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Smuin and Gershwin

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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)

Bay Area Dance Awards

My report in today's Chronicle:

"Sometimes radical inclusion creates curious exclusions. One of the great strengths of the Bay Area's booming dance scene is its wild diversity, a spectacle the Bay Area Dance Awards captures in its striking spectrum of nominees. From the elegant LIKHA-Pilipino Folk Ensemble to the Contract Improvisation-inspired stunts of Scott Wells and Dancers, seemingly no style and no genre was out of contention Monday night at the robustly populated Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, where the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards bestowed its 22nd annual honors in a joint production with Bay Area National Dance Week.

And yet some absences were conspicuous: The only mentions of San Francisco Ballet were in the restaging category. And you have to wonder about priorities when the performers of a heavily costumed Chinese lion dance, no matter how vigorously dispatched, win out against an MVP-worthy array of movement artists from some of the city's finest ensembles: Lines Ballet, ODC Dance and Janice Garrett & Dancers.

Yet the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards' championings are often the kind well worth cheering. Jess Curtis and his bi-continental company Gravity haven't lacked for praise in recent seasons, but his provocative, heady postmodern experiments should be even better known. On Monday, Gravity's raucous "Under the Radar" took the choreography, company performance, and music/sound/text awards. That sweep might seem to come with a biting irony: Curtis spends half his year in Berlin because of the more generous arts funding there. But Curtis had only gratitude for his native dance climate. "The different styles of dance, the combination of the personal and political here is something special in the world," he said. "There's a kind of heart in this community that is sometimes missing [in Europe] and I appreciate calling this place home." "

Click here for the full story.

And the winners:

Choreography: "Under the Radar," Jess Curtis/Gravity

Company Performance: "Under the Radar," Jess Curtis/Gravity

Individual Performance: Ibrahima O. Diouf in "JUSAT," with Diamano Coura West African Dance Company

Ensemble Performance: Danny Luong and Peter Luong, in "Lion Leaping through the Plum Blossom Mountain to Reach the High Green," with Leung's White Crane Lion and Dragon Dance Association

Visual Design: Jo Kreiter, David Fredrickson and Stephen McCaffery/Figureplant, and Sean Riley for Flyaway Productions' "Live Billboard Project"

Music/Sound/Text: Two awards: Abbos Kosimov for "Shodiana," and Jess Curtis/Gravity and the collaborators on "Under the Radar," with musical direction by Matthias Herrmann

Restaging: Miguel Santos, for "Misa Flamenca," for Theatre Flamenco

Special Awards: Gabriela Shiroma, for her full-length theater piece "Diaspora Negra," which brought together companies representing the dance forms of Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.

Pandit Chitresh Das, for leading the international festival "Kathak at the Crossroads"

Sustained Achievement:
Pam Hagen, co-founder and former executive director of Lines Ballet

Miguel Santos, former artistic director of Theatre Flamenco

Pick School of Ballroom Dancing, founded in 1961

Bay Area National Dance Week Dancers' Choice Award
Jessica Robinson, executive director of CounterPULSE

April 30, 2008 · 12:04 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Politics and Dance at ODC Theater Fest

My review in today's Chronicle:

"One of our city's most important dance spaces, ODC Theater, is closed for a major rebuild this year, but director Rob Bailis isn't sitting idle. He's teamed with the historically beleaguered, heroically persevering management of Project Artaud Theater just a few blocks away in the Mission for an ambitious series of festivals.

"For the Record," which opened last weekend, will be followed by "Local Heroes/Big Picture" in June and July, and "Off Book: Stories That Move," a partnership with the wildly popular local literary festival Litquake, in October. In the meantime, "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic" unfolds in phases, too: Legendary local rabble-rouser Sara Shelton Mann will unveil the full triptych of her "Inspirare" next weekend, and homegrown choreographer Miguel Gutierrez returns from a burgeoning international career with two works about the intersection of politics and the body the weekend after.
It's treacherous territory, politically inspired dance, but Bailis has never shied from taking chances and "For the Record's" opening weekend displayed the risks and the rewards. The two works made an unintentional case study in the pitfalls and poetic potential of overtly making art about social issues.

Aerial choreographer Jo Kreiter's "Lies You Can Dance To" took an obvious message - American history is full of deception - and beat it into the ground with simplifying visuals. Butoh artist Ledoh and his creative collective Salt Farm used a heated topic - immigration - as a jumping-off point for wildly suggestive, metaphorically expansive images that spoke not just to our times, but to the challenges of the human condition."

I could have written so much more about Ledoh, and one small line on his "Color Me America" got cut, probably for space. Here's that section of the review with the tiny cut restored:

"Ledoh and Salt Farm's "Color Me America" was stunning antidote. Though you can point to the work's trappings to explain its success, with its hip and ear-teasing electronic score by Matthew Ogaz, and its gorgeous video by Perry Hallinan, the heart of "Color Me America" is in the movement. Ledoh, born in Burma, is trained in butoh, that apocalyptic post-World War II Japanese form where focused physical intention is all, where the performer's roiling facial expressions expose the emotional inauthenticity of our typical existence. Here, he channels butoh's essence without ever falling into its cliches.

The symbols are simple but used in beguiling combination: a row of four chairs that suggests endless bureaucratic waiting, placed onstage, and in the vast Interstate 5-like landscapes onscreen, and a red-tape-like ream of gauze with which Ledoh finally strangles his fellow performer, the excellent Iu-Hui Chua. For that final scene, the broad-chested, bald Ledoh wears a red corset and skirt and tasseled Spanish hat, an absurd foreigner; he fetches a bone in a way that suggests our dog-eat-dog mindset about “aliens” (the video even shows a real dog gnawing on another dog’s skull)."

Click here for the full review.

April 28, 2008 · 10:32 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

New Works Festival C

My review in the Chronicle:

"Jorma Elo, where have you been all our lives?

The Finnish choreographer's "Double Evil" proved the unqualified hit of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival on Thursday, crowning Program C's final slate of world premieres with a ballet so effortlessly innovative, fresh and blood-pumping that it seemed, excepting Mark Morris' "Joyride," to occupy a different plane than all before. "Double Evil" is a thrill on its own, but a festival of 10 new ballets invites comparisons, and to my eye the most fruitful was with Stanton Welch's "Naked" from the evening before. Though different on the surface, on a deeper level they play the same game: using classical steps as a base for startlingly modern departures. So why, in the Welch, does the exercise seem stilted, studied, merely academic, while in the Elo the results are visceral and vital?

True, Elo has the benefit of in-your-face music: two movements from Philip Glass' pounding, primal "Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra," alternating with Vladimir Martinov's achingly beautiful "Come In!" (Roy Malan excellent on solo violin). And true, the Bay Area has not experienced a large body of Elo work upon which to hypothesize: Aside from "Double Evil," his first San Francisco Ballet commission, we've seen only his "C. to C. (Close to Chuck)," which American Ballet Theatre brought here last year.

But the confident style of "Double Evil" made clear why Elo, now resident choreographer at Boston Ballet, has zoomed to ballet's fore in the past five years. It's a question of attitude. To Elo, just as to Balanchine and William Forsythe, it seems that classical ballet is not some fusty, precious tradition to be violated by bringing it up to the present day. It's not - as in the Welch - an anachronism: no preening jewelry-box ballerinas here, despite Holly Hynes' wonderfully provocative Petipa-style tutus.
Instead, when Sarah Van Patten takes a slightly skewed tendu in "Double Evil," she looks just as 21st century as when she's standing turned-in, winding down like some "Coppelia" doll-cum-street-princess. "

Click here for the full review.

April 28, 2008 · 10:27 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

New Works Festival B

My review in the Chronicle:

"One of the great opportunities of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival is the chance to consider - or reconsider - your personal ballet aesthetic. What qualities do you value in new ballets? What speaks to you and why? And if you appreciate a ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality, that takes classical attention to form and channels it into a modern ethos - if you cherish a ballet sure to show you something new every time you see it - then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris' "Joyride."

With its commissioned score by John Adams, "Joyride" was the PR coup of the Ballet's 75th anniversary season, and Wednesday, with Adams himself conducting, it lived up to the buzz. But it also capped a second-night slate that fulfilled the festival's larger potential: revealing the many faces of ballet today. No one who sees Program B's premieres by Stanton Welch, Julia Adam and James Kudelka could fail to marvel that ballet speaks in so many tongues.

If Morris' is the work that looks built for the ages, score one for complexity. With its shifting beat and crazy layers of rhythm, Adams' music must be a devil to count, and Isaac Mizrahi's sleek costumes make a joke of this, adorning metallic bodysuits with LED screens that continually flash random numbers. But cleverness is far from Morris' only game. There's a cool sex appeal in how these eight dancers efficiently shoot through and regroup. And there's a panoply of feeling in Morris' motifs, from a kung fu kick to a sweeping backward reach that turns into neck-clutching chaine turns.

The vocabulary looks more seamlessly integrated with a plainspoken classical virtuosity than any previous Morris ballet commission I know. Unlike works like his "Sylvia," where the ballet steps feel merely pared down in flourish to fit his aesthetic, in "Joyride" I felt Morris pushing from within ballet's language and conventions. Elizabeth Miner has a solo of fouette turns that seems to spin right out of everything she's done up to that moment; Rory Hohenstein blasts through a variation of spectacularly ticktocking legs.

But the drama of "Joyride" is its slower middle movement. Here, Morris has his couples (led by Sarah Van Patten and Gennadi Nedvigin) dance their pas de deux both facing front, side by side, the man standing slightly behind, the woman quite steady on her own, thank-you-very-much. The immediate effect is a smoldering mystery, as Morris manipulates the spacing. The larger possible influence is as an antidote to the current rave for twist-and-toss partnering that has grown not so much politically offensive as artistically bland."

Click here for the full review.

April 25, 2008 · 02:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

New Works Festival A

My review in today's Chronicle:

"It's tempting to treat San Francisco Ballet's gargantuan New Works Festival as a sporting event: 10 choreographers unveiling 10 world premieres over three days. Who will win? Who will lose?
But Tuesday the real winner was clear, and it was the Ballet audience. Throughout the War Memorial Opera House, veteran critics and newbie fans alike fervently debated which ballets they'd loved, and why. Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's daring onslaught of fresh work invites a heightened, even heated dialogue - and this, more than the sheer number of premieres, is what the ballet world needs now.

Between the two busily inventive ballets by Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Wheeldon, it seemed, viewers tilted toward one or the other. With Paul Taylor's "Changes," set to blaring music by the Mamas and the Papas, I'm guessing people either loved it or hated it.

I tilted toward Possokhov, whose "Fusion" was the improbable triumph of the evening. How's this for a formula that shouldn't work: A quartet of dervishes in flowing white, juxtaposed with four couples in sleek pantsuits (costumes by Sandra Woodall); Graham Fitkin's jazzy music with its crazy time signatures, sandwiched between Rahul Dev Burman's Bollywood-esque Indian compositions (kudos to the hard-driving musical ensemble under conductor Martin West); hip-swirling and lightning-swift movement that seems to borrow from anyone and everywhere.

But Possokhov pulls it together with theatrical flair, aided by Benjamin Pierce's scenic design of floating fabric panels. Those dervishes keep intermingling with the contemporarily clothed dancers like spirits or angels. The heart of the piece is a pas de deux for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith, the four dervishes standing as a wall that she runs through, then over, then rolls beneath before her increasingly clinging coupling. Were those dervishes her block to transcendence, or her gate to it, or both? When the pantsuit-dressed men take on the dervishes' kneeling chest pumps by ballet's end, have they found a piece of nirvana on earth? The metaphorical possibilities were rich.

Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour," on the other hand, looked like much invention to little cumulative effect. "

Click here for the full review.

April 24, 2008 · 10:06 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet's New Works Festival

The SF Ballet's New Works Festival is upon us. I wrote about the preparations for yesterday's New York Times:

"AS a star of the New York City Ballet, Helgi Tomasson danced in that company’s landmark 1972 Stravinsky Festival, which unveiled more than 20 ballets and a bonanza of masterpieces. He looked to his memories of that festival’s energy as he searched for a way to crown the 75th anniversary of the troupe he now leads: the San Francisco Ballet, America’s oldest professional company.

The resulting New Works Festival, opening here on Tuesday, will present 10 world premieres by 10 wildly different choreographers, from the modern-dance master Mark Morris to classical ballet’s great hope, Christopher Wheeldon. It will do that over just three nights — a flash flood of what’s happening in ballet now.

“People say now that there’s a creative void,” Mr. Tomasson said of the general perception of ballet since the deaths of giants like George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Frederick Ashton. “But these creative forces take time to recognize.”

Surely any artistic director would contend that creativity in ballet is alive and well, but Mr. Tomasson is making his case with more gumption than most. His festival would be a staggering undertaking for any company, even San Francisco, the country’s third-largest troupe and generally acknowledged to be among the top tier worldwide. And the pressure can be felt throughout the San Francisco Ballet Building, just opposite the gilt-trimmed War Memorial Opera House where the company performs."

Click here for the rest of that story.

And the SF Chronicle had me give a quick run-down on who's who among the choreographers, and who's doing what. Click here for those profiles.

April 21, 2008 · 12:41 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Project Bandaloop

My review in the Chronicle:

"Our locally based Project Bandaloop hasn't been seen much in Bay Area theaters for years. Amelia Rudolph's troupe of athlete-dancers, all skilled rock climbers, seems more likely to be spotted rappelling down Seattle's Space Needle or bounding off Yosemite's El Capitan.

But for "Interiors," which opened at Fort Mason's Cowell Theater Thursday and continues through Sunday, Rudolph has taken the show indoors, with interestingly bifurcated results. The first half brings what Bandaloop does so well in the open air up close, the better to marvel at these gravity-testing movers' sinuous muscle and sculptural control. The second half, the California premiere of Rudolph's "Interiors: Phase One," works so hard at repackaging Bandaloop for the traditional stage that the qualities that make this company worth gawking at get lost.

Aerial dance is a popular genre with deep roots in the Bay Area. For Bandaloop's 17 years, Rudolph has been at the forefront, and this show's opening parade of short pieces proves why. In this year's "Thick," 10 dancers strewn with kelp-like strips of fabric hang from the rafters, contracting and bobbing, twirling as though underwater. In "Tango Vals," Mark Stuver and Rachael Lincoln rendezvous longingly, he suspended, she clutching to join him swinging above the floor. In "Inverted Duets," the tango goes upside down, three couples pushing against each other's feet to levitate like planks.

The most memorable pieces tilt the viewer's axis. In "One of Each," Roel Seeber really does seem to be performing ballet steps against the stage's sidewall as though it were terra firma. And in "Shift," also new this year, we get the exhilarating feeling of watching six dancers from overhead as they race against a blue- and pink-lit back wall.

Mere stunts these are not: Rudolph choreographs with a true dancer's eye to line and form, and her works have formal and emotional trajectories. What she doesn't have is much beyond a cursory musicality - she tends to use her music, mostly either blandly electronic or quirkily atmospheric, like wallpaper - or a gift for gesture and theatrical timing. This might be due in part to her medium: When you're working in the air, unsurprisingly, movements tend to take on a floating, slow-motion feeling. And yet even on the ground, as in Melecio Estrella and Stuver's "Men's Duet," the interaction looks stilted, too deliberate.

Unfortunately, musicality, theatrical timing and fresh gesture are just what Rudolph's new "Interiors" needs. "

Click here for the rest.

April 18, 2008 · 03:52 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Oakland Ballet's "Secret Garden"

My review is in the Chronicle today. A side note: One of the final lines used to read: "Every character in "The Secret Gardens" grows and changes. That's its strength, scene to scene, and its Achilles heel, taken as a complicated whole." I talked to the copy editors half an hour before the copy shipped and this line still stood. I have no idea why it was changed.

"Blame the spring weather, but it's impossible to resist the obvious metaphors served up by Artistic Director Ronn Guidi's choice of "The Secret Garden" as his latest step in reviving the Oakland Ballet Company. Inside the bustling Paramount Theatre on Saturday afternoon, little boys and girls in their theater finest settled in noisily to watch a growing ballet troupe. And like the exuberantly yellow and purple final scene of this endearing two-hour production, the Oakland Ballet was once again blossoming.

The backstory couldn't be more springlike, or more improbable. For 33 years, Guidi, an Oakland native, led this company-that-could to community adoration and even international note. After he retired in 1998, it faltered, and closed in 2006. But in recent years, Guidi has brought the company back to life, starting with his "Nutcracker" and relaunching officially with a repertory show in October. With "The Secret Garden," Guidi's Oakland Ballet Company puts down fresh roots.

The old Oakland Ballet made its greatest reputation in the 1980s and 1990s with revivals of lost Ballets Russes masterpieces, and Guidi plans to mark the 100th anniversary of Serge Diaghilev's revolutionary company with a special tribute next year.

In the meantime, "The Secret Garden," which Guidi created in 1996, offered a solid reminder of Guidi's virtues as a choreographer and director, virtues that help explain both what attracted him to those Ballets Russes treasures and what uniquely suited him to give them new life. Ballet, in those gems by Bronislava Nijinska and others, was not some inhuman endeavor of posing and posturing - it was vibrant theater. And in "The Secret Garden," as in everything Guidi touches, it is not technique and pretty lines that count, but flesh-and-blood characters."

Click here for the full review.

April 14, 2008 · 01:49 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Janice Garrett & Dancers' "StringWreck"

My review today in the Chronicle:

"Within minutes of the start of Janice Garrett & Dancers' new "StringWreck," one dancer has wrestled an actual violinist, precious instrument in hand, to the floor while another dancer is pulling the violist's hair while he plays on. But that's only the most flamboyant way the hourlong work, which opened Thursday and repeats tonight and Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, moves a step beyond most collaborations between dance and music.

The dance - a team effort of Garrett, fellow choreographer Charles Moulton and the Del Sol String Quartet - is a delight from start to finish. It takes what could have been a merely cute, contrived concept - dancers and musicians collide - and shapes from it a continually thoughtful, surprising and even touching journey.

Of course it helps that Garrett is one of this city's most eloquent choreographers, capable of crafting exquisitely sculpted streams of movement for her angelic but never saccharine performers. But watching "StringWreck," it's not possible to separate Garrett's William Blake-reminiscent lines from Moulton's sense of structure and wit and the Del Sol String Quartet's adventurous musicianship - and physicality. Witnessing the interplay, you get the feeling that, rather than writing a catchy grant proposal and working together in some preconceived way, these parties took the studio time to let their relationships, and their contributions, grow organically.

The piece breathes. Sometimes the musicians control the dancers, making them writhe as though possessed by dissonant drones, and sometimes the dancers control the musicians, hoisting them on their shoulders to rearrange them as they play. There is danger and tension in this breach - early on, the dancers take violins and stick them between their thighs, tiptoeing cartoonishly and thrusting them like phalluses at the audience seated on three sides, and you can't help but think how much those instruments cost.

Often it's as though the musical selections - everything from George Antheil to an Astor Piazzolla tango - are driving the dancers and musicians, like a spell, to showdown. During one frenzy, violinist Rick Shinozaki actually somersaults while eking out a few notes, and viola player Charlton Lee folds up and gets squashed like a bug by a strident Nol Simonse."

Click here for the full review.

April 12, 2008 · 08:51 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Second Thoughts

Critics have second thoughts. All the time. But of course, writing dance reviews overnight, it's our first thoughts that make it into print.

Sometimes the second thought is simply a change of heart--a piece that didn't speak to you before suddenly does, either because of some quality you can finally see in it or some experience you've had that allows you to relate to it. Sometimes you feel the same about a work but realize the tone of the review was more strident than deserved, or more gushy than merited. Sometimes you realize you just plain missed the point. Sometimes you still feel that you were "right" that a piece didn't work, but you misdiagnosed the flaw. Such are the dangers when your copy is due at 9 a.m. the next day.

I believe there are no "right" or "wrong" reviews--this is art. I believe there are only well-informed reviews and uninformed ones, sensitive reviews and insensitive ones. When I say "sensitive" and "insensitive," I mean both to the intention and effect of the work, and to the creators and performers behind it.

Some of my recent reviews have stirred heated reactions. Often, I believe, sparking a spirited dialogue is the critic's job. When the dialogue becomes this polarized, it does not suit my temperament. I really don't thrive on conflict.

Sometimes what a respondent has to say makes me see a work a bit differently, sometimes not. And sometimes a remark touches a nerve because it pinpoints an opinion or piece of rhetoric I already feel I would write differently now, if I could.

So herewith, some second thoughts on how I would--and wouldn't--redo my coverage of the San Francisco Ballet season thus far if I had the chance.

--I'd write a bit differently on "West Side Story Suite." This is one case in which I feel, inexplicably, I bought into the hype about the San Francisco Ballet premiere of this work, and then manufactured some hype of my own. It was fine. Nothing to swoon about. The singing, predictably, was not good. I think Robbins' reduction of his musical works well--I like how the bows between songs nods overtly to its structure as a suite--and I had a new appreciation for the adaptation's choreography after hearing Robert LaFosse talk about the "Something's Coming" solo at the excellent Words on Dance discussion. I agree with those who feel the "Somewhere" finale cuts off too much of the story arc to feel satisfying. I do admire how the SF Ballet dancers tackled this with gusto (incidentally, corps member Shannon Roberts was wonderful as Anita, principal Lorena Feijoo, whom I saw in a second cast, painfully bad--she simply didn't have the pipes). If I could write about this one again, it would be a generally positive review, but not nearly so breathless.

--I would write the same about Yuan Yuan Tan in "Giselle." I would write exactly the same review. I marvel at the irrational fanaticism Tan's exquisite lines inspire in her fans. No dancer, not even one as lovely as Tan, is right in every role. As a performer, Tan flirts with the audience, she sells herself, she is beautiful and she knows it and her self-awareness projects to the audience. She is one of my favorite dancers in the world. In so many roles, she takes my breath away. But she is not a natural actress. She is temperamentally unsuited to "Giselle," and also to the works of Jerome Robbins, which require an unaffected presence. As for her performance in Balanchine's "Diamonds," I would write about this differently if given the chance now, giving far less latitude for her endless flourishes--especially after being reminded, by Sarah Van Patten's performance, how richly tragic that central pas de deux can feel.

--I would write about the same about Wayne McGregor's "Eden/Eden," though I would give more credit due to the innovation of the movement vocabulary. And I would never, never again presume to speak for how the general audience felt.

--I would stand by my assessment of Christophe Maillott's "Altro Canto," but tone down the rhetoric a bit. I would also be more mindful to assess it on its own terms, rather than dismiss prevailing trends in Europe wholesale. For the record, I love a great deal of European work, having fallen swooningly early in my dance-viewing years to certain works by Jiri Kylian and Mats Ek. I am not oblivious to the great volume of exciting work happening in Europe now. But between Nacho Duato's San Francisco Performances visit (another review I would stand by) and "Altro Canto," we have not seen the best coming out of Europe lately in San Francisco.

These are my second thoughts. I'm happy to hear yours, and your first thoughts too.

April 09, 2008 · 05:04 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Gravity Rising

For about five years now, the choreographer Jess Curtis has divided his time creatively between San Francisco and the more arts-funding-progressive Berlin. The arrangement is allowing him to do beautiful new things with his work, I discovered this weekend at CounterPULSE, where the latest show from Jess Curtis's Gravity has one more performance tomorrow (Sunday). Alas, I wasn't able to cover for the Chronicle and am too pressed for time to write my own review for this site, but fortunately my colleague Allan Ulrich caught the show for Voice of Dance and waxed eloquent about the new duet for Curtis and Maria Francesca Scaroni. From Allan's review:

"For 40 minutes, the totally undraped pair provide a gripping epic of shape-shifting, abetted only by a spare, recorded, structured improvisational score by double-bassist Klaus Janek and video artist Regina Teichs. The pair begins by posing on opposite sides of the stage. When Curtis doffs his robe like a lizard shedding his skin, you sense you’re in for something special.

He and Scaroni flow from one sculptural entanglement to another. At one moment, with limbs clasped, they’re rolling across the space like a wagon wheel. At another, she’s hoisting him on to her back. They split apart and slowly recombine. Her legs encircle his neck, and then, they’re hopping around like frogs chasing a fly. The piece, in three sections, does not lack for variety. In the middle part, the tempo slightly quickens, while the twosome seems to interact with the kaleidoscopically processed images of themselves on video.

Clothing would be a distraction. The nudity is not particularly shocking; the work may be deemed erotic by some observers, but the dancers certainly do little to encourage that response. They’re inclined, instead, to image making: surely, the curved arms and torso alignments that seemed to replicate those statues of the god Shiva are not coincidental. At one moment, with Curtis standing behind Scaroni, she seems to possess both his genitals and her own. "

Click here for Allan's full review (with video clip embedded!). And catch Curtis's final SF show for 2008 tomorrow if you're lucky.

April 05, 2008 · 09:57 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Visiting Companies at SF Ballet

My review for the Chronicle:

"The grandly titled "International Salute to San Francisco Ballet" has a practical purpose: As the National Ballet of Canada, New York City Ballet and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo pay tribute to the San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary this week, our hometown dancers gain a breather for putting finishing touches on the torrent of 10 world premieres about to be unveiled during Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's ambitious New Works Festival.

But don't mistake these visiting performers for mere stand-ins marking time. Two-thirds of Tuesday's opening offered rich choreography and vital, engaging performances. And if the Monte Carlo company's program-capping contribution is an interminable bore, at least it's a ballet so stereotypical in its Euro-fashionable pretentiousness that it has to be seen to be believed.

But first, the good news. New York City Ballet has sent just four dancers to alternate in George Balanchine's 1972 "Duo Concertant" - and what a delight opening night's Yvonne Borree and Jared Angle proved. Balanchine's jesting and then surprisingly touching jaunt to Stravinsky is a treasure - it hasn't been seen on the War Memorial Opera House stage in at least a decade - and it could hardly be performed with more authority than by members of the troupe Balanchine co-founded.

Borree is a dancer not in her first flowering, and not in great favor in New York, but she looked fresh and in fine form Tuesday, and she had a wonderfully crisp counterpart in Angle. Watching them you realized anew just how distinctive a New York City Ballet performance of Balanchine is, from the confident but not hammy way the two handled the passages of simply standing and listening to violinist Arturo Delmoni and pianist Cameron Grant, to the breakneck tempi. Detractors might call the studied quality of gesture sterile, but the swiftness and angular style looked gold standard to me. The second-cast dancers, Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild, represent a slightly younger City Ballet generation; I hope to catch them also."

Click here for the full review.

April 02, 2008 · 05:13 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Balanchine in San Jose

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

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)

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)

Catching up on shows that continue this weekend. My review of Ballet San Jose's "Swan Lake":

"Turns out that during recent seasons of dancing mostly silly spectacles, a crop of credible classical dancers at Ballet San Jose must have been yearning to show us their true chops. On Friday at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, the 44-member company took "Swan Lake" - that warhorse that can be sublime in the right hands or self-parody in the wrong ones - and made it a nonstop showcase of movement artistry. Rarely have so many talents in the San Jose roster shone to such advantage. And, in Karen Gabay, they had a Swan Queen to inspire them to yet greater heights.

It can't have hurt that Cynthia Gregory, one of the finest Black Swans of all time, coached this revival of Artistic Director Dennis Nahat's 1987 production, continuing through Sunday. From the moment the four princesses delivered their first-act variations, everyone looked galvanized by Gregory's influence: Beth Ann Namey shaping her small hops with extra lilt, Yui Yonezawa stretching confidently into long arabesques and whirling through clean turns, Catherine Grow giving everything flirtatious grace. Even the large corps of ensemble men jumped with extra power and finesse.

But it wasn't technical skill that powered this performance, though Nahat's choreography doesn't skimp on real McCoy steps. Where "Swan Lake" soars or falters is in the company's musical sensitivity to Tchaikovsky's monumental score, delivered dependably, though with tuning troubles, by Symphony Silicon Valley under Dwight Oltman's baton. These 20 swans breathed as one, led by Haley Henderson and Harriet McMeekin as the tall Swan Princesses.

Three Swan Queens are cast for this run, but the standard was set on opening night by Ballet San Jose's de facto prima, Gabay. She has beguiling facial proportions for the darker side of the duo White Swan/Black Swan role, her huge triangle of a smile projecting devious delight as Odile, the impostor who tricks Prince Siegfried into pledging his love."

Click here for the full review.

And my review of Robert Moses' Kin:

"Robert Moses' choreography, like his talking, tends to come out in blurts. So many ideas, so rapid fire - it's as if Moses can't contain what's on the tip of his tongue. In the 13 years since he founded Robert Moses' Kin, he's given San Francisco audiences a lot to chew on: movement that combines punchy street energy with unexpected eloquence and socially aware dances taking on everything from James Baldwin to youth violence. His concerts have often had an enviable problem: It's all too much.

So it was a surprise to show up at Robert Moses' Kin's latest home season, repeating next weekend at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco's Kanbar Hall, and find such simplicity of programming. Four dances - two brand new, one new to San Francisco and one a work in progress - 60 minutes, no intermission.

It seemed a deliberate paring back, and in a post-show talk Sunday, Moses professed that he's been restraining himself in other ways. After five years working on "The President's Daughter" - which used Thomas Jefferson's slave affairs as a prism to view race, sex and hypocrisy - Moses wanted to get away from "content-driven" dances, he said. These new dances are an effort to work more simply with pure movement and music.

The best is "Approaching Thought," a six-person showdown that serves as a capsule of the inimitable vocabulary that's propelled Robert Moses' Kin to national attention in recent years: hard-hitting, jiving, deliberately ungainly one moment and lyrical the next. The music is by Moses himself, and it's good: fast rhythms and a gung-ho Wild West guitar melody. One by one, the dancers cross from the stage corners to meet in the middle, trading rapid-fire gestures. Katherine Wells, a beguiling combination of grace and grit, has the last word.

But the middle dances suggest that Moses might be thinking about his paring back in hamstrung ways. The way I see a Moses dance, it's not the content that needs weeding but the movement itself. His density of surprising steps is both his strength and his Achilles' heel, and in the middle dances, "Hush" and "Rose," I wish he'd let the movement breathe, and the content hidden inside its overwhelming rush emerge."

Click here for full review.

February 22, 2008 · 11:13 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Maria Kochetkova did not disappoint in San Francisco Ballet's "Giselle" last night. Yes, she is tiny, porcelain-skinned, and feather light, but the key to her interpretation was this: You could see how much trust she was putting in her Albrecht, and just how dangerous and exhilarating that trust was. When Albrecht sat on the bench next to her, when she counted out the "he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not" flower petals--none of this happened with a coy flutter of lashes, but instead with swallows of fear. Even little passages like the series of piques where she kisses her fingers and they touch hands became not mere flirtations, but tests--can I trust you?--followed by not just romantic elation, but relief. Her Albrecht Joan Boada nuzzled her like a kitten he'd taken in from the cold, while in his rakish excitement we saw the mounting danger, that he did not realize the magnitude of sin he was committing in toying with such a delicate soul.

The first act was pure drama, and rightly so, Kochetkova's technique unostentatious--even her fleet jumps seemed an expression of Giselle's irrepressible joy in dancing, not feats for their own sake. Surprisingly, Kochetkova does not have a huge arabesque penchee to dazzle us with, but in the second act, she called on that buoyant jump again, a benevolent wisp in the air on that series of changements with one foot in coupe. Meanwhile, Boada was in good form with beautiful feet and a stretch that reaches well beyond his small proportions. He was an extravagantly penitent Albrecht, replacing the fluttering beaten jumps that so pierced the heart in Tiit Helimets' interpretation with an odd run of frenzied brisees.

The final moments were telling. In Yuan Yuan Tan's performance, as Giselle sunk back into the grave, Tan lolled her head as though to protest leaving him, almost like Odette in the second act of "Swan Lake." In Kochetkova's final moments, she gazed upon Albrecht lovingly, but she did not shake in protest of their separation. She accepted it--and everything: his betrayal of her, his penitence. This was not a tragic final parting, but a bittersweet one. It seemed to me perfectly in character. And it made this performance of "Giselle" one I will never forget.

Kochetkova and Boada will dance "Giselle" again Saturday evening. I'll be back at the opera house on Friday to see Vanessa Zahorian and Ruben Martin.

February 20, 2008 · 11:21 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of San Francisco Ballet's opening night "Giselle" in today's Chronicle:

"Yuan Yuan Tan has dominated the start of San Francisco Ballet's 75th anniversary season, which should be no surprise. With her liquid limbs and cool glamour, she is a wonder of the ballet world. Yet Saturday, at the opening of the company's "Giselle," Tan's first-cast prominence began to smell a little fishy.

Yuan Yuan Tan and Tiit Helimets in "Giselle," photo credit Erik Tomasson.

In physicality and temperament, Tan is hardly a dancer you'd typecast as the title role's rustic peasant girl - her arms are so long, they practically can't help unfurling in aristocratic flourishes, her natural demeanor so elegant, it seemed she'd be right at home in the courts of Albrecht, the deceptive prince who breaks Giselle's heart.

But the bigger problem was that Giselle must be a flesh-and-blood character, and Tan didn't seem to have thought out who, beyond a pretty flirt, her Giselle was. And so Saturday, with the corps women in top form as the ghost maiden Wilis of Act 2, this revival of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's 1999 production - the best of his many story ballet stagings - remained a finely danced vessel awaiting a worthy heroine to reveal its full pathos."

Click herefor the full review.

Yuan Yuan Tan and Tiit Helimets in "Giselle," photo credit Erik Tomasson.

February 18, 2008 · 02:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up after a run of four review assignments in four days (reviews of Ballet San Jose's "Swan Lake" and Robert Moses' Kin should appear tomorrow and the next day). I checked out the Georgia State Ballet for the Chronicle on Thursday:

"But if Thursday's opening did not deliver, thankfully, an "Ananiashvili and Friends" pony show, we got something more interesting: a troupe being rebuilt lovingly by hand. Ananiashvili, like the titanic 20th century choreographer George Balanchine, hails from the former Soviet state of Georgia, and in 2004 her now-independent homeland summoned her to direct its national company, long established but also, because of civil hardship, long dormant.

Her choices for this opening mixed-repertory program pointed to her range of artistic interest as a dancer, but also to her acumen in feeding developing dancers what they need. There were two Balanchine ballets (the company now has at least 10) and two U.S. premieres by names in the news: Alexei Ratmansky, the soon-to-step-down artistic director of the Bolshoi, who recently declined New York City Ballet's offer of choreographer-in-residence; and Yuri Possokhov, who happily accepted San Francisco Ballet's offer for the same post in 2006 and will contribute to the company's ambitious New Works Festival in April. The results were often overreaching - but only in the most heartening of ways.

Balanchine's "Chaconne" is no modest undertaking. A first intimate, then grand vision of heaven that floats atop Gluck's ballet music for "Orfeo ed Euridice," "Chaconne" requires fleetness, clarity and confidence. The Georgians had handicaps - murky lighting that plagued the entire evening, and lugubrious tempi from the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, provided under Robert Cole's baton presumably at the company's request. But what these dancers need most is authority, gumption."

Click here for the full review.

February 18, 2008 · 02:30 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of the Black Choreographers Festival opening in today's SF Chronicle:

"For the past three years, it's been good to have the Black Choreographers Festival on the scene, but it hasn't been clear whom the festival's performances are for. Was BCF, picking up where the defunct Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century left off, trying to stimulate another national dialogue on race in dance? Instilling local pride? Pitching itself to aspiring African American dancemakers or to a more general dance audience? If the latter, why were the performances so frustratingly uneven?

At Friday's opening of the festival's fourth annual installment, BCF's purpose seemed to crystallize in a word co-founders Laura Elaine Ellis and Kendra Kimbrough Barnes use a lot: community. And BCF has built a wide and wonderful community indeed. Opening at Oakland's Laney College Theater, the festival moves on to second and third weekends at San Francisco's Project Artaud Theater and Dance Mission Theater, which - along with ODC Theater - are all sponsors. There'll be symposia, family matinees, an art exhibition and a master class with sensational tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, out from New York.

All of this is tremendous for the community. For the average dancegoer at one of BCF's concerts, though, it means a huge range in quality. The bad news is you'll have to sit through sub-par work to get to the good stuff, like Smith's appearance Friday and Saturday, when the festival moves to Project Artaud (look forward, too, to the roof-raising West African stampings of Oakland troupe Diamano Coura). The upside is the chance to find standout choreographers whose work should be seen far more often. And at Friday's opening, the clear winner in that category was Reginald Ray-Savage (commonly known as Reginald Savage).

Savage has led his Savage Jazz Dance Company in Oakland since 1992, but it's never broken out much beyond a cash-strapped local season. That should change. Not only is Savage a master teacher, producing taut, controlled dancers as well trained as any on the Bay Area modern dance scene. But he's also a fine choreographer.

He proved this in two pieces that broke from his usual mission statement - "Not jazz dance. Dances to jazz music." - to take on intense classical scores. This being Savage, though, the look was sexy, from the sculpted sultry postures and teasing deep plies to the women's V-neck leotards."

Click here for the full review.

February 11, 2008 · 06:10 PM · Dance · Comments (2)

"Dance is like Israel: You don't just live there, you have to support it."
--Joan Acocella on writing about a low-status art form during her Stanford University critic-in-residence lecture Wednesday

February 08, 2008 · 02:17 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Balletomanes are raving about Sarah Van Patten's debut in "Diamonds" Sunday, and I can't help but add my voice to the chorus. This is the cast I wish the NY Times' Alastair Macaulay had seen. I wasn't in New York (or born yet) to see Suzanne Farrell in the 1960's, but in my imagination Van Patten has Farrell's spirit freshly incarnated. She gave "Diamonds" an air of tragedy in everything from the regretful, slightly petulant tilt of her head (more Farrell comparisons, anyone?) to the sudden stab into that "Swan Lake"-like attitude with piercing arm at the music's climax. Everything became an expression of longing, even the necessary push-pull tension in the connection between her arms and partner Tiit Helimets' as he steadied her in the arabesque penchee in which he lowers to one knee. Both were utterly in the music. Van Patten is no technician, and probably never will be--that circle of little hops to a small side extension that pull up into pirouette remained decidedly un-crisp. She has no technique for its own sake, but only in service to her musicality--but this to me is fine, even preferred to emotion-less automatons. And Van Patten acquires more technical assuredness every day. In the past, on an off day, she could fall to pieces--I've seen her fight through a second movement of "Symphony in C" and a performance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in "Nutcracker" so nerve-rattled and rushed I half-wondered if she'd taken too much Sudafed. But there was no hint of uncertainty in "Diamonds" Sunday, only luxurious command.

Six years ago, when Van Patten first arrived at San Francisco Ballet, Helgi Tomasson tossed her into the finale of "Diamonds" to top off the season-opening gala. She was young, in a new company, out of her depth; she looked preening. But the potential was there, and Tomasson saw it--and nurtured it through the unevenness of her early seasons here. I've spoken of Van Patten "coming of age" before--in her "Romeo and Juliet," in the grand pas of Tomasson's "Nutcracker." She just keeps on growing. She's the kind of ballerina who makes following a company closely so worthwhile.

February 05, 2008 · 09:54 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My SF Chronicle review of San Francisco Ballet's program two is now online. I have no idea why the headline says it's the season's first program, when "program 2" is right there in the lede. I'm also not sure why "the Bay Area's only major troupe" got changed to "the Bay Area's dominant troupe." Still, here's the top:

"Thursday at the opening of San Francisco Ballet's Program 2, the East Coast critics were in the aisles, curious on the occasion of the company's 75th birthday to see how far Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson has taken this once-regional troupe. Meanwhile, some of the company's most sparkling classicists were onstage, dancing not as though they had something to prove but as though they had much they wanted to show. The New York critics will see San Francisco Ballet through their lens, colored by regular exposure to American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet. And a local critic can only see the company through hers, colored by the fact that San Francisco Ballet is the Bay Area's dominant troupe, which lends a certain element of civic pride. But anyone who follows the company would have seen this: San Francisco Ballet was at its finest Thursday. These dancers showed the world their best.

They did so in a slate that showcases one of Tomasson's special strengths: assembling a diverse, something-to-please-everyone repertory. You could hardly arrange a greater contrast than the forthright, modern-dance-ethos-meets-ballet-steps hybridism of Mark Morris' "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" juxtaposed with the goofy theatrical flair of Yuri Possokhov's "Firebird." But the ballet that matters to serious ballet lovers, the ballet that tests not just the company's technical mettle but also its poetic gravitas, is George Balanchine's "Divertimento No. 15."

Vanessa Zahorian (L) and Kristin Long in "Divertimento No. 15," photo credit Erik Tomasson.

With its civilized manner and bedecked tutus (more fetching now that the Ballet has ditched its purple togs for muted yellows and blues after Karinska's original designs), "Divertimento No. 15" may look like a stereotype of ballet. But pity the viewer who shrugs it off as pretty. As with everything Balanchine, the meaning is in the music - the sublime spiritual serenity of Mozart, conducted by Martin West - but the steps are not just gloss on the music. When done with depth of understanding, they bring the unsayable in that music, that stirring harmoniousness, to flesh-and-blood life.

That was the case Thursday. Each soloist offered a wealth of musically sensitive details - Rachel Viselli's hovering rubato as she lowered her arabesque leg, Frances Chung's zesty spring en pointe, Vanessa Zahorian's lush stretch through her chest as she stepped forward as though through water. These details aren't ornaments; they're the soul of the dance, celebrating a way of living that makes every moment beautiful, even in small ways."

Click here for the rest.

More photos:

Mark Morris' "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," photo credit Erik Tomasson.

Yuan Yuan Tan in "Firebird," photo credit Erik Tomasson.

February 01, 2008 · 05:07 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

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)

My look back at the year in Bay Area dance for the San Francisco Chronicle is now online. In addition to a Top 10, the Chronicle asks its critics to choose a High, Low, Most Improved, and Most Valuable Player. My picks:

"HIGH: Gonzalo Garcia farewell performance: War Memorial Opera House (May). Fans of this irresistibly warmhearted San Francisco Ballet dancer knew saying goodbye would be emotional, but we could never have expected a leave-taking like his "Don Quixote." When partner Tina LeBlanc came down hard on a jump and couldn't stand, Garcia gallantly carried her off the stage. Fellow principals Molly Smolen and Tiit Helimets filled in for Act 2, while Vanessa Zahorian rushed across town to dance with Garcia for Act 3. At curtain call, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson looked choked up, and LeBlanc stood in a leg brace applauding. The triple cast, the palpable concern and affection in the audience for LeBlanc when she fell, Garcia's high-flying bravura - it was the kind of night at the ballet that you never forget. Another tear-jerker: the retirement of the Ballet's incomparable Muriel Maffre (who has since resurfaced guesting with Lines Ballet) just days later.

LOW: The sudden death in April of ballet showman and former San Francisco Ballet co-director Michael Smuin saddened dedicated fans and detractors alike. Fortunately, the Smuin Ballet lives on under his right-hand woman, Celia Fushille-Burke.

MOST IMPROVED: The term "service organization" sounds too bland to describe the revitalized Dancers Group. Again under the leadership of Wayne Hazzard, Dancers Group has surged as a rallying force in the dance community, not only providing fiscal sponsorship (i.e., a nonprofit umbrella) to dozens of local companies but also organizing festivals, collaborating on a statewide initiative to promote dance on the Web and revamping its monthly newsletter, InDance (full disclosure: I am an occasional contributor). The upshot for dance lovers? Check out the comprehensive performance listings at www.dancersgroup.org and you will discover a Bay Area dance scene more lively and diverse than you probably ever imagined.

MOST VALUABLE PLAYER: Now in his fifth year as director of ODC Theater, Rob Bailis is hitting his stride as a presenter, nurturing fresh local talent and bringing in exciting companies from New York and beyond. His taste is smart and sophisticated, his empathy for artists is instinctive and his enthusiasm is infectious. Look for him to make an even bigger splash with a series of major festivals at Project Artaud Theater as ODC Theater temporarily closes fora major rebuilding and expansion in 2008."

Winnowing down a Top 10 was far more difficult this year than last. Other high points that vied for inclusion: Miami City Ballet dancing Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room," Spain's Andres Pena in a searing solo with Yaelisa's Caminos Flamencos, next-generation Butoh maverick Shinichi Iova-Koga in his solo "milk traces," and San Francisco Ballet in Balanchine's "Divertimento No. 15."

To find out who did make the Top 10, click here.

My colleague Allan Ulrich has put together his own highly informed Top 10 for Voice of Dance, sending well-earned kudos to Counterpulse executive director Jessica Robinson. To check out Allan's highlights, click here.

December 28, 2007 · 11:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up after travels. The San Francisco Ballet "Nutcracker" is underway, and I reviewed Maria Kotchekova's delightful debut in in for the Chronicle:

"News flash for you lingering holiday dance Grinches: The fusty, old San Francisco Ballet "Nutcracker" you remember from Christmases past is long gone. In its place since 2004 is a sparkling still-new miracle: one of the most beautiful "Nutcrackers" on the planet.

If you're just discovering this, you will not be alone. On the eve of the company's 75th anniversary, San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker" is going global. A "digicast" of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's sumptuous staging will soon be screened in more than 70 theaters throughout North America and Europe, and this year's performances are being filmed for broadcast next winter on PBS.

At Thursday night's opening, cameras weren't yet rolling, but everything looked ready for its close-up. Flower maidens waltzed with extra lilt, the snow scene's confetti flakes came down in a blizzard, and Tchaikovsky's eternal score sounded supremely sprightly under Music Director Martin West's baton. There were surprises to fuel little-girl ballerina dreams and grown-up balletomane ravings alike, and