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Hear me read a new story--just click
This is very cool: Thanks to the enterprising John Yi and his new website dublit, you can hear me reading the story I shared two weeks ago at the Progressive Reading Series just by clicking this icon:
So give it a listen if you'd like to hear what I'm up to, fiction-writing-wise. And check out the rest of the dublit site to discover other great shorts or even record and upload one of your own.
Many thanks to John Yi and dublit.
May 31, 2008 · 04:10 PM · Books · Comments (0)
Shaolin monks at Lines Ballet
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UPDATE: Not until late yesterday evening did it come to my attention that there's a copy editing error in the review rendering a sentence in the second paragraph nonsensical. The sentence should read:" . . . propeller-legged jumps, lightning-fast punches, BACKFLIPS landed on the crown of the head."
Ah, daily journalism.
The Shaolin monks are back at Lines Ballet. My review in today's Chronicle:
"Usually the phrase "back by popular demand" is just so much marketing spin, but apparently the word really has gotten out about Lines Ballet's collaboration with Shaolin monks. This week's entire encore run of "Long River High Sky" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater is sold out, and Wednesday's opening-night audience was on its feet the moment the curtain fell.
Most of the cheers during the two-hour show went to the monks' more acrobatic kung fu feats: propeller-legged jumps, lightning-fast punches, landed on the crown of the head. But after one quartet exclusively by Lines' own exquisite dancers, an irrepressible lone enthusiast shouted "Bravo!," and more power to him. Because though the monks may be mesmerizing, they're far from carrying the show. The real marvel here is how choreographer Alonzo King brings these two art forms together with a shared sense of spiritual purpose that can't be faked or fabricated."
Click here for the full review, and here for my review from last year (which, frankly, is better written). And go here for some very cool pictures.
Finally, click here to see video from last year's show, which included a different cast of monks.
May 30, 2008 · 09:57 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Kathak Master in SF
Kathak master Birju Maharaj makes a rare U.S. appearance in SF on Sunday. My ditty in the Chronicle:
"With 15 pounds of bells on his ankles and sweat in his silver hair, Birju Maharaj stamps out ever more complex rhythms. Sometimes they sound uncannily like birds singing or rain falling. But always, just when you think you've lost the pattern, Maharaj brings it together on the first beat of the new cycle. When that happens, it's like suddenly seeing an image in a constellation of stars, or glimpsing divine design in the veins of a leaf: a spiritual experience.
"All the rhythms come from nature," Maharaj, the undisputed living master of Indian Kathak dance, explained by phone from his school in Delhi. "Nature surrounds us. The moon is dancing, the air is dancing. Dance is the movement of the universe. Rhythm is our heartbeat, until our last breath."
Few practitioners of Kathak - one of eight classical Indian dance forms - can make people see or hear that the way Maharaj can. It's no surprise that Kathak fans, and other lovers of Indian culture, will flock to the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre on Sunday for one of the 70-year-old guru's rare U.S. appearances.
Kathak is enjoying a resurgence these days with schools proliferating here and abroad. Maharaj, born into a family of legendary Kathak dancers, is largely responsible for that trend. "It's reached a point where certain dancers might try to deny this," said Anuradha Nag of San Jose, the producer of Sunday's concert and a disciple of Maharaj for 25 years. "But everybody is following in his footsteps."
With accompaniment by the virtuoso tabla player Zakir Hussain, Maharaj's solo performance will highlight Kathak's insanely musically complex game of one-upmanship between dancer and drummer, the swift turns and powerful stampings. But it will also showcase the subtler artistry that Maharaj is often credited with restoring."
Click herefor the full preview.
May 29, 2008 · 06:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Paige Starling Sorvillo/blindsight at SFIAF
Catching up again. My review of Paige Starling Sorvillo's "thirty seven isolated events" in the Chronicle:
"Strange and wonderful how butoh, the post-World War II Japanese "dance of darkness," is spawning such a strong new generation of artists here in San Francisco. The latest to emerge is Paige Starling Sorvillo, and if you didn't know of her butoh background, you might not guess it immediately from "Thirty Seven Isolated Events," which her company Blindsight premiered at CounterPULSE over the weekend as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
Sorvillo keeps butoh's methods - the existential intensity, the non-dancey, image-driven intentionality - and forgoes its stereotypical clawing hands and, as she aptly put it in a post-performance talk Friday, "gnarled faces." The results are not yet as startlingly original or metaphorically provocative as some of her contemporaries, like Shinichi Iova-Koga and his company inkBoat, or Ledoh and his Salt Farm collective. But they show a great deal of promise.
The strongest elements of "Thirty Seven Isolated Events," which continues this week, are the fully present performances. Tall, gamine Claire Willey gets the most stage time, along with punky, defiant Loren Robertson. In the work's most memorable section, Willey turns away from the audience and roils the incredible musculature of her naked back, reaching around to paw herself, while a live video feed of this is projected onto Robertson, clothing her in an artificial second skin. In the central section, a flailing Sorvillo calls out 37 "events" as Robertson and Willey enact them: "No. 8: You fall forward, taking me with you"; "18: Hide under the table"; "No. 22: This is where we hear our own artificial breathing"; "28: I cannot see my own hands."
The number of events refers to 37 degrees Celsius, the resting temperature of the human body. Tidy enough, but the metaphor doesn't feel as though it has anywhere to go. "
Click here for the full review.
May 29, 2008 · 06:27 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
"Speaking Chinese" at SFIAF
I really take no joy in having to write a review this negative. From yesterday's Chronicle:
"Was Andrew Wood, executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, making disclaimers Thursday night? Introducing the dance-theater production "Speaking Chinese," Wood explained that the collaborators, some based in San Francisco, some in China, had been able to work in each other's presence only a handful of times. Nonetheless, he said, the performers were excited to share what they had and eager for audience feedback.
It sounded like the precurtain spiel for a work-in-progress, not a world premiere, and perhaps that's the kindest way of viewing this hourlong show, which repeats at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum tonight before touring in China. It isn't that "Speaking Chinese" is terribly offensive, it's just that there isn't much to it, despite a roster of collaborators that makes the show a poster child for the festival's goal of fostering international connections.
There's the Chinese Culture Center, local choreographer Kim Epifano and her Epiphany Productions, Shanghai producers Reckless Moments, and Beijing producer Honglan Studio. "Speaking Chinese" has its own composer (Zhu Jian'er), dramaturge (Barry Plews) and even its own interpreter (Hu He). Despite all that, this adaptation of Eileen Chang's 1943 novella "Love in a Fallen City" comes off as a series of tentative sketches that only hint at the richer story.
If you don't know Chang's book (and though it's inspired a movie and several plays, one should assume that the majority of the audience does not), you will be utterly lost by this string of bafflingly bland and choreographically thin duets. True, Epifano and team set themselves a challenge in using just two dancers, the lithe National Ballet of China star Hou Honglan and frequent Epiphany Productions performer C. Derrick Jones. But the tools of theater are many - voice-overs, props, backdrops, dramatic lighting - and though "Speaking Chinese" uses all of these in a modest way, none tell the average viewer that Honglan's Bai Liusu is a divorcee trapped by repressive conditions, or that Jones' Fan Liuyan is a playboy, or that part of their affair is happening in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese attack and occupation. You'll be lucky even to catch the characters' names."
Click here for the full review.
May 25, 2008 · 04:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Hear Me Read Saturday
I'll be reading one of my newer short stories this Saturday at the Progressive Reading Series, 7 p.m. at the Makeout Room in San Francisco's Mission District. I had been scheduled to read next month, but when Mary Roach had to drop out, organizer (and amazing novelist) Stephen Elliott bumped me up in the lineup. And what a great lineup it is:
Pam Houston, Adam Mansbach, David West, Mark Pritchard
Plus: Sticky Notes from This American Life's Starlee Kine
Josh Bearman's Multi-Media Extravaganza
Comedian Nato Green
and The Progressive Reading Series All-Star Minstrels
Your $10-$20 sliding scale donation at the door goes to help save rent control--NO on Prop 98 and YES on Prop 99 on the June 3 ballot.
7 pm at The Makeout Room
3225 22nd Street 415 647 2888
Click here for more info.
May 14, 2008 · 11:17 AM · Books · Comments (0)
Washington Post on SF Ballet's New Works Festival
Sarah Kaufman's gloomy assessment is a must-read:
" "Finally, a real success!" exclaimed one patron on his way up the aisle at the War Memorial Opera House, where he had just seen the last of 10 world premieres performed in three days by the San Francisco Ballet. Wonderful for him that he was pleased, but I was merely weary. Too many bad ballets, too few steps forward.
The company didn't envision its ambitious New Works Festival, the centerpiece of the San Francisco Ballet's 75th-anniversary season, as a microcosm of what's wrong with the ballet world. But the fact that this large outlay of money, time and talent -- unprecedented in its scope -- produced more mediocrity than revelation points to a big problem for ballet. Self-renewal is not its strong suit. Ballet does well with the old and the familiar -- whether traditional story ballets such as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake," or their plotless offspring, the tighter, sexier undressed works of George Balanchine. This is largely what the ballet runs on these days. But in recent years, producing new masterpieces (not just new pieces) has become a challenge."
I don't agree with Kaufman's underlying cynicism (particularly her arch unveiling of the festival as a marketing play--why shouldn't it also be that?), but her piece reawakened me to a standard of what mainstream-press dance writing today could be. Hers is a level of reportage and analysis--and a level of wider cultural relevance--that could only be achieved with the benefit of weeks to mull over the festival's bigger implications. And it's done incisively, with a level head and without hyperbole. It's clearly not the kind of thinking that could be arrived at overnight.
I'm beginning to think I've valued knee-jerk passion--passion that tilts towards hyperbole--too much in dance writing lately, both my own and others. Alas, freelancing for the Chronicle, I'm often logistically unable to do the kind of deeper, longer form consideration Kaufman offers, alongside perhaps only Alastair Macaulay at the Times, and Joan Acocella at the New Yorker. But I thank Kaufman for providing an example to aspire towards.
May 14, 2008 · 10:58 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Live Jazz at Diablo Ballet
Catching up--my review in the Chronicle Monday:
"Friday night at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, I ended up sitting next to a mother and her 10-year-old girl. The little girl liked ballet, and the mother regularly bought tickets for Diablo Ballet at her daughter's urging. San Francisco Ballet was too far to make it home by bedtime, and they were both quite happy with the professionalism of Diablo Ballet's dancers.
It was a useful reminder of what would be lost if Diablo Ballet dies. The family-friendly chamber troupe has survived a tough year after losing the financial backing of a major, longtime sponsor. Over the weekend, it closed a pared-down spring season with a program that looked like an ideal vehicle for bouncing back. "Jazz Fever" offered three new works by three in-house choreographers, with accompaniment by the Brett King Cosby Trio - the first time Diablo Ballet has had the luxury of live music in nearly a decade.
I'd hoped for three distinctive ballets, each with something to say, and maybe even a gem from Viktor Kabaniaev, the trio's most gifted dancemaker. In the end, all three choreographers seemed stymied by the unfamiliar musical forms of the atmospherically avant-garde '80s style jazz, mostly compositions by the Brett King Cosby Trio's own members. Each ballet noodled on to fill out the music, but without a more animating improvisatory spirit.
"Jazz Room," by Kabaniaev's brother Nikolai, was the most conventional in style, but also the most disciplined in structure. Frenetic stop-and-go solos for each of the four cast members framed a sultry duet between Jenna McClintock and Derek Sakakura, she falling backward into his strong arms and pretzeling her legs around his body into ecstatic lifts. If "Jazz Room" offered less than the role of a lifetime, you would never have known that watching McClintock (also a dancer with Oakland Ballet), who sculpted her part into a continuous dream of ravishing elegance."
Click here for the rest of the review.
May 14, 2008 · 09:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Smuin and Gershwin
Catching up--my review of Smuin Ballet in yesterday's Chronicle:
"Michael Smuin was a ballet showman whose slick dances his fans loved, and plenty of critics - this one included - loved to hate. But watching his Smuin Ballet carry on after the gleefully populist choreographer's sudden death one year ago, it's hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Perhaps that's largely because Smuin's 2001 "Dancin' With Gershwin," which opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday, is one of his tamer packages. It's inoffensive, undemanding entertainment that will keep Smuin devotees happy - and likely win some new fans.
This suite of ditties set to George and Ira Gershwin is not as theatrically outre or teasingly testing of the boundaries of good taste as some Smuin creations. True, there's a blond-wigged Marilyn Monroe (Robin Cornwell) shaking her moneymaker to Monroe's rendition of "Do It Again" as men with Vegas feather fans tremble with lust - a classic Smuin moment. And true, "Dancin' With Gershwin" is suffused with Smuin's love of razzle-dazzle showbiz and crazy cartoon effects. In "Swanee," to a recording by Al Jolson, the dancers wear white gloves and spats; their shirt cuffs suddenly glow in the dark, flying like birds as Jolson whistles. In "Ain't Necessarily So" (Cher's version), lithe Kevin Yee-Chan slinks through acrobatics while dancers in larger-than-life shadow projections act out the Biblical episodes behind him. There's full-company tap dancing and old-fashioned cane twirling. In one of the less-inspired gimmicks, to "By Strauss," two women in French maid outfits get twirled around on rolling office chairs.
But the bulk of "Dancin' With Gershwin" consists of pleasant, mostly indistinct, romantic pas de deux. In "I've Got a Crush on You," the man in a suit takes off her hat and turns out to be a woman - a vintage Smuin twist. "Someone to Watch Over Me" is set in the tropics, with Ethan White in a Tommy Bahama-style shirt partnering light-as-air Jessica Touchet. In "They Can't Take that Away from Me," Matthew Linzer moves through a ballroom dream with Cornwell, and in "The Man I Love," sultry Erin Yarbrough-Stewart lavishes herself upon a bare-chested Aaron Thayer.
I can't say I found either the steps or the emotional arc of any of these duets to be terribly notable, but I'm also not sure that matters. "
Click here for the rest.
May 06, 2008 · 12:37 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
New "Swan" at SF Ballet in 2009
My write-up of the San Francisco Ballet 2009 season in today's Chronicle:
"San Francisco Ballet will unveil an all-new production of "Swan Lake" by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson in 2009 as the centerpiece of its 76th season, along with a world premiere by resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov, the return of George Balanchine's full-evening "Jewels" and a program dedicated to works by reigning modern dance master Mark Morris.
The new "Swan Lake" marks an investment in the classics after the forward-looking New Works Festival that crowned this year's 75th anniversary. Six of the 10 ballets unveiled during that festival will return next year, including Christopher Wheeldon's intimate "Within the Golden Hour" and Jorma Elo's blood-pumping "Double Evil."
But Tomasson said the time was right, 20 years after his first staging of "Swan Lake" for the Ballet, to revisit the Tchaikovsky/Petipa classic with subtle new ideas and a larger budget. The sets and costumes will be designed by Jonathan Fensom, acclaimed for his work on Broadway but doing his first work for ballet. The production will put no major revisionist twists on the iconic story, but will use video projections and other multimedia effects to create more theatrical spectacle than the old staging.
On the contemporary side, the all-Morris program marks 15 years of his association with San Francisco Ballet with three works created for its dancers: the intricate and Baroque "A Garden"; the daffy "Sandpaper Ballet"; and "Joyride," to commissioned music by John Adams, which premiered at the New Works Festival. The other New Works Festival ballets returning are Possokhov's "Fusion," Stanton Welch's "Naked" and Val Caniparoli's "Ibsen's House." "
Click here for the rest, including Tudor, Robbins, and Forsythe on tap.
And click here for a podcast interview with Helgi Tomasson. I say about five words total over the course of it. Most of the interviewing you'll hear is deputy arts and entertainment editor Leba Hertz.
May 06, 2008 · 12:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
