-depth profile of San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson for San Francisco Magazine. I really do recommend picking up the hard copy issue, though; the photographs and the layout are gorgeous and you can't see either online.
January 26, 2008 · 06:57 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
My review of San Francisco Ballet's gala for the SF Chronicle is now online:
" "Maestro!" Pascal Molat shouted with a mischievous grin before launching himself into a dizzying whirl of jetes. Soon Nicolas Blanc rushed the Opera House stage to give Molat a run for the money, stopping pirouettes with the surreal physics of a cartoon character, capering effortlessly through an excerpt from Italian choreographer Renato Zanella's zany "Alles Walzer."
Pascal Molat in "Alles Walzer," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
It was the kind of moment to make you sit up and realize that San Francisco has one of the world's leading ballet companies, a revelation that Wednesday's San Francisco Ballet gala supplied in overwhelming variety. From the company's consummate actress, Sarah Van Patten, girlishly swooning in the duet from Christopher Wheeldon's "Carousel (A Dance)" to the tiny Russian recruit Maria Kochetkova teasingly tambourine-tapping through the tricks of "La Esmeralda" and the debut of guest artist Sofiane Sylve, there was no shortage of star turns to remind us why San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary is a big deal: Not because of its novel past (America's oldest professional ballet company, as you'll hear ad nauseam this season), but because of its promising present.
Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba in "Carousel (A Dance)," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
These were welcome moments in a Champagne-fueled celebration that suffered a curious Big Moment by-product: big anniversary bloat. It wasn't that the Ballet indulged undue pomp, with balloons and confetti raining upon the final curtain call. The speechifying was brief, with a rightfully beaming Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson flanked by recipients of the company's Lew Christensen Medal before board co-chair James H. Herbert was inducted into their ranks. Never verbose, Tomasson let the dancing speak to all that he has accomplished since taking the helm in 1985, reshaping a once-regional company into a collection of internationally distinctive dancers. But the dancing spoke haltingly, hampered by programming that never hit the whiz-bang pacing that ballet galas trade in."
Click here for the full review.
In the perennial struggle to cover the season opening gala without creating a laundry list of every tidbit, I left out Rachel Viselli and Damian Smith in the final bowler-hat-girl pas from Kenneth Macmillan's "Elite Syncopations." The omission wasn't intentional; I'm warming to Viselli slowly, and was pleased to see an unexpected playful side of her emerge in the tush-shaking ragtime.
Meanwhile, if you pick up the newest (February) San Francisco Magazine and open it dead center, you will find a gorgeous, glossy 10-page spread full of photos of Helgi Tomasson and the company. The layout is stunning; whether my in-depth profile of Tomasson captures him and does him justice I leave you to judge.
As always, I love hearing your reactions, good and bad (but please not ugly). You can email me at rachel at rachel howard dot com, or better yet if you have thoughts to share on the gala and the season to come, post them on the "comments" feature at the top of the review after you click through.
Photos of my other personal highlights, courtesy San Francisco Ballet:
Sofiane Sylve and Anthony Spaulding in "Two Pieces for Het (For Rachel)," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
Maria Kochetkova in "La Esmeralda," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith in "Distant Cries," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
January 24, 2008 · 08:07 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
I'm back--back from graduate school residency in North Carolina at Warren Wilson College, back into the intensive work of a second semester, and happily back out reviewing dance for the Chronicle. It's nearly the start of the San Francisco Ballet's big 75th anniversary season, of course--the gala kickoff comes next Wednesday--and February and March are looking busy, with appointments to see Robert Moses' Kin, the State Ballet of Georgia, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Nacho Duato's Compania Nacional de Danza, ODC, and many others.
After nearly a month since my last review, I jumped in again with Keith Hennessy's Circo Zero:
"If you're not a follower of the more subversive side of the San Francisco dance scene, Keith Hennessy may be the most revered dancer/performance artist/self-proclaimed prophet/political provocateur you've never heard of. A member of the rabble-rousing collective Contraband in the late '80s and early '90s, he's probably best known for once gathering spit from his audience, mixing it with black pigment, and pasting it on his naked body in a visceral rejection of AIDS fear-mongering. In the past decade, though, he's turned from quasi-rituals to a new form - circus - with increasingly successful results.
"Sol Niger," performed by his troupe Circo Zero, was so popular during its premiere last fall that Hennessy has brought it back for another two-week run at Project Artaud Theater. During Wednesday's opening, it was obvious why the Hennessy faithful have been passionate about this production. To a less converted viewer, though, the 70-minute show leaves a residue of reservations alongside its striking images.
The title "Sol Niger" is Latin for "black sun," a poetic description of solar eclipse that here cuts two ways: as a symbol for dark times and as a belief that sometimes the deepest truths are glimpsed in shadow. Cirque du Soleil, of course, this is not. "Welcome to the circus where bodies are metaphors and every gesture is symbolic!" Seth Eisen's creepy ringmaster shouts, cleverly winking at the relatively low-rent nature of the spectacle: "Watch Emily tread upon the world's poor," he says as Emily Leap steps across her castmates' hands, "four feet above the ground!" "
Click here for the full review in today's SF Chronicle.
January 18, 2008 · 10:45 AM · Dance · Comments (1)
I'm in Asheville, North Carolina for my graduate school residency in the Warren Wilson College writing program all week. Meanwhile, my list of dance performances to look forward to in the first half of 2008 is in tomorrow's SF Chronicle. Here's a sampling:
Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Jan. 25-26, Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium): The 87-year-old maverick - who revolutionized dance's relationship to time, space and sound - is astonishingly au courant. Along with Cunningham classics, Stanford Lively Arts' two programs will include "eyeSpace," in which each audience member experiences his or her own soundtrack while listening to an iPod set to "shuffle."
Shen Wei Dance Arts (March 6-8, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts): Chinese-born Shen Wei has attracted a lot of attention here in recent years, and for good reason. His large-scale visions, which draw upon his background in Peking Opera and as a painter, are overwhelming sensory experiences. His company will bring "Re," which transforms the stage into a giant Buddhist mandala.
inkBoat (April 24-26, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts): Next wave butoh maverick Shinichi Iova-Koga bases his international collaborative in both the Bay Area and Berlin, creating theater experiences that are absurd and haunting, tender and demented. His newest, "c(H)ord," features music from the director of Seattle's Degenerate Art Ensemble, and - as always - surreal visual design.
The Oakland Ballet Company (April 12, Paramount Theatre): Founding Artistic Director Ronn Guidi continues the resurrection of his plucky company with two performances of his ballet "The Secret Garden," set to Elgar; Michael Morgan will conduct the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
ODC Theater Festivals (April 24-May 10 and June 5-28, Project Artaud Theater): The indispensable ODC Theater is going dark for a major rebuilding and expansion in 2008, but director Rob Bailis is hardly sitting idle. Instead, he's moving the shows a few blocks over to Project Artaud, where ODC will produce four major festivals. The first, "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic," features new work by aerialist Jo Kreiter, butoh artist Ledoh and others; the second, "The Big Picture: ODC Hosts Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Philadelphia," brings cutting-edge multidisciplinary work from those cities. Later festivals in July and October will challenge our ideas of "traditional" dance, and team with the literary festival Litquake to investigate "Stories That Move."
For my other five picks, click here.
January 05, 2008 · 03:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
