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Balanchine in San Jose
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I reviewed Ballet San Jose's all-Balanchine program for the Chronicle:
"George Balanchine's 1934 "Serenade" turns ballet dancers into angels. It can't help but have that effect. From the moment the first stirring notes of Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" sound and the curtain lifts on 17 tulle-draped women, each with one hand raised toward gentle moonlight as though in protest of tragedy, there's an inviolable spirit onstage that dancers sense as sacrosanct, that they want to rise to meet.
That's just part of the larger transformation Balanchine is working on Ballet San Jose this weekend. I'm tickled by the name of this latest program, which opened Thursday and continues through Sunday: "Just Balanchine," as though the titan of 20th century choreographers (who died in 1983) could ever be "just." It implies an approachability that is part of the way Artistic Director Dennis Nahat runs his show in Silicon Valley, while his 44 cheery dancers clearly understand the intention behind the title, dancing as though this were "All Balanchine," or even "Purely." They have three of Balanchine's most canonic creations on offer, all staged by guest ballet mistress Victoria Simon. And they do great credit to each, even if much room for growth remains in forging individual interpretations and making the dancing as memorable as the dances.
The most absorbing is "Serenade," and no surprise; no matter how many times you see this ballet, you can't help but be moved by the subtle spiritual drama unfolding in Balanchine's "abstract" spectacle of grace. Amid all of Balanchine's swirling stage formations and ingenious formalism, a woman meets a man. Another woman, the "Dark Angel" role, leads the man to abandon her, as though by fate. And into the grief pour all those other angel-like women to comfort their heroine, raising her to the light.
The Ballet San Jose ensemble danced with care, eagerness and never melodrama Thursday, while the principal casting mostly shone. "
Click here for the full story.
March 29, 2008 · 03:55 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Opera Capers at Diablo Ballet
I'm a bit late adding this one, but I reviewed Diablo Ballet's latest for Monday's Chronicle:
"Until a year ago, Walnut Creek's Diablo Ballet relied on heavy donations from a single sponsor. Now, as the chamber troupe moves bravely and steadily toward firmer financial footing, Artistic Director Lauren Jonas is making the most of her next best bankable asset: Nikolai Kabaniaev.
Diablo Ballet's press spin would have you believe that co-Artistic Director Kabaniaev's "Once Upon a Ballroom" - premiered over the weekend at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts - is a major new step for the company, its first "full length" ballet. In fact, it's more of the same. For more than five years, Kabaniaev has reliably produced economically staged ballets that cleverly repackage everything from "Carmen" to "Cinderella" to the Taj Mahal. They're lighthearted, colorful and quick, and they give the dancers opportunities to show off their technical chops, if not their subtler emotive and interpretive abilities. Clocking in at less than 90 minutes, including intermission, "Once Upon a Ballroom" easily fits this bill.
It's not going to win any awards for dramaturgy. The material being repackaged in "Ballroom" is opera, and what a curious repackaging it is."
Click here for the full review.
March 26, 2008 · 10:11 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Golden Memories at SF Ballet
I scoped out the emotional San Francisco Ballet alumni reunion Saturday for the Chronicle:
"Louise Lawler Pynchon had just finished gawking at a 1956 photo of herself with the San Francisco Ballet corps in "Concerto Barocco."
"I quit dancing to marry him and have kids," she said, pointing at her husband, Bill. "He played the violin and was in the orchestra pit. He picked three different dancers he was interested in."
"You don't have to go into all that," Bill Pynchon said.
"But I won," his wife said.
"Or lost."
They agreed, at least, that San Francisco Ballet today was filled with "unbelievably beautiful dancers" whose conditions were a world apart from the days when S.F. Ballet toured the country by train. "They have salaries now!" Bill Pynchon said. "Benefits!"
Nostalgia ran high Saturday night at the Civic Center's newly remodeled Museum of Performance & Design, where dozens of former Ballet members feted their former glory, and the company's present as part of its 75th anniversary celebrations.
"I'm freaking out here!" shouted Jennifer Blake, a dancer from 1991-1999, as she hugged Duncan Cooper, whose trim figure attested to a relatively recent retirement, but who joked that he danced "from 1854 to 1937."
"Tomorrow during the dinner, do we get up and start dancing?" he said.
"We'll have a pirouette competition!" Blake said.
"It'll be more like spinning and falling on the tables," Duncan deadpanned.
Around them silver-haired former danseurs wistful for the days of flexible hips and effortless grandes battements noshed alongside 70ish primas who, a testament to their lifetimes of balletic discipline, could surely still show the young ones a mean tendu. Jocelyn Vollmar, America's first "Nutcracker" Snow Queen back in 1944, gazed admiringly upon a green "Beauty and the Beast" tutu that would probably still fit, while Deborah Zdobinski, an alumni from the 1970s, had more mixed feelings about the displays. "In there is a costume created for me for 'The Tempest,' " she said, motioning from the hall decked with brownies and canapes back toward the main gallery. "It helped me remember how skinny I used to be."
The costumes were part of "Art and Artifice," an exhibition celebrating "75 Years of Design at San Francisco Ballet," and the reception was just one among a whole weekend's worth of events for dancers who once graced the War Memorial Opera House stage. The list of attendees was illustrious, including Mikko Nissinen, now artistic director of Boston Ballet; Christopher Stowell, now artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre; and Suki Schorer, who danced with San Francisco Ballet in the 1950s before going on to the New York City Ballet. But it was also a big night for the Museum of Performance & Design, relaunched from the former San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum."
Click here for the story. And apologies to the excellent soloist Frances Chung, whom I inadvertently named a corps member.
March 18, 2008 · 02:06 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
World Premieres at ODC
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My review of the gala opening in today's Chronicle:
"To see ODC/Dance blazing through KT Nelson's "Walk Before Talk" on Thursday was to understand why the troupe, now celebrating its 37th year, is not only San Francisco's most firmly established modern dance company but also its most civically embraced. The ODC ethos is all there in that explosively joyful finale. This is a world where the movement is as jazzy as it is athletic, where the women are brash and the men beautiful, where rugged individuality builds team togetherness. No wonder ODC has become a hub for West Coast dance, with its welcoming 23,000-square-foot, $9.5 million center hosting more than 180 classes a week in the Mission.
The three women who lead ODC have always contended that their dances reflect their vision of community, and as the company's local prominence has shot up, so apparently has its creativity. This latest home season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will unveil five world premieres over three weeks - or as founder and Artistic Director Brenda Way said before curtain at the gala opening, "What got into us?" The excitement that must have fueled that prolific output, though, wasn't yet leaping off the stage Thursday. Neither of Way's two new works is a dud, and each has attractions. But both left muted impressions.
"Unintended Consequences: A Meditation" is the more memorable, mostly for Alexander V. Nichols' visual design: an exposed light grid overhead and two fluorescent vertical bars that stand like a Space Age detention cell at the back (Way's own costumes clothe the nine dancers in shades of gray and green). The music is by Laurie Anderson - selections from her album "Big Science," including an ironic celebration of urban sprawl laid over what suggests an Indian drumbeat - and the atmosphere is appropriately dystopian. "Unintended Consequences" is a co-commission from the Equal Justice Society, which must help explain, but not much, the conceptually tacked-on finish in which Corey Brady finds himself trapped between those fluorescent lights."
Click here for the full review.
March 15, 2008 · 12:32 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
My Other Life
If you're curious about the non-dance-writing side of my life and live on the Bay Area's peninsula, I'm reading with my esteemed friend and fellow memoirist and fiction writer Lindsey Crittenden next Thursday, March 20, at the Notre Dame de Namur University. I'll probably read a bit from my memoir, but also from newer short stories--scary and exciting. Click here for the scoop.
March 12, 2008 · 11:08 PM · Books · Comments (0)
Tomasson World Premiere at SFB
Apparently, though I presumed starkly otherwise, I am the only person in San Francisco not crazy about Wayne McGregor's "Eden/Eden." "Eden/Eden" fans at the opera house Friday: My apologies for projecting my own indifference upon you. Otherwise, I think my review of San Francisco Ballet's program five in today's Chronicle captured things more or less accurately:
"San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson may have excluded himself from the 10 choreographers about to unleash world premieres at next month's New Works Festival, but he's hardly shelved his own choreographic ambition. Tomasson's "On a Theme of Paganini," unveiled Friday, tackles a devilishly complex score: Rachmaninoff's rakish rhapsody on Paganini's famous melody. To match it, Tomasson deploys nearly every weapon at his disposal: two sparkling female principals, three of the company's most rip-roaring star guys, a platoon of demi-soloists who barely get to see battle, and separate battalions of corps women and men. But the one weapon Tomasson could have used a lot more of is wit.
Like most of Tomasson's neoclassic oeuvre, "On a Theme of Paganini" will hardly stand accused of theatrical outlandishness. Neil Peter Jampolis' lighting design is a light-flooded field of gray, and Martin Pakledinaz's costumes have a subtle industrial feel - the women's short dresses have silver metallic bodices.
This could have provided a clean visual backdrop for formal fun with Rachmaninoff, teasing to the point of near-parody or lushly romantic in many of these 24 variations.
But as so often in Tomasson's dances, though the structural skill is unflagging, the physical vocabulary is restrained to a point of paucity. The most notable motif in "On a Theme of Paganini" is an arm raised overhead, then flipped palm up, defiantly, puckishly. That gesture could have been a good starting point, but it's about all we've got, and it returns dutifully, though never in surprising ways. "On a Theme of Paganini" could've used a little naughtiness, a little bad taste.
It does offer pleasures - Music Director Martin West and the orchestra, with Roy Bogas as pianist, and the swooning famous 18th variation featuring Maria Kochetkova. The sweet innocence that made her "Giselle" heartbreaking proves magical again here, as Kochetkova kisses Davit Karapetyan's forehead and curls up so tiny inside his burly arms. "
Click here for the full review.
UPDATE: Turns out "Eden/Eden" fans are wonderfully passionate. I'm sorry to say I can't join your ranks. But if you're curious about my personal reasoning about my indifference towards "Eden/Eden," this is what I wrote in the Chronicle last year:
"If you want to know where the San Francisco Ballet is headed, talk to the younger dancers. For months, they've been buzzing about "Eden/Eden," the futuristic work by British choreographer Wayne McGregor that had its U.S. premiere on the company's Program 4 Tuesday night. Such bizarre, crazy movement! Like nothing we've ever danced! And indeed they danced it with obvious relish.
But what may feel cutting-edge and exciting to dancers brought up in the relatively artistically isolated world of ballet is not always a thrill for the audience. "Eden/Eden" is relentless. It's designed to be. It's about cloning, and it uses music by the minimalist composer Steve Reich -- fast repeating xylophone rhythms intercut with robotic voices, and audio clips of scientists talking about genetic engineering. The nine dancers start out in flesh-colored underwear and bald caps, looking like eerie mannequins; Ursula Bombshell's costumes really do succeed at making them look identical. Later, apparently as they begin to take over the human race, they put on clothes; there's also a tree hovering in the background, and it disappears along with our last shred of humanity. Think Philip K. Dick for the Opera House stage.
The movement would indeed be novel for a ballet dancer. Limbs hyperextend; arms look as if they want to pop out of their joints. Much of it is quite inventive: hips and ribs shimmying upward from deep grand plies; a leg extended with a flexed foot rocking side to side, boom-boom-boom. Muriel Maffre is the high priestess of this kind of style, but the whole cast -- including corps members Dana Genshaft and Hayley Farr -- clearly take to it, and the young soloist Jaime Garcia Castilla has a whip-crack solo that may be his finest moment yet.
So why then does it all grow so tiresome? For one thing, for all its aura of scientific wonder and doom, "Eden/Eden" doesn't have any mysteries. When McGregor has, for instance, the whole ensemble start whirling in marathon fouette turns, you put it together pretty quickly -- ah! It's as if they're genetically modified superhumans! -- and once you do there's no extra ambiguity to open up, no further emotional or conceptual place to take that thought. Dance can say interesting things about technology and science, but it needs to do so in a much less tidy, far more metaphorically rich and unresolved way than McGregor offers."
And please, keep sharing with me your thoughts.
March 10, 2008 · 02:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
"West Side" Triumph at SFB
San Francisco Ballet in "West Side Story Suite" is a can't-miss. My review in the Chronicle:
"San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary season is only half begun, but its defining moment arrived Thursday in the troupe's fourth repertory program. Whatever thrills and spills Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's risky New Works Festival may bring us come April, we already know this: No one will forget these dancers snapping and singing their hearts out in the company premiere of Jerome Robbins' "West Side Story Suite."
That "West Side Story" is enduringly irresistible even in digest form doesn't explain half the excitement; the real drama lies in what Robbins' 1995 adaptation, until recently performed only by New York City Ballet, reveals to us anew about a relentlessly ascending troupe. Like William Forsythe's edgy "Artifact Suite," though in a completely different style, "West Side Story Suite" unveils a San Francisco Ballet bolder, braver and more committed than we had thought possible.
Shannon Roberts as Anita (far right) in "West Side Story Suite," photo credit Erik Tomasson.
It's a triumph a long time in the making. Tomasson has steadily strengthened the company's connection to Robbins, the artistic mentor he once worked with so closely; the whole of Program 4 attests to his progress. Robbins' intimate "In the Night," acquired when Tomasson first took the helm 23 years ago, received exquisite interpretations Thursday, while "Fancy Free," the Bernstein collaboration that made Robbins' name in 1944, fell shy of a fully realized performance yet kept the audience happy. But it was "West Side Story Suite" that drew rock-concert cheers. Even the orchestra seemed to rally, brash and bleating under Music Director Martin West.
This staging by Jean-Pierre Frohlich and Jenifer Ringer uncovers fresh talent in the Ballet's ranks. Two of Wednesday's leads were drawn from the corps: Dores Andre moved as sweetly as a lamb as Maria, while Shannon Roberts sashayed through a rendition of "America" to make even Rita Moreno proud - and let rip a wild and natural voice - as Anita. Soloist Rory Hohenstein has been on the rise for several seasons now, but as Riff he gets to show off his Broadway-baby instincts, crooning credibly and commanding a crackling performance of "Cool." Corps member Matthew Stewart took on the vocals for "Something's Coming," usually reserved for a professional singer. His enunciations weren't nearly as intelligible as those from Natasha Ramirez Leland, the hired voice for "Somewhere"; still, kudos for gumption. Garrett Anderson made a dreamy Tony. Yet to call out names would be an endless exercise: How to stop at gutsy Julianne Kepley, sassy Courtney Elizabeth, wiry Benjamin Stewart? That's the beauty of a ballet that takes a company to a new level, and especially Robbins danced at its best: Everyone matters."
Click here for full review.
And take note: Deborah Dubowy has organized another of her excellent Words on Dance evenings--this time two evenings, both dedicated to Jerome Robbins. On Monday, March 10 Grover Dale (West Side Story), Sheldon Harnick (lyricist for Fiddler on the Roof), Sondra Lee (High Button Shoes and Peter Pan), and Rita Moreno (Oscar winner for West Side Story, and King and I) will talk about Robbins' Broadway work. On March 17, Robert La Fosse (New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Tony Award winner for Jerome Robbins' Broadway), Stephanie Saland (former New York City Ballet principal dancer), Helgi Tomasson (Artistic Director, San Francisco Ballet, former New York City Ballet principal dancer), and Edward Villella (Artistic Director, Miami City Ballet, former New York City Ballet principal dancer) will talk about Robbins and his ballet career.
Expect revealing, behind-the-scenes talk, illuminating anecdotes, and rare video clips of Robbins' best. Click here for full info.
March 07, 2008 · 04:44 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Ailey Dancers Back in Berkeley
My review in the Chronicle:
"Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" is a dance everyone should see at least once; the real miracle is that it's stirring no matter how many times you see it. Here in the Bay Area, we've had the chance to see it again and again, thanks to Cal Performance's annual presentation of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater -"Revelations" closes almost every Ailey program.
Wednesday the classic was as moving as it must have been when it premiered in 1960. With its hip-shaking spirituals, soul-baring reaches and burning understanding of the joyous struggle for transcendence, "Revelations" seems to fly in the face of that old lament that dance is an ephemeral art. But, of course, even the most timeless of dances is ephemeral - it lives only as long as it's danced in the right spirit. And since Ailey's death in 1989, the keeper of that spirit has been Judith Jamison.
The Ailey troupe's latest run at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall comes on the heels of Jamison's announcement that she'll step down in 2011. It's hard not to watch this engagement as a celebration of her leadership. Even a company as popular the world over as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater cannot live by "Revelations" alone, and for nearly two decades Jamison has fed her muscular, monumental dancers solid food for body, mind and spirit. In truth, choreographically, there have been far more scintillating slates than this first of three programs continuing through Sunday. But just try telling that to the sold-out house yipping with admiration for these superhuman movers' every step in Camille A. Brown's "The Groove to Nobody's Business." "
Click here for full review.
March 07, 2008 · 12:41 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
