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SF Ballet's New "Swan Lake"

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My preview in this Sunday's Chronicle:

"Helgi Tomasson is having trouble keeping secrets.

The normally reserved, cool artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet rises suddenly from the sofa in his office at the Ballet Association building. He hurries across the room, pauses as if he knows he shouldn't do this, then lifts a black cloth. Voila! Before him stands a scale model of the third-act set for his new production of "Swan Lake," premiering Saturday.

A boyish smile warms Tomasson's face, and he clasps his hands.

"Now you can see," he says.

And it's impossible not to share in his anticipation. The palace scene devised by Tony-nominated Broadway designer Jonathan Fensom looks nothing like the fusty Watteau-inspired ballroom of Tomasson's previous "Swan Lake" production, which raised the level of the company's dancing - and its national stature - at its first performances in 1988. In fact, the new set's bold spaciousness - and in particular, a dramatic focal point Tomasson wants to keep under wraps - looks strikingly different from the antiquated image much of the general public probably holds of the Tchaikovsky classic.

Tomasson is counting on the full-size realization of this model to live up to the dazzle. This "Swan Lake," more than two years in the making with a budget of $3 million, must stay vital for at least 15 years.

Then there is Tomasson's deeper ambition. He wants to defy that catch-22 of ballet box office: Productions of the story ballet classics such as "Swan Lake" are essential to drawing in older audiences, yet can project an image of ballet as outmoded to a new generation of viewers.

"I don't want this 'Swan Lake' to look old-fashioned for young people," he says, reiterating his most cherished goal for the fourth or fifth time. "To me, this is really a love story. A strong love story. I wanted to rekindle that part of it." "

Click here to keep reading.

Casting is now available here. I'll be seeing all six pairs of Odette/Odiles and Siegfrieds and reviewing them all for the Chronicle.

February 13, 2009 · 03:44 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet Hits High "in the middle"

My review in Saturday's Chronicle:

"Everyone who sees William Forsythe's "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" is knocked out, and no wonder. It's like going on safari, watching exotic creatures prowl through their native habitat and pounce into displays of territorial command. Ballet dancers as a pride of muscle-rippling, competitive lions. Ballet class - to my mind, the implied setting of Forsythe's signature 1987 work - as their savanna.

Nearly every company in the world dances "In the Middle" these days, it seems. But Thursday at the opening of San Francisco Ballet's Program 2, I couldn't help thinking the War Memorial Opera House was the place to see it. Few international-caliber troupes have cultivated personality and passion with the fervor of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. The payoff shines in "In the Middle" as well as in two encores from last season's New Works Festival.

That "In the Middle" should look like such an artifact of its era and also so fresh is testament partly to the vigor of performance it receives here, but mostly to Forsythe's evolutionary place in ballet tradition. From the industrial-chic lighting and electronic Thom Willems score to the ethos of sexually aggressive individualism (think "A Chorus Line" meets "Fatal Attraction"), "In the Middle" screams late '80s. Yet its stretched-to-the-limits understanding of classicism - vestigial glimmers of Petipa and Balanchine between all those extreme extensions and provocative crouches - is timeless.

Kristin Long and Ruben Martin were scorching hot in the final pas de deux, energy running like an electrical current between their eyes. When she stood on pointe and leaned her hips toward his, her body bending like a bow, I just about thought he would lick her face."

Click here to read the rest.

January 30, 2009 · 05:26 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Chronicle Redesign

The latest on the Chronicle's changes, from a story in the paper:

"The next major addition to The Chronicle is a themed daily Datebook section that will focus on a topic that readers care about: Health on Monday, homes on Wednesday, restaurants on Thursday and the great outdoors on Friday. In addition to this themed content, readers will still find the Bay Area's most complete guide to local entertainment and places to go and things to do."

January 29, 2009 · 09:50 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet: Possokhov's "Lilacs"

My review of Tuesday's SF Ballet's program one opening in the Chronicle:

"How valuable will former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Yuri Possokhov prove as the company's resident choreographer? The jury's still out after the world premiere of his "Diving Into the Lilacs" on Tuesday night at the War Memorial Opera House.

"Lilacs," his third work for the Ballet since retiring from the stage in 2006, provides a sweeping showcase of lush dancing for three ravishing couples and a corps of eight. But it's unlikely that much beyond the strong performances will prove lasting.

As happens often with Possokhov, visual design and theatrical flair overshadow choreographic depth. Benjamin Pierce's scenery suspends a sort of lilac diorama within a wall of black. Sandra Woodall's costumes dress the men in swashbuckling vests and boots, the women in slim gossamer gowns.

Possokhov has said that the music, the Sinfonietta for String Orchestra by Shostakovich-influenced Boris Tchaikovsky (not Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, though few would confuse them), evoked memories of boyhood Moscow with lilacs in bloom. And indeed, no shortage of nostalgia and passion permeates "Lilacs," with its busy abundance of swirling lifts, swooning melts and devastated clutches. But much of the high emotion feels unearned.

There are ingenious movement motifs - too many to cohere meaningfully. The men have propeller arms, a macho legs-apart stance with shoulders swaggering, and long passages with fists clenched, a favorite Possokhov crutch. The women are constantly tossing in weird little contemporary fillips when they're not lying on the floor like corpses (a compelling image that goes nowhere). Because Possokhov's response to Tchaikovsky's pretty, middle-of-the-road modernism attains only surface musicality, nothing really registers.

Yet it's hard to feel disappointed with Tuesday's cast milking every moment."

Click here for the rest.

Chronicle dance reviews will be getting shorter: 300 words per review now for most performances, 500 words for SF Ballet. (Previously most dance reviews were 500 to 600 words, 600 to 800 for the Ballet.) I'm working my hardest to make my writing as concise and pared as possible, and I hope over time the results will show. It's particularly difficult, though, with a company filled with so many beautiful dancers as SF Ballet. Before cuts for space, my program one review continued to end thus:

"And the ensemble kept bringing back the bite, Lily Rogers a budding goddess of subtle musicality in the first theme, Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun unnervingly serene in the third, and Jennifer Stahl leading the quartet of sleek Phelgmatic ladies, each as coolly self-possessed as a Vogue cover model."

The sentences may be excised, but the admiration remains.

January 28, 2009 · 08:58 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Sean Dorsey Dance

My interview with Sean Dorsey in the Chronicle:

"You might expect Sean Dorsey's dances to be aesthetically transgressive or politically provocative. Dorsey - born female but now preferring the pronoun "he" - is the founder and director of Fresh Meat Productions, which he says is the nation's first year-round presenter of transgender arts.

Sometimes the most progressive thing an artist can do with a marginalized experience is to present it in a familiar, easily relatable form. Weaving movement with story, the 36-year-old Dorsey tells finely crafted, poignant tales of transgender life. In "Uncovered: The Diary Project," premiering this weekend at Dance Mission Theater, Dorsey turns his attention to the life of Lou Sullivan.

A female-to-male transsexual gay man, Sullivan lived in San Francisco from 1975 until his death in 1991, founding groundbreaking peer-support groups and publishing newsletters and informational booklets. The voluminous journals, medical records and letters he bequeathed to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society form the source material for "Lou," Dorsey's new suite of dances.

Q: You didn't know anything about Lou Sullivan when you undertook this project.

A: A lot of transgendered people haven't even heard of Lou Sullivan. That revealed to me the need to bring his story forward. I researched several people in letters and memoirs, knowing I wanted to work on a single life story. Lou's actual writing is gorgeous and articulate and sensual and so clear and beautiful. As soon as I read it, I knew he was the one.

Q: Three other excellent dancers star in this show with you. How do you, as a quartet, bring Lou Sullivan's story to life?

A: I'm not trying to physically embody Lou onstage or impersonate him.

I open the piece with my own writing as a witness narrator. All the rest of the text is taken from his journals and grouped into thematic episodes like love, transition, loss. They follow the arc of his life and journey, but some are in a more storytelling voice, some are more abstract and poetic. "

Click here for the rest.

January 28, 2009 · 08:55 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Company C Review

I reviewed Company C's latest in Tuesday's paper:

"Many a burgeoning ballet troupe could benefit from having a ballet by Alonzo King in its repertoire. On Friday at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, the East Bay's Company C Contemporary Ballet gained an ersatz substitute: "Which Light in the Sky Is Us," a world premiere by Gregory Dawson.

That's not to disparage Dawson's obvious talent. Every emerging choreographer begins by imitation, and with more than a decade spent dancing for King's Lines Ballet, it's only natural that Dawson would be highly influenced by the work of his former boss.

The fine commissioned score, by Ben Juodvalkis and Moses Sedler, sounds like a reduction of Lines Ballet's greatest hits: bold industrial sounds mingling with Tibetan prayer gongs, African percussion and elegiac strings. Yet Dawson's personal choreographic gifts glimmer within the ballet. His movement leans toward more obviously classical vocabulary than King's, which makes for clearer unison sections. And his stagecraft with tension-building transitions is tremendous. Just when you think you know where the structure of a section is going - four women lined up along one wing, say, with a soloist center stage - in pops a visitor whose arrival seems both surprising and inevitable.

Most important, though, is how focused and emotionally immersed Company C's members look in "Which Light." The young dancers - being steadily groomed by Artistic Director Charles Anderson - have grown tremendously in recent seasons in ballets by luminaries like Twyla Tharp and Antony Tudor. But in "Which Light" they look grown up - not mere performers, but artists. "

Click here for the full review.

January 28, 2009 · 08:52 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Alonzo King Talks Design

A few months back, I was asked to propose a choreographer to interview for design mind, the new magazine produced by the global design and innovation firm frog design. Quickly, I settled on Alonzo King, a choreographer who thinks beyond the often cloistered dance world, looking towards the transcendent.

So there Alonzo King and I were at frog's San Francisco studios last Thursday, where I interviewed King before a packed audience of designers transfixed by his insights on artistic authenticity.

Meanwhile, the new issue of design mind containing King's thoughts on collaboration is now available at select bookstores and newsstands. As befits a publication produced by a design firm, it is gorgeous (take a look especially at these stunning photos by French photographer Denis Darzacq). The Lines Ballet dancers receive an elegant spread of photos by Marty Sohl, well worth the magazine's price. But if you can't find a hard copy, you can at least read my interview with King online. Here is an excerpt:

"In a sweaty San Francisco dance studio, Alonzo King watches a quartet of men entwine around one another, forming a spinning line that soloist Brett Conway, his limbs fluid and yet tensile as a spider’s thread, keeps trying to break through.

“This is interesting to me because it’s a fixed point — convergence, and then one emerges,” King says in his gentle voice. “It’s that same tightness and then” — he throws his long arms wide — “whoosh! So as an idea, tightness and then release.”

King is talking to a group of musicians who will soon go back to their studios to create a score for his new ballet (which premiered on October 17th in San Francisco). The legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who played with John Coltrane’s jazz ensemble in the 1960s, will improvise live over this musical base, though he won’t be coming to the studio to see the dancing until three days before opening night. It’s risky, but risk-taking and collaboration are the driving forces of King’s creative vision.

In twenty-six years of making dances for his Lines Contemporary Ballet, King has paired his dancers with tabla master Zakir Hussain, Hindustani singer Rita Sahai, a band of Central African pygmies called the Ba’Aka, and a US-based group of kung fu practicing Shaolin monks. For King, collaboration is the essence of creative expression. It also poses a management challenge that any business leader or manager can appreciate: How do you bring seemingly disparate teams together for a cohesive — and transcendent — result? King shared his thoughts on collaboration during a rehearsal break in his office on September 18, 2008.

I OFTEN SAY IF TWO MEDIOCRE PEOPLE come together, a scientist and a farmer, and they meet and discuss what they do, they’ll say, “We’re really in two different worlds.” But if it’s a visionary scientist and a visionary farmer, they’ll say, “My God, we’re doing the same thing.” I want to talk to the world’s top scientists. What does that have to do with ballet? A lot. Anyone who has dedicated themselves to something and given their best [is] at a high level of expertise. They’ve got a lot to offer, and I’m interested in conversations with them. "

Here is the link to the full interview.

January 24, 2009 · 05:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet Gala

My review in today's Chronicle:

"George Balanchine's "Stars and Stripes" has closed out many a gala, but San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson must have known that its campy, high-kicking patriotism could never appear so felicitous as the day after President Obama's inauguration.

And so it was at the Ballet's 76th season opening: the guys in their feathered parade hats twirling, the girls bedecked in red, white and blue saluting, the American flag rising as the crowd clapped along to John Philip Sousa marches.

What better way to celebrate a new era than with one of the most satisfying Ballet kickoffs in recent memory? After several seasons bogged down by the pomp and ponderousness of big anniversaries, the programming Wednesday was sprightly, the star turns mostly sparkling. This was also the first time in many a tendu that women outshone men in a troupe often accused of allowing male talent to eclipse its ballerinas.

Though the exceptions of male brilliance were striking. In the pas de deux from "Le Corsaire," recent Ballet Nacional de Cuba defector Taras Domitro made a spectacular local debut, launching his tawny, compact body into textbook-perfect jumps, imbuing the connecting moments with spontaneity and never-overplayed feline prowess. "

Click here to read on.

January 23, 2009 · 02:07 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Company C's Charles Anderson

I profiled Company C Contemporary Ballet founder Charles Anderson for today's Chronicle:

"In a studio in Walnut Creek, a large man wearing jeans and sneakers stands before a group of lithe, chiseled dancers. "I like the attack," he says, throwing his full weight into a jump, "but keep it natural." When Charles Anderson demonstrates, his movement is expansive and graceful.

A stranger meeting Anderson on the street wouldn't guess that the big, jovial 43-year-old possesses a formidable ballet pedigree: His father is a former San Francisco Ballet principal, his mother a soloist. And even someone familiar with Anderson's eight years performing with New York City Ballet, and his reputation as one of the West Coast's most respected ballet teachers, probably wouldn't have thought, six and a half years ago, that his Company C Contemporary Ballet would become such a success.

After all, Anderson had virtually no budget and two months' prep time in late 2002, when a manager at San Francisco's Cowell Theater, looking to fill a cancellation, asked him to get some dancers together and put on a show. He had no staff, no funding and only his own choreography to stage. And really, did the Bay Area need another ballet company?

As it happens, the Bay Area did. The 13-member Company C, which will perform in Walnut Creek and San Francisco during the coming month, doesn't just offer committed, attractive young dancers. It also offers dance works - some masterpieces, some simply delightful - not danced by other California companies.

"My feeling is San Francisco is saturated with dance of all kinds, and you have to bring something else to the table," Anderson says after rehearsal, his blue eyes still boyish against pale skin and red hair. "As great as San Francisco Ballet is, there are a ton of great works that aren't in its purview for whatever reason."

The acquisitions were gradual. But, tapping his East Coast connections and his broad taste, Anderson began assembling a repertory of rare stature and eclecticism for a chamber troupe. A 2008 program juxtaposed Antony Tudor's wrenching, too seldom performed 1937 landmark "Dark Elegies" with David Parson's zany 1986 caper "The Envelope." Other programs have showcased everyone from modern dance living legend Paul Taylor to razzle-dazzle ballet showman Michael Smuin.

Then, in April, came the coup. After previously acquiring two well-known Twyla Tharp works, Company C gave the world premiere of a Tharp ballet that the famously prolific choreographer created years ago but then forgot about. "

Click here for the rest of the story.

January 18, 2009 · 08:04 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet 2009

The new San Francisco Ballet season, kicking off with a gala January 21st, is nearly upon us. I profiled retiring ballerina Tina LeBlanc for this Sunday's Chronicle:

"Tina LeBlanc is getting teary, but not because of her impending farewell to the ballet stage.

"I was totally crushed," LeBlanc says in a quiet room at the San Francisco Ballet Building, remembering the day she auditioned for the summer training program at American Ballet Theatre in New York. She had made it into the school the summer before; even though she was just 15, she knew her dancing was strong.

"One of the judges saw my confusion when my number wasn't called. She called me over and said, 'You're just too short. You haven't grown.' "

LeBlanc, 5 feet 1 - "I have been measured lately at 5 foot 1 1/2!" - raises a hand to a watery eye and laughs. "It was all I could do to walk out of that audition without bursting into tears. It was a blow. Not that I regret anything that has happened in my career."

It is hard to imagine what in LeBlanc's 27 years of professional dancing - 17 with San Francisco Ballet - she could have to regret. At 42, faint traces of gray framing her no-nonsense face, she has entered the growing pantheon of mold-breaking Ballet ballerinas who prove that skill, artistry and passion trump body-type strictures. With her pliant feet and diminutive-but-strong-as-nails legs, she is a supreme technician, lending sparkling clarity to ballets by George Balanchine and Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. But her gala goodbye performance May 9 will surely also show what has made her a total dancer, valuing nuance, precision and musicality over gymnastics and flash, whether weeping as "Swan Lake's" Odette or hoofing it up as the cowgirl in Agnes DeMille's "Rodeo."

"Nothing seems impossible for her," says fellow Ballet principal Kristin Long, who first admired LeBlanc's fearless freedom when both trained as children at the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. "She has this incredible daring quality when she's onstage." "

Click here to keep reading.

I also describe the season's offerings. And I interview the designer of the new "Swan Lake," Jonathan Fensom:

" After San Francisco Ballet's forward-looking 75th anniversary in 2008, with its 10 commissioned world premieres, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson is returning to a classic. He raised the caliber of San Francisco Ballet's dancing, and its national esteem, when he choreographed his first "Swan Lake" for the company 21 years ago. Now, for his new production premiering Feb. 21, Tomasson has teamed with Tony-nominated Broadway designer Jonathan Fensom ("Pygmalion," "Journey's End"), making his first foray into ballet.

We talked with Fensom about the new "Swan Lake" as he was in New York, putting finishing touches on the Manhattan Theatre Club's "The American Plan."

Q: This is a fairly traditional, not a postmodern or revisionist, "Swan Lake," and yet you're doing some forward-looking things with it. What was the driving intention behind this production?

A: Right away when I was asked to do this, I wanted to make the narrative clearer. In ballet and in opera, a lot is expected of the audience, as if they have to do their homework before seeing the show. With San Francisco Ballet's new slogan about "a new way of seeing ballet," I thought, let's try to design with a very strong narrative in mind and make the story clear for people who have never seen this ballet.

For one thing, we've made it Odette's story, more than Prince Siegfried's story. And there's a prologue that lays out the backstory. The audience will be aware that something strange has happened.

Q: In a lot of "Swan Lake" productions, the look is heavy and Germanic, Disneyfied medieval. What kind of style did you work for?

A: It's early 19th century, Regency period, with high collars, large sleeves that taper. We haven't gone Gothic. I wanted to keep a lightness of touch. In each scene, an object becomes a motif. In the first scene, for instance, we're outside the palace, and the motif is the palace wall. Siegfried is trapped. He's living the bachelor lifestyle, but he's oppressed by it.

At the lakeside, the emotion evoked is wild, and in the ballroom everything is contained and orderly. I'm taking advantage of that wonderfully wide Opera House stage to use a lot of objects. I've designed sculptural forms to move about the stage. I figure dancers are sculptural forms, I wanted the scenery to work that way, too. We've pulled away from the usual painted drops. The effect is more magical - or that's the plan."

Click here to keep reading that.

January 09, 2009 · 07:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

What to Watch in 2009

The Chronicle asked me to list ten dance performances to look out for, appearing in this Sunday's Pink section. Here are a handful:

"San Francisco Ballet (Jan. 7-May 8, War Memorial Opera House) After last year's forward-looking 75th anniversary, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson tends to tradition with a new "Swan Lake." Also tantalizing: the return of William Forsythe's slam-bam "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated"; a revival of Antony Tudor's heartbreaking masterpiece of psychological insight, "Jardin aux Lilas"; and Balanchine's magisterial three-part "Jewels" - particularly alluring with the ravishing Sarah Van Patten dancing "Diamonds."

Compagnie Marie Chouinard (April 10-11, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Novellus Theater) The sexually provocative, fearlessly primal company from Montreal made an indelible San Francisco debut in 2005. Now San Francisco Performances brings us Chouinard's take on two erotically charged classics: "Rite of Spring" and "Afternoon of a Faun."

Paul Taylor Dance Company (April 29-May 3, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Novellus Theater) One year without modern master Paul Taylor is too long. Returning to San Francisco Performances after a hiatus, Taylor's sunny company will dance his usual mix of the daffy and divinely bittersweet, bringing two new works along with the classic "Esplanade" and 1969's disturbing, erotic "Private Domain."

Anna Halprin (May 1-3, Stern Grove) Eighty-eight and dancing with unbridled beauty, the Bay Area's postmodern pioneer creates a new, free site-specific work for Stern Grove, the leafy bower of an outdoor performance space designed by her husband, seminal landscape architect Lawrence Halprin."

Click here for my full list.

One extra heads-up: the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is really on the ball for 2009, bringing intriguing visitors from Japan and New York. Be sure to check out their full line-up here.

On a personal note, I'm off to North Carolina for another graduate school residency for the next twelve days. But coming soon, a big preview package on the coming SF Ballet season in the Chronicle on January 11.

January 02, 2009 · 04:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Year in Dance 2008

My list in Sunday's Chronicle:

"HIGH: San Francisco Ballet's Maria Kochetkova in "Giselle" (Feb. 19): Tiny, delicate and irrepressibly sweet, the Russian-trained Kochetkova broke our hearts. Cutting through all the hype of San Francisco Ballet's forward-looking 75th season, the company's doll-like new principal gave a performance to remember for a lifetime.

LOW: Mark Morris Dance Group in "Romeo and Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare" (Sept. 26): Modern masters have their off years, too. Morris resurrected Prokofiev's original score but didn't show any feeling for the music. A handful of clever dramaturgical touches couldn't bring passion to this star-crossed production.

MOST IMPROVED: Smaller Bay Area ballet companies: They had a banner year. The reborn Oakland Ballet Company charmed in family-friendly fare, Diablo Ballet danced Balanchine with fresh panache, and Company C Contemporary Ballet romped through the world premiere of a lost Twyla Tharp creation. With the Smuin Ballet also carrying on strongly, there was ballet for everyone.

MVP: Jessica Robinson. CounterPulse's tireless executive director runs a tiny performance venue with a big impact, fostering new work by developing choreographers seemingly in all styles and genres - and just as important, promoting substantive dialogue among artists and their audiences."

And a few selections from my top 10:

"Retrospective Exhibitionist: (Miguel Gutierrez, May 9) A fleshy naked man. Holding a backbend. Singing a Kate Bush song in falsetto as a lit candle rises near his bare derriere. Gutierrez, a Joe Goode alumnus now in New York, was outrageous - but his meditation on narcissism was oddly touching, too.

Craneway Event: (Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nov. 9) Cal Performances presented the 89-year-old modern dance maverick's timeless experiments in time and space at a former Ford assembly plant at Point Richmond. To see these superhuman dancers doing superhuman things - up close, inside a glistening palace of a warehouse perched on the edge of the sea - was heaven.

Axis Dance Company 20th anniversary season: (Nov. 15) Oakland's trailblazing troupe for dancers with and without disabilities astonished us again with the intense chemistry between feisty Sonsheree Giles and Rodney Bell, lashed tightly to his wheelchair but spectacularly agile, in a duet by Alex Ketley."

Click here for the full list.

December 26, 2008 · 07:43 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet Nutcracker

Belatedly, my "Nutcracker" review in last week's Chronicle:

"In a winter of belt-tightening economic gloom - and as a silver lining, one hopes, a Christmastime not reduced to mere shopping - let's get the consumer advice out of the way. Is San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker" worth the outlay? The giggling children and shining parents at the War Memorial Opera House on Thursday suggested a "yes" that can't be measured in ticket prices.

Five seasons after the unveiling of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's luxurious production, the verdict is clear: This is one of the best "Nutcrackers" in the country and, by my estimation, the most visually elegant. The setting - 1915 San Francisco, with Clara dreaming about sights from the Panama-Pacific Exposition - is ingenious. The choice of a teenage Clara on the cusp of maturity makes for seamlessly satisfying storytelling.

The scenery - fog-shrouded Victorians, and for the second act a crystal palace that evokes the Conservatory of Flowers - is gorgeous. The battle between the toy soldiers and the mice is one of the cleverest in the business. My only serious complaint is that Tomasson's "Waltz of the Flowers," which ought to be an exuberant highpoint, feels cold and sterile. "

Oodles of photos online, if you click here for the rest of the review.

December 15, 2008 · 01:45 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Ballet Nutcracker on PBS

My little ditty of a story in the Sunday Chronicle:

"San Francisco Ballet was the first company to dance the full "Nutcracker" in North America, in 1944. But it was George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet that turned the then-relatively unknown Tchaikovsky score into a holiday tradition - and the ballet world's bread and butter - in the 1950s. Now San Francisco Ballet is about to reclaim the "Nutcracker" mantle in a big way with the nationwide PBS "Great Performances" broadcast of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's "Nutcracker" - set in 1915 San Francisco - on Dec. 17.

With its softly fog-shrouded sets and sumptuous Edwardian-era costumes, the Ballet's "Nutcracker"- also soon available on a DVD from Opus Arte/Naxos - looks tailor-made for its close-up. But Tomasson wasn't thinking about television when he conceived his widely acclaimed $3.5 million production, which premiered in 2004.

"After the fact, so many people said, what a beautiful production, and it takes place in San Francisco," said Tomasson, who devised a scenario in which the teenage Clara dreams about the fantastical sights she's just seen at the city's World's Fair. "That got the ball rolling."

Tomasson's "Nutcracker" was filmed over three performances last December, with eight cameras capturing every angle of glamorous Yuan Yuan Tan as the Snow Queen and technically virtuosic Vanessa Zahorian as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Emmy-winning director Matthew Diamond, who also directed the Ballet's 2003 recording of "Othello," said filming the gorgeous Act 2 divertissements of waltzing flowers, French cancan girls and a wild Chinese dragon was the easy part - it was editing the story-packed Act 1 that posed a challenge."

Click here for the full story.

December 07, 2008 · 10:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Diablo Ballet Back in Fine Form

My review in Monday's Chronicle:

"This may be sacrilegious to admit, but there have been moments during Diablo Ballet's past two budget-woe-beleaguered years when I've asked myself, "How urgent is it to save this little company, really?" On Friday at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, I felt the shame of that ungenerous thought, and happily. The hardy Diablo performers danced with total panache in excerpts from "Who Cares?," one of George Balanchine's most deceptively breezy minor masterpieces, yet one of his most stylistically demanding.

This was Diablo's finest hour in many moons, and it was sheer pleasure.

It seems the talented troupe members finally have the right people cracking the whip again. Artistic Director Lauren Jonas is reportedly spending less time in the office as interim executive director and more hours in the studio, and the results show. Just as crucial, one guesses, was the oversight of former San Francisco Ballet principal and now Oregon Ballet Theatre Artistic Director Christopher Stowell, who coached this staging. The Diablo dancers clearly lapped up his attention to meticulous artistry.

"Who Cares?" may sound like a fail-proof package - Gershwin tunes, chorus line girls in short skirts, starry-eyed romanticism - but without the right details, it falls flat, as anyone who saw San Francisco Ballet's most recent rendition can attest. Diablo made it an irresistible souffle."

Click here for the rest of the review.

November 23, 2008 · 10:50 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SF Hip Hop DanceFest

My review in Monday's Chronicle:

"The San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest's audience isn't shy about its predilections: The mob screams for a fat beat, claps along when a crew breaks out old-school James Brown or vintage '80s Janet Jackson and shouts "work it out!" when a dancer starts slamming. But like any crowd that knows how to have a good time, the festival's fans rarely err in taste - and neither does founder, director and producer Micaya.

I wasn't able to catch the 10th anniversary festival's Program A on Friday at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, but that was surely my loss, because Saturday's Program B was sick, buck, dope, stupid - insert whatever other hip-hop accolade you wish - the best of the eight editions of the festival I've been fortunate enough to witness through the years.

Just when we thought Micaya's international scouting had shown us everything possible in hip-hop, along comes Indiana's Breaksk8 Dance Crew. These five guys dance on roller skates, and this ain't no roller derby. They do tight, hard-hitting moves that most crews would kill to pull off with their feet on the ground. Then they do more, throwing themselves into b-boy spins, scissoring their legs in handstands.

Also on the novel side was Philadelphia's MopTop Music and Movement, led by Buddha Stretch, a repeat visitor to the festival. For "HipHop/Beebob" he took a Charleston-grooving song by Common and staged a 1920s speakeasy bash. You haven't seen street tough redefined until you've seen B-girl Bounce whirl through a corkscrew in a flapper dress and heels.

But some crews didn't need a gimmick, just a good booty-shaking."

Click herefor the rest of the review.

November 23, 2008 · 10:47 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Blixa Bargeld, Nanos, and Kunst-Stoff

My review in Friday's Chronicle:

"To the public, Blixa Bargeld might most easily be identified as the former guitarist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But to serious fans of experimental music, Bargeld is a cult hero: founder of the group Einstürzende Neubauten, power-tool-wielding savant of industrial music and major influence on everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Depeche Mode. So local music collective Nanos Operetta and dance company Kunst-Stoff must have counted it a coup when Bargeld chose to work with them on a San Francisco edition of his "Execution of Precious Memories," continuing through Sunday at Project Artaud Theater.

The "Execution of Precious Memories" project - with its morbid Bargeldian double entendre - began in Bargeld's hometown, Berlin, in 1994 and has been executed, so to speak, in six more cities since. Calls for memories are put out to residents of the particular city; a 50-item questionnaire is distributed by e-mail and flyers. The collaborators then gather the anonymous answers and work under Bargeld's direction to shape them into an original piece.

For this run, Bargeld also presides over the recollecting, reading many of the memories in his deep, crisp, horror-movie-worthy voice, tall frame cloaked in a black three-piece suit. He sings, and for the final climax he lets out a piercing, clear animal scream that is one of the most astonishing things I have ever heard a human voice produce. But the real star here is Nanos Operetta's music.

With Bargeld at the mike, Nanos leader and vocalist Ali Tabatabai has stepped aside, but the lush music stands strong without his charismatic presence. To Nanos fans, it will sound like much of what the collective has produced over its busy seven years: a Jacques Brel-meets-Persia fever dream of accordion, strings and relentless vibraphone; wild percussion and an eerie singing saw whining above it all. "Execution of Precious Memories" sounds less dark and twisted to me than much of Nanos, though, and more softly swooning. It's sweeping and absorbing.

I wish I could say the same for the project's other elements."

Click here for the rest of the review.

November 20, 2008 · 09:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Chris Stowell at Diablo Ballet

My Q and A in Friday's Chronicle:

"San Francisco Ballet fans miss Christopher Stowell, who for 16 years was one of the finest male dancers in the company's history. But though Stowell retired from the stage in 2001, he's hardly disappeared. In 2003, Stowell made good on his ballet lineage - he's the son of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, founders of Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet - and became artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre in Portland. He hasn't shied from calling on his San Francisco connections, whether hiring San Francisco Ballet dancers, recruiting from the San Francisco Ballet School or tapping Ballet choreographers like Yuri Possokhov. His emphasis on contemporary classicism at OBT has brought the troupe accolades in festivals like the Kennedy Center's "Ballet Across America" and New York's "Fall for Dance."

Last week, Stowell returned to the Bay Area to help out another troupe, Walnut Creek's Diablo Ballet, which will dance excerpts from Stowell's "All Eyes on You" as part of the company's "An Evening on Broadway" program this weekend.

Q: Oregon Ballet Theatre has been generating a lot of buzz during your five years there.

A: We're getting a lot of attention. It's very satisfying.

Q: Ticket sales at OBT's home performances are up 50 percent. What's your strategy?

A: I try to surprise our audiences all the time about what ballet can be. The people who are afraid of a tutu find out that ballet can be contemporary; it's not uptight. And the people who are scared of no tutu get dancing that is still classical and discover that the language of ballet can be so many interesting things. But it's still ballet. If it reminds me of a music video, I'm not interested."

Click here for more.

November 20, 2008 · 09:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

LevyDance and Hennessy's "Delinquent"

Catching up on Chronicle reviews I haven't had time to post this week. Both these shows are over, alas. But first up, LEVYdance:

"For all the physiological complexity of young Benjamin Levy's whiplash choreography, some aspects of LEVYdance's sexed-up appeal are simple: He works with good-looking dancers, and he knows how to make them look good.

Continuing through Saturday, that attractiveness extends to the setting. For its seventh home season, LEVYdance has opened its own little nook of SoMa, an alley off Folsom and Eighth streets that plays village square not only to LEVYdance's headquarters at Studio Gracia but also to the atelier of couture designer Colleen Quen and an automotive repair shop.

Wednesday night a nearly full moon shone above the brick buildings with their lovely murals and tendrils of trumpet vine, while three stages connected by catwalks occupied the center. The audience sat on two sides and in the pit created by the performance platforms, where a hipster crowd curled up on cushions, cozily nursing cups of mulled wine and hot chocolate.

A San Francisco scene, to be sure, and it was no surprise that the dance that looked most natural in these environs was last year's "NuNu," a dance-party romp set in part to a club anthem by Fabolous."

Click here for the full review.

And then, Keith Hennessy's "Delinquent" which, if you read the full review, you'll see I found mildly disappointing:

"Near the beginning of Keith Hennessy's new one-hour show, "Delinquent," Lick Wilmerding High School senior Constance Castillo sits high in a sling hoisted by her fellow cast members. "Two of us have been locked up on both sides of the bay," she says, steely-eyed. "Three know someone killed in the last month. Five have parents who have been incarcerated. Some have parents in prison right now. All have stolen."

And all - so the hook of this Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Bay Area Now presentation goes - have been labeled "juvenile delinquents" at some time in their lives, though the most eloquent protest against the ways youth incarceration demeans human potential is a quick glimpse through the program bios. Some of the cast members have already graduated from colleges like UC Santa Cruz, others volunteer for the ACLU or study at major ballet schools - hardly the stereotype of underachieving kid thugs. All are honest, compelling performers, and choreographer Hennessy - a veteran performance artist and activist best known for his anti-fear-mongering AIDS rituals - mostly does right by their diverse talents.

"Delinquent" is strongest whenever Hennessy lets these teens and no-longer-quite-teens do their thing. "

Click here for the rest.

November 20, 2008 · 09:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Farewell, Clive Barnes

I'm very sorry to hear of the great critic Clive Barnes' passing. I grew up on him and his wit and effortless deep knowledge, as almost everyone writing about dance today did.

November 19, 2008 · 03:16 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

AXIS Dance's 20th Anniversary

My story in Sunday's Chronicle:

"One of the most riveting Bay Area dances of 2008 starred a tiny, fierce redhead and a brawny, burningly intense man in a wheelchair. In Alex Ketley's duet "To Color Me Different," Axis Dance Company members Sonsheree Giles and Rodney Bell toss themselves into a torrent of volatile intimacy. Giles flips herself over Bell's shoulders and across the stage; Bell throws the wheelchair, tightly lashed to his immobile legs, to the floor and rolls upright again, in full command of his essentially three-limbed physicality.

No doubt part of the fascination of the piece comes from seeing an unconventional body fearlessly attempting unexpected things. But watching "To Color Me Different" at various local dance festivals this summer, there was no separating the power of Bell's physical determination from his passionate connection with Giles.

This is not a duet about being disabled; it's about the perils of attraction and trust. And it's being danced again next weekend in Oakland as part of a larger Ketley piece, "Vessel," which will receive its world premiere during Axis Dance Company's 20th anniversary home season.

Hard to believe, but true: Oakland's Axis has been pushing dance combining performers with and without disabilities into the realm of great risk-taking art for two decades. "

Click here for more. And here's a timeline of the company's milestones.

November 10, 2008 · 10:52 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Cunningham at Cal

My review in the Chronicle:

"Friday night, lost in Merce Cunningham's sensuous "Biped" at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, I thought I'd start this review by rhapsodizing about "Biped" as the perfect portal for someone who's never seen a Cunningham dance. I thought I'd tell readers that if you're considering coming to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's second weekend at Cal Performances - and you should - you should make certain to come on Friday, when "Biped" will be repeated. I'd go on about "Biped's" shimmering Gavin Bryars score, about how the 1999 dance feels more lush and human and generous than most of Cunningham's work, about how the ghostly motion-capture video projections, the disembodied lines moving like angelic forces of geometric beauty, warm up a spirituality that tends to feel coldly intellectualized.

After all, I figured, especially as Cunningham nears 90 years of age - and as Cal Performances does right by his troupe's venerated 55 years with two packed weeks of colloquia, a film series and more - Cunningham converts forget that his work frequently strikes the uninitiated as inscrutable, impenetrable, even pointless. Liberating dance from music and decor, embracing chance techniques, embodying the Zen attitudes of his partner and collaborator, John Cage: You can read about all the avant-garde advances in the dance history books and still feel affronted at the performance. After all, a lot of Cunningham is meant, however slyly, to affront you.

My own Cunningham conversion came very late, just two years ago. I was watching a typical Cunningham dance with its typical unsettling mix of precision and randomness, and suddenly it struck me. The key was to release myself from the paralyzing burden of trying to find my own meaning in every moment - to refrain from reprimanding myself for tuning out. I surrendered to watching Cunningham as a kind of meditation. And suddenly, the beauty of sheer form was everywhere."

Click here for the rest of the review.

November 10, 2008 · 10:49 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Change--and ballet--come to the White House

I first posted this in January 2007, but I'm posting it again in honor of Barack Obama's first hire:

"You know how people say, 'crawl, walk, run'? Well, for me it was always 'crawl, walk, ballet'."

--Democratic Caucus Chair and former ballet dancer Rahm Emanuel today on Fresh Air. Click here for the interview.

And I thought I couldn't be any happier about Obama's triumph. Now thanks to him we have a ballet fan in the White House.

November 07, 2008 · 11:03 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Oakland Ballet

My review in today's Chronicle:

"For two years now, the Oakland Ballet Company has been an irresistible underdog, replete with an against-all-odds story. Could Ronn Guidi really reclaim the troupe he founded in 1968 - the troupe that foundered and finally folded seven years after his 1999 retirement - and bring it back to life with its old plucky spirit? Oaklanders who knew Guidi and remembered the Oakland Ballet heydays of the '80s and '90s hoped yes - and gave Guidi a lot of credit for heart.

But Saturday at the Paramount Theatre, extra points for perseverance were no longer necessary. In its third repertory outing, the reborn Oakland Ballet danced like a company without need for allowances. This was a well-chosen program that kept matinee families happy while offering more serious ballet lovers much to admire.

The best decision Guidi made was bringing back former Oakland Ballet star Michael Lowe's "Bamboo," an imagistic mingling of Chinese childhood memories. Not a small portion of pleasure was thanks to Melody of China playing traditional instruments in the pit, but the charm of the choreography is all Lowe's. Six women in elegant green leotards wafted like tender leaves, legs sprouting upward as the men in brown held their bodies upside down. Jenna McClintock and Ethan White danced a Tai Chi-inspired pas de deux punctuated by silent suspense. In the most memorable section, a gaggle of men as young ducks quacked with hands and mouths, lying on the lip of the stage with legs skyward like bobbing tails.

The ensemble moved harmoniously, led by gracious Gianna Davy. Harmoniousness, softness, an unassuming generosity: Those qualities are beginning to re-emerge as a company style and ethos, and they brought a good-natured vibe to Ron Thiele's "How'd They Catch Me?," which could have looked like a bad '80s flashback. "

Click here for the full review.

October 27, 2008 · 10:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Lines Ballet with Pharoah Sanders

My review in today's Chronicle:

In the middle of Lines Ballet's "The Radius of Convergence," five men form a line that spins and collapses. Brett Conway, the troupe's most eloquent male dancer, peels off in rapturous spools of motion, finally laying his body upon the other men's arms as they spasm.

Perhaps that spinning line represents the ballet's titular radius. Whatever the case, it provides the only moment when the dancers seem to live within the music. And I don't think it's coincidence that it's danced to an Edgar Meyer violin concerto, the music Artistic Director Alonzo King used when he created it, rather than to the commissioned score he superimposed on this ballet later.

"Radius," continuing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Novellus Theater through Sunday, is billed as a world premiere collaboration with famed saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, but precious little convergence of music and movement graces it. Unlike in many of Sanders' six previous collaborations with Lines - several of them among King's most beautiful works - the former member of John Coltrane's ensemble did not actually create the score. Instead, King called in a trio of standby electronic composers - Miguel Frasconi, Leo Hurley and Leslie Stuck - to provide a sort of sonic carpet. Sanders sits onstage improvising - mostly, on Saturday, with feathery low notes.

The result looks like a bland rehash of earlier Lines creations, dressed in the usual Lines way: sleek dresses and leotards by artistic associate Robert Rosenwasser in a dull moss green and space-age lighting by Axel Morgenthaler. The recorded sound offers a by-now-cliche aural assemblage: shattering glass, the hum of street traffic, solemn reverberations of what sounds like a Tibetan prayer gong.

Sanders seems so incidental that you sometimes forget he's there. The nine Lines dancers do the usual Lines things: twist and twine, cling to one another and pull apart in ways that suggest psychological allegories. In the one section when we hear only Sanders' improvising, the disconnect between musician and dancers is painful, four women each stepping forward to take solos, their steps tentative, as though the saxophone notes might reprimand them."

Click here for the rest of the review.

October 20, 2008 · 02:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Kirov "Don Q"

My review in tomorrow's Chronicle:

"I thought I'd died and woken up in a different era of ballet history Friday night. After opening its Cal Performances run earlier last week with a pristine but lifeless anthology of Petipa's Greatest Hits, the Kirov Ballet overwhelmed a standing-ovation crowd at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall with a "Don Quixote" that was sensationally spirited, sunny, even swarthy - in a word, blood-pumping.

The spectacle was all the more disarming at a time when performances of the 19th century story ballets - especially in America - tend to be box-office driven and dutiful. "Don Quixote" is the Russians' heritage - Petipa created it for the rival Bolshoi Ballet in 1869, and the Kirov credits its production (questionably) to the 1902 Alexander Gorsky staging - but the Kirov doesn't dance it like a museum piece. Instead, the famous Kirov tough-as-nails technique feels unloosed in a faux-Spanish celebration of gypsy madness and young love."

Click here for the full review.

October 19, 2008 · 07:05 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

5 Q's with Smuin Ballet's Amy Seiwert

My interview in the Chronicle today:

"When ballet showman Michael Smuin died last year, he left behind a lively legacy, a company of devoted dancers and a choreographic protege, Amy Seiwert. "Boss," as Smuin Ballet dancer Seiwert called him, always championed her sharply innovative, formally dazzling ballets, which she began choreographing about a decade ago. In June, Seiwert retired from the stage to become Smuin Ballet's resident choreographer. Her latest work, "Been Through Diamonds," premieres this week alongside Smuin's "Dances With Songs" and Robert Sund's "Carmen."

Q: The new ballet sounds quirky.

A: (Company director) Celia (Fushille) asked me to do something celebrating the company's 15th anniversary. I can be moody and dark, but she wanted a celebration, to classical music. I spent about 100 hours listening to Mozart before I chose the String Quintet in C Minor. It has a beautiful humor about it.

The title is a lyric from the J. Geils Band song "Love Stinks." There's another line from the song, "You love her, but she loves him," and that kind of relationship started going through my mind. For the first section of the dance, I created a flow chart. Shannon loves Brooke, but Brooke loves Shane, Shane loves Erin, Erin loves Matt, Matt loves Robin. The dancers would ask, "So does Robin love Shannon?" And I was like, "No. Shannon doesn't get any love." "

Click here for the full interview.

October 19, 2008 · 05:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The Kirov at Cal

My review in Thursday's Chronicle:

"Two years ago, the former Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal wrote an article called "Five Things I Hate About Ballet," slamming the majority of today's ballet performances as "flatulent" and "trivial."

He was widely trounced as an enemy of the art form, but anyone who knew Segal - and his encyclopedic command of ballet history - understood that his vitriol was in direct proportion to his deep love of classical dance. Tuesday night, watching the Kirov Ballet at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, I thought I knew just how he felt.

The Kirov is Russia's bastion of 19th century classicism, the place where Petipa reinvented classical technique, the institution that birthed such rebels as Nijinsky and Balanchine. To see the 24 corps women in the "Shades" act of "La Bayadere" Tuesday was still to see an unparalleled demonstration of the ballet ideal of physical perfection, every leg held at the optimal angle of beauty in relation to the back, every chin turned for the precise degree of twist in the neck. The Kirov dancers' feet were exquisitely arched to a one, their legs crisp and efficient as jackknives. Witnessing such a refinement of technique, you can't help wishing it weren't so purely mechanical, that it meant something."

Click here for the full review.

October 15, 2008 · 06:46 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Litquake and ODC Theater Team for Off Book

My review in today's Chronicle:

"The Bay Area boasts one of the country's most exciting dance scenes, and one of the country's liveliest literary scenes. But rarely if ever do the two come together with such freewheeling spirit as at Off Book: Stories That Move, presented Thursday at Project Artaud Theater.

For "Page to Stage," the festival's centerpiece, ODC Theater teamed with the raucous literary festival Litquake to match three local writers with choreographer counterparts, each pair free to collaborate according to personal whim. The results were not always ambitious, but their unpretentious looseness made them all the more appealing.

The shame about "Page to Stage" was that it ran only one night, with JoAnn Selisker's one-woman show "Off Leash" opening the Off Book festival Wednesday, and Los Angeles choreographer Rosanna Gamson's "Ravish," about the Brontë sisters, closing out the weekend (and repeating tonight and Sunday). ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis should trust more in his commissioned talent.

One of the pairings in "Page to Stage" on Thursday was, for this lover of both literature and dance, practically the fulfillment of a personal aesthetic-pleasure-overload fantasy. The sassy Mission District memoirist Michelle Tea read her story "I Used to Be a Lesbian" while the deliciously witty Contact Improvisation Zen master Scott Wells sent eight strapping men tumbling over each other, stripping down to skivvies and making bizarre animal noises. "

Click here for the full review.

October 10, 2008 · 10:39 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Chitresh Das

My review in the Chronicle today:

"The North Indian dance form Kathak may not seem as prime as, say, flamenco for a popular explosion - but try telling that to Pandit Chitresh Das. For nearly 40 years, he's tirelessly promoted Kathak in the U.S., training his "rainbow coalition" of multi-ethnic, American-born disciples here in San Francisco. And for the last three years, he's toured the world trading riffs with the young tap virtuoso Jason Samuels Smith, in their spectacularly entertaining "India Jazz Suites."

Despite that cross-cultural conversation, Das is not a hybridist - he has no interest in mixing Kathak into Western dance styles as the phenomenally popular British choreographer Akram Khan does. Das works within his tradition. And Saturday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Forum, he returned to one of Kathak's oldest traditions, the evening-length solo. It dates from the 15th century, when kathakas (storytellers) toured the Mughal courts - yet the largely improvised solo is rarely performed in India today.

Das' two-hour performance was, first of all, testament to his physical vigor. At 63, he is agile and athletic, a powerhouse example of the muscular style of Kathak he espouses, with its emphasis on swift turns and lightning-quick feet."

Click here for the full review.

September 29, 2008 · 03:25 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

EmSpace Dance

My review in the Chronicle:

"Show up for EmSpace Dance's "Keyhole Dances," and choreographer Erin Mei-Ling Stuart will meet you at the door, in a red negligee and cheetah-print slippers, her freshly washed hair swept up in a bath towel. Ushering you upstairs to her Victorian flat, she'll offer you a cookie and invite you to play voyeur - and Saturday, there was plenty to peek at.

In the bathroom, Jennifer Wright sat on the toilet bawling into a cell phone, while in the TV room, Jesselito Bie and Jessica Fudim wrestled for the remote in slow-motion acrobatics. In one bedroom, a couple shuffled Tarot cards; in the living room, Christy Funsch danced a sad tango, staring longingly out the window at the intersection of Steiner Street.

It's a constant challenge for talented young choreographers to find affordable spaces in which to show their work; Stuart has solved this by using her home, the exact address provided when you visit the EmSpace Web site and buy a ticket. Her flat is large and slightly creepy, with dark paneling and burgundy carpet; her cast is an assemblage of compelling personalities, many drawn from Huckabay McAllister Dance, with which Stuart performs; and her choreography is quirky, intimate and unexpected. "Keyhole Dances" is a modest show, but a charming one."

Click here for the rest.

September 22, 2008 · 11:44 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Robert Moses at YBCA

I asked Robert Moses five questions for this Sunday's Chronicle:

"San Francisco dance company Robert Moses' Kin has rocketed in national reputation recently, gaining notice for Moses' fast and furious, streetwise yet eloquent style and his bold way of exposing the hypocrisies of race and gender in America. A faculty member at Stanford University, Moses grew up in Philadelphia and Long Beach, and danced in the companies of Twyla Tharp and ODC/Dance before founding his troupe in 1995. His latest work premieres this week as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Bay Area Now series.

Q: How did you absorb all the influences that go into your movement style?

A: It's a combination of all the stuff I've studied, including some Afro-Haitian. Then just watching people, you see what they do, going to clubs. I used to watch people on breaks in high school, too. You'd get a room that the teachers stayed out of. Somebody brings a radio, and the next thing you know, people are up dancing.

Q: For your new dance, "Toward September," you use music you created, something you've been doing a lot. Is this a new phase?

A: There's a weird cult of collaboration happening right now. I think it's also important to find your individual voice. I love to collaborate, but at the same time you have to go back and mine yourself."

Click here for the full interview.

September 12, 2008 · 04:15 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

DanceWaves 2 and 3

I wish the opening of the WestWave Festival's "DanceWave" series had been as strong as the "DanceWave 3" program I caught last night. In addition to a stunning performance by AXIS Dance's Rodney Bell and Sonsheree Giles in Alex Ketley's riveting "To Color Me Different," I especially enjoyed Chris Black's deadpan "Headlines," with its overlapping medley of inspirational pop songs accompanied by deliciously ridiculous movement phrases. The skirt-shaking vitality of Afro Puerto Rican troupe Hablando con Tambores was a major discovery, and it was an eye-opener to see leading Joe Goode dancer Jessica Swanson moving those hips Middle Eastern style with Zooz Dance Company. Even when the choreography disappointed, as in the talented Brittany Brown Ceres's "Shade," the dancing last night was always professional and frequently luxurious, as with Ballet Afsaneh soloist Tara Catherine Pandeya.

Wednesday's "DanceWave 2" did not reach such a consistent standard, but I enjoyed Alayna Stroud's artful pole dance (no, not the naughty kind) and the elegant Odissi dance of Guru Shradha. Fellow Travelers Performance Group rolled out their trademark dark absurdity in "Cocktail Hour," with its central dancer strapped into what looked like a medieval torture device, a wooden wheel attached by ballast to her back, orbiting the stage as she turned in place and fellow dancers with martinis ducked beneath its axis.

Humor is in the funny bone of the beholder; I heard notable dance rabble rouser Keith Hennessy squealing in delight at Amy Lewis's "How many presents/balls/chips/scarves/books/hearts/circles can you wrap/catch/win/throw/read/cut out/make in four minutes thirty-two seconds?," while what struck me as pure obnoxiousness made me long to flee the theater. The beautifully danced hula of Halau o Keikiali'i soothed my nerves.

I still feel torn between appreciating the WestWave Dance Festival's special role in the Bay Area dance scene, and wanting a more curated approach. As it stands, I find it too uneven to recommend to the general public--but it's an important place for choreographers, especially younger ones, to try out ideas, and it's useful for making discoveries.

One thing I feel certain of is the effectiveness of the new five-minute format. Knowing that every piece was between four minutes and thirty-two seconds and five minutes made for a fascinating comparative study. When a piece felt interminable, you registered this all the more clearly. I found myself spending most of my viewing time thinking about why one piece was engrossing, another never-ending, and contemplating the ways my personal prejudices and tastes played into the equation.

Dancers' Group did a heroic job keeping the WestWave going. The Bay Area does need it. I hope it returns in some form in 2009.

August 22, 2008 · 07:13 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

WestWave Dance Festival

My review of "DanceWave 1" in the Chronicle:

"Time is an elastic function of human perception. Rarely have I felt that so keenly as at Tuesday's "DanceWave 1" program, part of the reinvented WestWave Dance Festival. Amy Seiwert's pas de deux "Air" seemed over in one exquisite instant, while Erika Tsimbrovsky's "The Silence of Stones" threatened to stretch a punishing eternity. In fact, each lasted five minutes.

The time limit is part of the new packaging for WestWave, a festival that has long struggled to balance inclusiveness with quality control. In recent years, it's also fought for survival in the face of funding cuts, venue closures and the inevitable exhaustion of valiant longtime director Joan Lazarus.

Those woes were solved when Dancers' Group took over WestWave, partnering with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and DanceArt. For this, its 17th year, WestWave has gained a grand new venue at the YBCA's Novellus Theater and, under Dancers' Group Executive Director Wayne Hazzard, a fresh format. Each of the three "DanceWave" programs offers a dozen acts, each allowed five minutes maximum to show their stuff, from ballet to belly dance, tango to taiko. Hazzard pitches it as a Bay Area dance iPod on shuffle. Each "DanceWave" program repeats at some point either tonight or Friday, but for such a simple concept, the programming is absurdly confusing. Check the schedule, and check it twice.

Or just show up and see which grab bag of five-minute performances you end up with, but come forewarned: WestWave continues to be wildly hit-or-miss. On Tuesday, the time limit only mildly mitigated a long string of misses. And then there was Seiwert's gorgeous "Air," reminding us why the WestWave is so needed.

The festival gave Seiwert, now resident choreographer at Smuin Ballet, a crucial leg up into the dance-making world by encouraging her earliest works, and even producing a full evening of her choreography last year. With "Air," she is now clearly a fully mature artist. "

Click here for the full review.

August 20, 2008 · 10:12 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Zhukov Dance Theatre

My review in today's Chronicle:

"If you'd like reassurance that worthy talent is on occasion rewarded with generous patronage, consider Yuri Zhukov. For the last five years, the former Kirov and San Francisco Ballet dancer's choreographic efforts have premiered mostly at the student recitals of our local City Ballet School. Among the proud parents were passionate Zhukov fans, two of whom - Zhukov Dance Theatre co-founders Millicent Powers and Sandy Lee - have marketing savvy to match their money.

The debut performance of Zhukov's troupe Friday was titled "Product 01" - it came accompanied by a catalog-style program filled with arty rehearsal photography. Perhaps unfairly, such professional packaging for such a nascent venture arouses my skepticism; no matter. In a single evening, Zhukov Dance Theatre established itself as one of the most promising presences on the Bay Area dance scene. With movement this luscious, if Zhukov's selling, I'm buying.

And Zhukov's product is a definable one. It's European ballet, skillfully blending influences from latter-day William Forsythe and Hans Van Manen, among others, but serving them up more gently, without the affront of intellectual provocation or emotional disturbance. In the opening of "M&W," dancers slunk beneath a lowered lighting grid - but that industrial look is now more chic than startling. In "Passing," the six men and women wore unisex flowing skirts, another well-worn theatrical device. And yet in the best moments at the Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Novellus Theater - and especially in "Passing" - Zhukov emerged as not merely a recycler but as a developing artist in his own right, who has softer but perfectly compelling things to say."

Click here for the full review.

August 11, 2008 · 10:43 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

SYTYCD Finale

One last time, "So You Think You Can Dance" fans. My unlikely summer gig draws to a close with notes on the top four's finale performances for Voice of Dance here.

August 07, 2008 · 04:33 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Discerning SYTYCD Viewers

While I've ridden along relatively mindlessly recapping episodes of "So You Think You Can Dance," a few articulate fans of serious dance--and of the show--have restarted a far more elevated conversation. Their questions echo ones I've been wrestling with since the show's early success. Informed dance fan Joanna has moved the discussion from Voice of Dance, with its clunkier comments capabilities, to her own delightful blog. Joanna writes (and I hope she'll forgive the lengthy quotation):

" . . . Professor of Dance and writer Mindy Aloff, whose name I recognized from having read her reviews in The Nation and other publications, asked what readers of Rachel's article, viewers of the show, thought of the choreography. I think it's worth reposting her question, because she brings up a number of issues that folks have been discussing, in a variety of venues in the dance world, and in the fan boards.

"Would be interested to find even one reader's assessment of the choreography--especially since the show, itself, which I like, takes a lot of care to emphasize the subject. Does anyone (apart from Rachel) care? Would it make a difference to anyone if these were gymnasts rather than dancers? What, in your view, makes the dancing, well, dancing? And what do you all think about the fact that, say, in the rehearsal segment for the Viennese waltz, we actually heard a Viennese waltz (by Johann Strauss, Jr) but in performance the Viennese waltz choreography had to be performed to pop music. Why do you think the producers made that change? Aren't you all dancers and dance fans? Don't you have views on stuff like this?"

My reply, and her response as well as the responses of others are a little hard to follow because the site has a lame comment feature, but I want to know what people think of her question and all the questions that come with it.

Are we just suckers for a pretty face, a scripted showmance, a pop ballad? are we manipulated by the judges' vague and tendentious commentary that does little to educate us about what to look for in the performance or the choreography? Does it all boil down to "I may not know much about dance, but I know what I like"? "

Jump into the worthy dialogue here. My thanks to the esteemed dance writer Mindy Aloff for getting it started.

And on the fun side, with thanks again to blogger Joanna.

August 04, 2008 · 08:52 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

RAWdance

My review in the Chronicle:

"In a RAWdance performance, thighs work like switchblades, partners push and pull, and a leg lifted into a high, crotch-exposing extension practically becomes a fetish. The strength of this young, hip company on the rise is its distinct, muscular movement vocabulary. Its weakness is that co-founders and co-choreographers Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith don't yet know what they have to say with it.

The best dances at the 4-year-old group's first full home season, which repeats at CounterPULSE tonight, are the most abstract. In 2007's "The Ties That Bound, Studies," pairs of dancers dressed in unisex corsets manipulate each other like mechanical dolls to tinkling music-box sounds. In 2006's "Drained," a quartet zooms through each other's trajectories and atop platforms like buzzing atoms before shouting out, "I've had enough!" Think of the style as jackknife ballet, the limbs slashing and slicing. The center of gravity is held high, and the legs turn in and turn out like swiveling robot parts, the shoulders often hunching above. It's not an original aesthetic, but it's a clean and compelling one, and Rein and Smith may yet do original things with it.

The problem arrives when RAWdance tries to get more representational - that is, to make dances whose meanings manifest in more than just the structure of the movement, dances that come closer to suggesting scenes from real life. "Fallout," the work-in-progress premiere on this slate, needs deeper rethinking, not just expansion."

Click here for the rest.

August 02, 2008 · 12:53 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SYTYCD Top Six

It's getting down to the wire, "So You Think You Can Dance" fans. My Voice of Dance commentary on the top six is here.

July 31, 2008 · 04:44 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

"New Traditionalists" at ODC Theater Fest

My review for the Chronicle:

"The ODC Theater Festivals' "New Traditionalists" slate has a political point to make: Isn't so-called "ethnic dance" contemporary dance too? Why should styles like Kathak or West African get marginalized as "culturally specific" while modern and postmodern dance - which arise from their own, mostly Caucasian, post-Martha Graham traditions (and which can certainly look "culturally specific" to plenty of baffled first-time viewers) - get labeled mainstream art?

It's a point that's ripe in the Bay Area, where our region's claim to the highest per-capita dance activity in the United States rests heavily on our dazzling diversity of dance styles. And it's a perspective that's welcome if it gets master artists like Hearan Chung and Vishnu Tattva Das in front of new audiences. Two-thirds of this program, which repeats tonight at Project Artaud Theater, ODC Theater's temporary home, is a mesmerizing display of total theatrical command.

The most enchanting discovery here is Das, a practitioner of Odissi, one of India's eight classical dance forms. Two others of those eight forms, the powerfully percussive Kathak and the somewhat gentler Bharatanatyam, are well represented in the Bay Area; Das creates an equal fascination with Odissi with a single performance.

Draped in cream and red silk and silver baubles, his chest bare, Das brings to life the Hindu deity Krishna with the rise of an eyebrow, his heavy-lidded eyes radiating sensuality. His arms flow like gentle rivers; his legs move in slow-motion control; his bell-bedecked feet occasionally stamp bursts of precise rhythms. The stance in Odissi is with knees turned out (rather than knees facing forward, as in Kathak); Das makes a drama of every deep leg bend, the long pleats of his costume fanning wide with a curious graciousness."

Click here for the full review.

July 25, 2008 · 05:28 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

SYTYCD Top Eight

For you "So You Think You Can Dance" fans: My rundown on the "elite eight."

July 24, 2008 · 02:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Local Heroes at ODC Festivals

My review in the Chronicle:

The latest in ODC Theater director Rob Bailis' ambitious series of festivals is titled "Local Heroes," but it wasn't clear at Thursday's opening whether that label is yet deserved. I suppose there is more than a little unsung heroism in the dogged work of artistic experimentation, but the three emerging dancemakers at Project Artaud Theater (ODC's home while its own building is closed for major reconstruction) still have considerable growing to do before saving the dance world in a single bound.

The problems with much of this slate, which repeats tonight, have mostly to do with music. Alex Ketley and Manuelito Biag are distinctive and exciting new voices steadily building their own physical languages, Ketley's more rooted in ballet, Biag's in José Limón-influenced modern dance. But in each of their world premieres, the movement dawdles on and on without any real attempt at musicality, or even anti-musicality.

Click here.

And my latest "So You Think You Can Dance" recap at Voice of Dance is here.

July 20, 2008 · 09:40 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Memo to the Bay Area Dance Community

I'll soon begin assembling the SF Chronicle's fall arts preview for dance. If you have a performance coming up between September and December, and you'd like me to consider it, please send the information to rachel at rachel howard dot com. Many thanks.

July 15, 2008 · 10:22 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

SYTYDC Top 12

My recap of this week's "So You Think You Can Dance," for those who are having trouble finding it, is right here.

I played hooky from ten days of crazy-intensive writing study in North Carolina and crashed the rec room of a smelly dorm to watch, the consolations of television never felt so keenly. I'm headed back to California tomorrow, and looking forward to more TV breaks with the Top 10 competitors.

July 12, 2008 · 10:15 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Summer Gig: So You Think You Can Dance

Not much dance writing happening for the Chronicle between now and mid-August. Though I miss reviewing, I'm making the most of the extra downtime to focus on fiction writing (and heading back to North Carolina to start the third semester of my MFA program at Warren Wilson College July 2-13).

Meanwhile, in the category of unexpected--and fun--summer gigs, the website Voice of Dance has tapped me to play armchair judge for the wildly popular TV show "So You Think You Can Dance." Every week I'll be recapping the Wednesday showdown--click here for my take on last week's top 16 competition. Surprised to see a dance critic more accustomed to analyzing the latest Mark Morris and rhapsodizing about Diana Vishneva writing about a TV show? Click here to read my season four-launching essay on why I'm not too sniffy to appreciate SYTYCD's hard-working and talented hopefuls, and here to read my thoughts on SYTYCD's "high culture"/"pop culture" crossover possibilities, published in the SF Chronicle last year.

Now if I only had Tivo . . .

June 28, 2008 · 03:43 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Ethnic Dance Fest--Other Half of the Review

I reviewed the SF Ethnic Dance Festival's weekend one for the Chronicle, but the review was a little shorter than I'd intended. Here are the extras:

UPSIDE: A panorama of cultures and styles in a fast-moving showcase.
DOWNSIDE: Total disorientation.
30th ANNIVERSARY BONUS: Almost all the music is live this year, with master musicians flown in from around the world.
AUDIENCE FAVORITE: OngDance Company
MY FAVORITE: Miriam Peretz in a shodiona (“dance of happiness”) from Uzbekistan/Tajikistan, flirting with two virtuoso musicians on the doira, a rattling handheld drum.
MOST ADORABLE: The sassy little girls of CPAA Arts Center tossing red handkerchiefs in their gymnastic New Year’s dance.

And check out some great photos of the festival.

UPDATE: After experimenting with the Upside/Downside bulletpoints and factoids, the Chronicle is going to be trying out many new ways of approaching reviews over the coming year. We're working to open up the conversation about the arts in the Bay Area. Watch for reviews that break the mold in format and approach during this summer and fall.

June 09, 2008 · 12:53 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Ethnic Dance Festival Turns 30

My story in Sunday's Chronicle:

" "Chicos, listos?" Zenon Barrón's voice calls out through a sweaty studio in the San Francisco Dance Center. "Última vez, última vez!"

Rattling drums. Plaintive flute. Echelons of men march solemnly, their leader leaping fiercely about them. A circle of women hold up their hands as if to blow conch shells and flap their arms like bats. Finally, the king chooses a queen.

For a few moments, dancing together, they are Mayan royalty, proud and unassailable. And then, the music over, they are ordinary people again, joking, laughing, gathering their things to leave rehearsal.
But Barrón is still serious.

"A lot of people say doing a Mayan dance must be a fad, like after the Mel Gibson movie ('Apocalypto'), " says the trim, broad-shouldered director of Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco. "But it's not like that. This is my culture, so I need to do the best I can to represent it well onstage."

The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival gives a spectacular reflection of the diversity in the Bay Area, from a Bharatanatyam group out of San Jose to a classical Cambodian dancer from Sonoma County. Hula, hip-hop, Hungarian, Haitian: If it exists in the world, it seems, you can see it at the festival. And now, with Barrón's "Las Cortes Mayas," you can see a dance that hasn't existed for centuries.
Barrón grew up in the southern Mexican mountain village of Guanajuato, learning indigenous dances from his parents. But he created the dances in "Las Cortes Mayas" himself, based on poses depicted on the ancient Mayan Bonampak murals, which Barrón studied for two years and is now bringing to life with movement also informed by ballet and contemporary dance.

Is it strictly traditional? Hardly. But the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival has been exploding perceptions of ethnic dance for three decades, and this year it's set to bust more boundaries than ever.
To mark its 30th anniversary, the festival is expanding to four weekends (beginning Saturday), with 36 dance companies. Fifteen will be showing world premieres, from a Korean shaman ritual to an Afro-Peruvian zapateo, and four of these are festival commissions. One of the marvels of the festival is that its talent is entirely local, but this year the lineup will pay homage to teachers and influences from beyond the bay. Fifty musicians and dancers are flying in, including a Filipino chieftain who has never before stepped foot outside his country, and some Mexican marimba masters."

Click here for the full story.

June 03, 2008 · 02:26 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Shaolin monks at Lines Ballet

UPDATE: Not until late yesterday evening did it come to my attention that there's a copy editing error in the review rendering a sentence in the second paragraph nonsensical. The sentence should read:" . . . propeller-legged jumps, lightning-fast punches, BACKFLIPS landed on the crown of the head."

Ah, daily journalism.

The Shaolin monks are back at Lines Ballet. My review in today's Chronicle:

"Usually the phrase "back by popular demand" is just so much marketing spin, but apparently the word really has gotten out about Lines Ballet's collaboration with Shaolin monks. This week's entire encore run of "Long River High Sky" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater is sold out, and Wednesday's opening-night audience was on its feet the moment the curtain fell.

Most of the cheers during the two-hour show went to the monks' more acrobatic kung fu feats: propeller-legged jumps, lightning-fast punches, landed on the crown of the head. But after one quartet exclusively by Lines' own exquisite dancers, an irrepressible lone enthusiast shouted "Bravo!," and more power to him. Because though the monks may be mesmerizing, they're far from carrying the show. The real marvel here is how choreographer Alonzo King brings these two art forms together with a shared sense of spiritual purpose that can't be faked or fabricated."

Click here for the full review, and here for my review from last year (which, frankly, is better written). And go here for some very cool pictures.

Finally, click here to see video from last year's show, which included a different cast of monks.

May 30, 2008 · 09:57 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Kathak Master in SF

Kathak master Birju Maharaj makes a rare U.S. appearance in SF on Sunday. My ditty in the Chronicle:

"With 15 pounds of bells on his ankles and sweat in his silver hair, Birju Maharaj stamps out ever more complex rhythms. Sometimes they sound uncannily like birds singing or rain falling. But always, just when you think you've lost the pattern, Maharaj brings it together on the first beat of the new cycle. When that happens, it's like suddenly seeing an image in a constellation of stars, or glimpsing divine design in the veins of a leaf: a spiritual experience.

"All the rhythms come from nature," Maharaj, the undisputed living master of Indian Kathak dance, explained by phone from his school in Delhi. "Nature surrounds us. The moon is dancing, the air is dancing. Dance is the movement of the universe. Rhythm is our heartbeat, until our last breath."

Few practitioners of Kathak - one of eight classical Indian dance forms - can make people see or hear that the way Maharaj can. It's no surprise that Kathak fans, and other lovers of Indian culture, will flock to the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre on Sunday for one of the 70-year-old guru's rare U.S. appearances.
Kathak is enjoying a resurgence these days with schools proliferating here and abroad. Maharaj, born into a family of legendary Kathak dancers, is largely responsible for that trend. "It's reached a point where certain dancers might try to deny this," said Anuradha Nag of San Jose, the producer of Sunday's concert and a disciple of Maharaj for 25 years. "But everybody is following in his footsteps."

With accompaniment by the virtuoso tabla player Zakir Hussain, Maharaj's solo performance will highlight Kathak's insanely musically complex game of one-upmanship between dancer and drummer, the swift turns and powerful stampings. But it will also showcase the subtler artistry that Maharaj is often credited with restoring."

Click here for the full preview.

May 29, 2008 · 06:34 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Paige Starling Sorvillo/blindsight at SFIAF

Catching up again. My review of Paige Starling Sorvillo's "thirty seven isolated events" in the Chronicle:

"Strange and wonderful how butoh, the post-World War II Japanese "dance of darkness," is spawning such a strong new generation of artists here in San Francisco. The latest to emerge is Paige Starling Sorvillo, and if you didn't know of her butoh background, you might not guess it immediately from "Thirty Seven Isolated Events," which her company Blindsight premiered at CounterPULSE over the weekend as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Sorvillo keeps butoh's methods - the existential intensity, the non-dancey, image-driven intentionality - and forgoes its stereotypical clawing hands and, as she aptly put it in a post-performance talk Friday, "gnarled faces." The results are not yet as startlingly original or metaphorically provocative as some of her contemporaries, like Shinichi Iova-Koga and his company inkBoat, or Ledoh and his Salt Farm collective. But they show a great deal of promise.

The strongest elements of "Thirty Seven Isolated Events," which continues this week, are the fully present performances. Tall, gamine Claire Willey gets the most stage time, along with punky, defiant Loren Robertson. In the work's most memorable section, Willey turns away from the audience and roils the incredible musculature of her naked back, reaching around to paw herself, while a live video feed of this is projected onto Robertson, clothing her in an artificial second skin. In the central section, a flailing Sorvillo calls out 37 "events" as Robertson and Willey enact them: "No. 8: You fall forward, taking me with you"; "18: Hide under the table"; "No. 22: This is where we hear our own artificial breathing"; "28: I cannot see my own hands."

The number of events refers to 37 degrees Celsius, the resting temperature of the human body. Tidy enough, but the metaphor doesn't feel as though it has anywhere to go. "

Click here for the full review.

May 29, 2008 · 06:27 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

"Speaking Chinese" at SFIAF

I really take no joy in having to write a review this negative. From yesterday's Chronicle:

"Was Andrew Wood, executive director of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, making disclaimers Thursday night? Introducing the dance-theater production "Speaking Chinese," Wood explained that the collaborators, some based in San Francisco, some in China, had been able to work in each other's presence only a handful of times. Nonetheless, he said, the performers were excited to share what they had and eager for audience feedback.

It sounded like the precurtain spiel for a work-in-progress, not a world premiere, and perhaps that's the kindest way of viewing this hourlong show, which repeats at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum tonight before touring in China. It isn't that "Speaking Chinese" is terribly offensive, it's just that there isn't much to it, despite a roster of collaborators that makes the show a poster child for the festival's goal of fostering international connections.

There's the Chinese Culture Center, local choreographer Kim Epifano and her Epiphany Productions, Shanghai producers Reckless Moments, and Beijing producer Honglan Studio. "Speaking Chinese" has its own composer (Zhu Jian'er), dramaturge (Barry Plews) and even its own interpreter (Hu He). Despite all that, this adaptation of Eileen Chang's 1943 novella "Love in a Fallen City" comes off as a series of tentative sketches that only hint at the richer story.

If you don't know Chang's book (and though it's inspired a movie and several plays, one should assume that the majority of the audience does not), you will be utterly lost by this string of bafflingly bland and choreographically thin duets. True, Epifano and team set themselves a challenge in using just two dancers, the lithe National Ballet of China star Hou Honglan and frequent Epiphany Productions performer C. Derrick Jones. But the tools of theater are many - voice-overs, props, backdrops, dramatic lighting - and though "Speaking Chinese" uses all of these in a modest way, none tell the average viewer that Honglan's Bai Liusu is a divorcee trapped by repressive conditions, or that Jones' Fan Liuyan is a playboy, or that part of their affair is happening in Hong Kong at the time of the Japanese attack and occupation. You'll be lucky even to catch the characters' names."

Click here for the full review.

May 25, 2008 · 04:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Washington Post on SF Ballet's New Works Festival

Sarah Kaufman's gloomy assessment is a must-read:

" "Finally, a real success!" exclaimed one patron on his way up the aisle at the War Memorial Opera House, where he had just seen the last of 10 world premieres performed in three days by the San Francisco Ballet. Wonderful for him that he was pleased, but I was merely weary. Too many bad ballets, too few steps forward.

The company didn't envision its ambitious New Works Festival, the centerpiece of the San Francisco Ballet's 75th-anniversary season, as a microcosm of what's wrong with the ballet world. But the fact that this large outlay of money, time and talent -- unprecedented in its scope -- produced more mediocrity than revelation points to a big problem for ballet. Self-renewal is not its strong suit. Ballet does well with the old and the familiar -- whether traditional story ballets such as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake," or their plotless offspring, the tighter, sexier undressed works of George Balanchine. This is largely what the ballet runs on these days. But in recent years, producing new masterpieces (not just new pieces) has become a challenge."

I don't agree with Kaufman's underlying cynicism (particularly her arch unveiling of the festival as a marketing play--why shouldn't it also be that?), but her piece reawakened me to a standard of what mainstream-press dance writing today could be. Hers is a level of reportage and analysis--and a level of wider cultural relevance--that could only be achieved with the benefit of weeks to mull over the festival's bigger implications. And it's done incisively, with a level head and without hyperbole. It's clearly not the kind of thinking that could be arrived at overnight.

I'm beginning to think I've valued knee-jerk passion--passion that tilts towards hyperbole--too much in dance writing lately, both my own and others. Alas, freelancing for the Chronicle, I'm often logistically unable to do the kind of deeper, longer form consideration Kaufman offers, alongside perhaps only Alastair Macaulay at the Times, and Joan Acocella at the New Yorker. But I thank Kaufman for providing an example to aspire towards.

May 14, 2008 · 10:58 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Live Jazz at Diablo Ballet

Catching up--my review in the Chronicle Monday:

"Friday night at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts, I ended up sitting next to a mother and her 10-year-old girl. The little girl liked ballet, and the mother regularly bought tickets for Diablo Ballet at her daughter's urging. San Francisco Ballet was too far to make it home by bedtime, and they were both quite happy with the professionalism of Diablo Ballet's dancers.

It was a useful reminder of what would be lost if Diablo Ballet dies. The family-friendly chamber troupe has survived a tough year after losing the financial backing of a major, longtime sponsor. Over the weekend, it closed a pared-down spring season with a program that looked like an ideal vehicle for bouncing back. "Jazz Fever" offered three new works by three in-house choreographers, with accompaniment by the Brett King Cosby Trio - the first time Diablo Ballet has had the luxury of live music in nearly a decade.

I'd hoped for three distinctive ballets, each with something to say, and maybe even a gem from Viktor Kabaniaev, the trio's most gifted dancemaker. In the end, all three choreographers seemed stymied by the unfamiliar musical forms of the atmospherically avant-garde '80s style jazz, mostly compositions by the Brett King Cosby Trio's own members. Each ballet noodled on to fill out the music, but without a more animating improvisatory spirit.

"Jazz Room," by Kabaniaev's brother Nikolai, was the most conventional in style, but also the most disciplined in structure. Frenetic stop-and-go solos for each of the four cast members framed a sultry duet between Jenna McClintock and Derek Sakakura, she falling backward into his strong arms and pretzeling her legs around his body into ecstatic lifts. If "Jazz Room" offered less than the role of a lifetime, you would never have known that watching McClintock (also a dancer with Oakland Ballet), who sculpted her part into a continuous dream of ravishing elegance."

Click here for the rest of the review.

May 14, 2008 · 09:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Smuin and Gershwin

Catching up--my review of Smuin Ballet in yesterday's Chronicle:

"Michael Smuin was a ballet showman whose slick dances his fans loved, and plenty of critics - this one included - loved to hate. But watching his Smuin Ballet carry on after the gleefully populist choreographer's sudden death one year ago, it's hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Perhaps that's largely because Smuin's 2001 "Dancin' With Gershwin," which opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday, is one of his tamer packages. It's inoffensive, undemanding entertainment that will keep Smuin devotees happy - and likely win some new fans.

This suite of ditties set to George and Ira Gershwin is not as theatrically outre or teasingly testing of the boundaries of good taste as some Smuin creations. True, there's a blond-wigged Marilyn Monroe (Robin Cornwell) shaking her moneymaker to Monroe's rendition of "Do It Again" as men with Vegas feather fans tremble with lust - a classic Smuin moment. And true, "Dancin' With Gershwin" is suffused with Smuin's love of razzle-dazzle showbiz and crazy cartoon effects. In "Swanee," to a recording by Al Jolson, the dancers wear white gloves and spats; their shirt cuffs suddenly glow in the dark, flying like birds as Jolson whistles. In "Ain't Necessarily So" (Cher's version), lithe Kevin Yee-Chan slinks through acrobatics while dancers in larger-than-life shadow projections act out the Biblical episodes behind him. There's full-company tap dancing and old-fashioned cane twirling. In one of the less-inspired gimmicks, to "By Strauss," two women in French maid outfits get twirled around on rolling office chairs.

But the bulk of "Dancin' With Gershwin" consists of pleasant, mostly indistinct, romantic pas de deux. In "I've Got a Crush on You," the man in a suit takes off her hat and turns out to be a woman - a vintage Smuin twist. "Someone to Watch Over Me" is set in the tropics, with Ethan White in a Tommy Bahama-style shirt partnering light-as-air Jessica Touchet. In "They Can't Take that Away from Me," Matthew Linzer moves through a ballroom dream with Cornwell, and in "The Man I Love," sultry Erin Yarbrough-Stewart lavishes herself upon a bare-chested Aaron Thayer.

I can't say I found either the steps or the emotional arc of any of these duets to be terribly notable, but I'm also not sure that matters. "

Click here for the rest.

May 06, 2008 · 12:37 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

New "Swan" at SF Ballet in 2009

My write-up of the San Francisco Ballet 2009 season in today's Chronicle:

"San Francisco Ballet will unveil an all-new production of "Swan Lake" by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson in 2009 as the centerpiece of its 76th season, along with a world premiere by resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov, the return of George Balanchine's full-evening "Jewels" and a program dedicated to works by reigning modern dance master Mark Morris.

The new "Swan Lake" marks an investment in the classics after the forward-looking New Works Festival that crowned this year's 75th anniversary. Six of the 10 ballets unveiled during that festival will return next year, including Christopher Wheeldon's intimate "Within the Golden Hour" and Jorma Elo's blood-pumping "Double Evil."

But Tomasson said the time was right, 20 years after his first staging of "Swan Lake" for the Ballet, to revisit the Tchaikovsky/Petipa classic with subtle new ideas and a larger budget. The sets and costumes will be designed by Jonathan Fensom, acclaimed for his work on Broadway but doing his first work for ballet. The production will put no major revisionist twists on the iconic story, but will use video projections and other multimedia effects to create more theatrical spectacle than the old staging.

On the contemporary side, the all-Morris program marks 15 years of his association with San Francisco Ballet with three works created for its dancers: the intricate and Baroque "A Garden"; the daffy "Sandpaper Ballet"; and "Joyride," to commissioned music by John Adams, which premiered at the New Works Festival. The other New Works Festival ballets returning are Possokhov's "Fusion," Stanton Welch's "Naked" and Val Caniparoli's "Ibsen's House." "

Click here for the rest, including Tudor, Robbins, and Forsythe on tap.

And click here for a podcast interview with Helgi Tomasson. I say about five words total over the course of it. Most of the interviewing you'll hear is deputy arts and entertainment editor Leba Hertz.

May 06, 2008 · 12:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

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 sometimes - especially in the sensational debut of the new Russian-trained principal Maria Kochetkova - both at once.

Kochetkova, a 23-year-old recruit from the English National Ballet, is tiny and light, a sparrow. In the closing Grand Pas de Deux, she seemed hardly to touch the floor, and when she leapt toward her Nutcracker cavalier, Davit Karapetyan, for a diabolically difficult shoulder-sit, she landed as though she'd simply flitted to a fresh branch."

Click here for the full review.

And just when you thought nothing more could be said about Mark Morris's "The Hard Nut"--well, at least I tried:

"There are three certainties in American life - death, taxes and "Nutcracker" - and more than 15 years ago, Mark Morris took the sting out of one of them, replacing sugarplum sweetness with a raunchy 1960s suburbia house party, Dairy Queen-hatted snowflakes and friskily fertile, splay-legged waltzing flowers. No wonder then that "The Hard Nut," which had premiered in Brussels, quickly became a hit and a nearly annual ritual in this country. But as the years pile on and "The Hard Nut" becomes more familiar, the question builds: Can an antidote to the "Nutcracker" as cod-liver-oil tradition avoid becoming cod liver oil itself?

The answer, it turned out Friday at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, is yes. The Mark Morris Dance Group is no stranger to Cal Performances in this production - they've danced it here for eight of the past 11 years - and many in the opening-night audience (including this critic) had seen it three or more times. Yet the laughs were fresh and frequent. If, like many arts fans in the Bay Area, you've been there, done that and wonder if it's worth seeing "The Hard Nut" again before the run ends Sunday, let my smile-weary face answer affirmative.

The reasons why the show still tickles might seem obvious. Does anyone need it explained why a Christmas cocktail hour that features a polyester tree, a TV fireplace and a teenage daughter who can hardly keep from dry-humping the drunken guests is funny? Surely no other choreographer has mined Tchaikovsky for as many punch lines, and they speak for themselves, from the groovy Afro with hair pick firmly ensconced to the sideburn-laden hipster (Morris himself in an often scene-stealing walk-on) who returns from the loo with toilet paper attached to his pimp-height heels.

But the real reason "The Hard Nut" never loses its laughs runs far deeper than sight gags, and it has to do with Morris' musicality. In "The Hard Nut," his response to Tchaikovsky is often so simple that it's deep. Almost every movement is both parody and tribute to the score. I can't tell you why the way the waltzing flowers slump is funny - to understand that, you would have to see it, and the way the posture both captures and mocks the brooding swirl of emotions in the strident chords. I can't fully explain why Morris' most common comedic tack, note-for-note mockery, is a crackup: To get it you would have to see Craig Biesecker, as Drosselmeier, bouncing the Nutcracker doll dutifully along to every lilt in Tchaikovsky's melody, affectionately revealing its near-inanity."

Click herefor the full Chronicle review.

December 18, 2007 · 11:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed Margaret Jenkins' newest for today's Chronicle:

"In the inevitable ebb and flow of a long, rich dance-making career, Margaret Jenkins is reaching high tide. She just finished a piece to premiere as part of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival in the spring, and 2006's blockbuster "A Slipping Glimpse" - created in collaboration with dancers in India - recently wrapped an acclaimed nationwide tour.

With the grande dame of Bay Area modern dance so busy, perhaps no one should feel surprised that "Other Suns," unveiled Thursday at Project Artaud Theater, feels like a minor event. It isn't that Jenkins' latest, which the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company continues performing through Sunday, seems rushed into the world or unfinished. It just might take a while to see quite where "Other Suns" fits within the Jenkins oeuvre.

Partly, that's intentional. Clocking in at only 45 intermissionless minutes, "Other Suns" is billed as the first part of a trilogy to be completed in 2009. The inspiration, Jenkins says, arose from a past residency in China, and parts 2 and 3 will be created with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company of Guangzhou. As with most Jenkins works, though, "Other Suns" is so abstract that the specific cultural reference seems incidental. Aside from the Asian influences in the music of Bun-Ching Lam (the rest of the soundtrack is by Paul Dresher), there is nothing recognizably Chinese here.

Instead, this will probably be remembered as "the Jenkins piece with the water," though water is just one element of the arresting visual design by longtime Jenkins collaborator Alexander V. Nichols. "

Click here to read the full review.

December 08, 2007 · 01:45 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Memo to the Bay Area Dance Community

It's that time of year when the Chronicle asks me to look back on 2007, and ahead to 2008. I'm just starting to assemble a "forecast" of dance events in the first half of 2008, to appear in the Chronicle's Pink section next month. If you've got a dance event coming up and you'd like me to consider it for this preview, please send me details. What, when, where, and a quick description of what you're up to will suffice. Please email information to rachel at rachel howard dot com within the next week and a half. Thanks very much!

December 04, 2007 · 05:20 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The Chronicle asked me to check out the live tour of the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance?" Friday, and I gamely obliged:

"It was an astonishing sight Friday: Oakland's Oracle Arena packed with screaming fans who had shelled out handsomely to see not the latest Disney tween machine or some overproduced pop starlet, but dance. Just dance.

Or rather, the U.S. tour of "So You Think You Can Dance," the Fox show that, unlike "Dancing With the Stars," boasts not a single celebrity yet regularly draws upward of 10 million viewers. The show that, alongside the inferior parade of ballroom B-listers on "Dancing With the Stars," is being embraced by anyone who cares about dance - sometimes reluctantly, sometimes excitedly - as marking a new Golden Age of dance in popular culture, and a great hope for drawing new audiences to dance as high culture, too.

And so, among the unceasing stage fog, the preshow "American Idol" alumni videos, the $4 Pepsis, and, oh yes, plenty of truly impressive dancing Friday from Season 3's top 10 finalists plus a few special guests, the question remained: Is "So You Think You Can Dance" God's gift to the dance world?

One thing you couldn't question Friday was whether these are talented dancers. The high points of last season's competition look even more impressive live: Sabra Johnson and Neil Haskell cold-staring through the table dance set to the Eurythmics; Pasha Kovalev and Sara VonGillern lightly quickstepping to Fat Boy Slim; Pasha and Lauren Gottlieb popping their way through that fabulous Shane Sparks robot routine; Danny Tidwell doing absolutely anything.

Sure, ragged jumps, circus extensions and melodramatic flailing sometimes count more than control and line. And sure, a few contestants have allowed themselves to become trick ponies, especially Bay Area local Shauna Noland, who whipped out her patented turn-with-one-leg-overhead at every opportunity. But whether it was Dominic Sandoval spinning through B-boy head spins or Anya Garnis flinging herself across the stage in yet another Mia Michaels three-hankie special, these are dancers who move with precision and professionalism, not slickly produced reality TV personalities.

As to whether they might inspire crowds to check out less commercial choreography, a highly unscientific crowd poll yields uncertain results."

Click here to read the rest.

November 26, 2007 · 04:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Pina, Sean Dorsey, and Hip Hop

The Chronicle had me experiment with a new form over the weekend, writing three reviews in one. One unfortunate consequence is the story's generic headline, and perhaps there are others--I'd like to hear what you think of this approach. Doing three-in-one was the only way I could get the paper to fit a Pina Bausch review into its pages, believe it or not. My relentless advocacy and my admission to less than absolute knowledge of the Bausch ouevre did not win favor with this indignant Chronicle reader. Nevertheless, thoughts on Bausch:

"To hear the buzz, you might have thought the messiah was returning to UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Friday, and, to her followers, that may not be too exalted a description for Pina Bausch, whose Tanztheater Wuppertal made its first Cal Performances appearance in eight years. Bausch is a choreographer so iconic that people in the dance world tend to forget that other reasonably culturally educated people may not know who she is. And for more than 25 years she's been a choreographer so influential that to see her work is also to recognize the legions of emulators and imitators she's spawned.

"This is just absurd!" cried the woman behind me as dancer Helena Pikon announced, "This is a bear, I am naked, we are in the forest, and it's a little dark," then threw a fur rug over a hunched man and rode off on his back. Um, yes. Absurdity, surrealism, existential non sequiturs - Bausch didn't introduce these elements to dance, but she combined them in her patented way.

I am not a longtime member of the cult of Bausch; I can't tell you how "Ten Chi," created in 2004, stacks up to her mud-heaped "Rite of Spring" (though I did enjoy it less than her carnation-carpeted "Nelken"). I can tell you that "Ten Chi," supported by a consortium of Japanese cultural organizations, is part of a series of dances inspired by place, and that the Japanese references come in the middle: Nazareth Panadero turning a compendium of words like "Fuji" and "sushi" into baby babble; Azusa Seyama running around snapping pictures like a Japanese tourist; two men taking fierce samurai stances only to sit when chairs are placed beneath them.

Whether this captures any essence of Japan is dubious. It all seems raw material rather than subject matter. If there is a staple subject, it's Bausch's usual - love and sexual manipulation - often rendered unforgettably."

(More if you click here.)

And on Sean Dorsey:

"Sometimes deeply transgressive material is most powerful when it's channeled into non-transgressive, almost conventional form, and that's the case with San Francisco's Sean Dorsey. Dorsey is gender-ambiguous, tilting toward male, and uses the pronoun "he." His dances are usually about the female-to-male transgender experience, as were the two premieres on "Lost/Found" Saturday at Dance Mission Theater, rounded out with storytelling by writers Kirk Read and Max Wolf Valerio.

Dorsey tells stories too, in a plainspoken, warmhearted style. He then records them and lays them over a collage of sweet, warm-hearted music. His further brilliance is to bring these stories to life with an uncanny knack for matching movement to the rhythms of speech and planting simple but pungent gestures that have the innocent charm of a parent reading to you at bedtime."

Again, more if you click.

And finally the SF Hip Hop Dance Fest:

"Meanwhile, across town, bass was pounding through the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, and the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest was pumping. Hot tip for 2008's 10th anniversary edition, which founder and inspired producer Micaya is already cooking: The earlier you arrive, the more you get to watch of the opening freestyle, and the more you realize that the soul of hip-hop is wit.

Every group on Program A had its distinctive style: from the Chicago FootworKINGz with its mad, fast steps to Oakland's Neopolitan convincingly merging Afro-Caribbean forms with funk. New York's Mop Top staged a "Wizard of Oz" with master of popping Buddha Stretch as the Tin Man, and Colorado's Elements of Motion won my vote for overall excellence, marrying unreal B-boy head spins to consummate theatricality."

(Yet again, a smidge more if you click.)

And I've just noticed that the editing cut off my last sentence and added some random text below. Chalk it up to attempting an awkward solution to that ever-worsening problem of finding column inches for dance.

Please, if you'd like to comment--I've had to disable comments on this site to avert spam. But you can comment away on the Chronicle link. Good or bad, go for it.

November 20, 2007 · 02:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of American Ballet Theatre at Berkeley:

"There was a moment at American Ballet Theatre on Wednesday night when everything changed. Herman Cornejo came tearing out of stage left at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall and launched himself so high you wondered if he'd used an invisible vaulting pole. It was the kind of jump in which the dancer seems to have created a ladder out of air.

The "Corsaire" pas de deux that followed was an intoxicating combination of recklessness and control. Cornejo's pirouettes torpedoed right through the moment where most dancers give themselves a little break with the waltz step known as balancé. He threw himself into the next set of pirouettes, threatening to veer across the stage like a Tasmanian devil - but when he centered himself by turn four or five, he looked as if he'd known what he was doing all along. Cornejo is small and muscled - he has a body like a Corvette. And watching him vroom through "Le Corsaire" was like watching an expert race car driver in the Grand Prix. No wonder his partner, Xiomara Reyes, no slouch in the technical department herself, looked on top of the world riding high aloft in his hands.

It was one of the more remarkable dance moments I've seen, all the more so because it created such a clear dividing line during a very odd show. The first half of this first of two repertory programs (Program B opens tonight) was so lackluster - almost like a graduation recital with the world's most precocious students - that you wondered what had happened to American Ballet Theatre in the six years since it last visited Cal Performances. The second half was so scintillating that you wondered how the Bay Area has lived without seeing this troupe for so long."

Click here to read the rest.

November 10, 2007 · 10:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My SF Chronicle review of the Faustin Linyekula:

"Pain is all-consuming, but the intensity doesn't always translate. Ken Foster, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has brought us a steady series of African contemporary dance companies in recent years, and in each of them you see the same image: piles of bodies. But more than that, you feel the same disconnect.

You know the image must be powerful to artists from these war-torn countries; you feel a twinge of guilt because it isn't instantly powerful to you. But it's just a pile of bodies, and you don't share the experiences behind it. There's a bridge between you and the image that the artist, immersed in how much it means to him, hasn't led you across.

At first, Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula's "Festival of Lies" looks as if it's going to fall into this trap, despite some novel attempts to counteract the distance. Billed as part installation, part dance performance, the show (continuing with an expanded six-hour rendition tonight) turns the YBCA's Forum into a party, with free African food, a bar and a grooving band, Soukous Connection, from Oakland.

Gradually, Linyekula and the three members of his company, Les Studios Kabako, take over the dance floor as the crowd settles into the tables and chairs placed on two sides. It's a Brechtian removal of that theatrical "fourth wall," and the practical effect works: You feel closer to these performers, immersed in the environment. Thursday a healthy crowd of attendees even got up and danced during the intermission.

And yet, for the first half, a disconnect persists. "

Click here to read the rest of the review.

November 10, 2007 · 10:37 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Lines Ballet at 25

My review of the Lines Ballet fall season, in Monday's Chronicle:

"Lines Ballet threw itself a big party Friday night, and for a big occasion. The troupe is officially 25 years old, but longevity is just the start of what's worth celebrating.

In a quarter-century, Alonzo King's small, sleek company has risen from playing tiny theaters to touring the country and now the world; worked with a dazzling array of musical collaborators hailing from Morocco, Central Africa, Japan and beyond; and essentially, through these nine dancers' twisted, tangled movement and King's earnest yet urgent spirituality, broken the mold of what ballet can be. With its bustling dance center, Lines has also - alongside San Francisco Ballet and ODC/Dance - become one of the hubs of the San Francisco dance scene, one of its great successes and its magnets.

Rest assured all this was marked with due pomp at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: fancy dinner, sparkling dresses, Champagne. And yet, if at some galas festivity trumps substance, that just isn't possible with King in charge. The man does not know how to be frivolous. There were luxuries aplenty Friday: fabulous live music and a guest appearance by former San Francisco Ballet ballerina Muriel Maffre. But the greatest richness was the dancing: purposeful, powerful and luscious. And that's a richness that should only deepen as the home season continues through Sunday.

There are two King world premieres on this program. "Irregular Pearl," to a smattering of Baroque composers with music from the pit by members of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, has moments but will probably not go down as King at his best. On the other hand, "Rasa" is extraordinary. The music for "Rasa" is a mesmerizing commissioned score by the tabla master Zakir Hussain. The heart of "Rasa" is an epic pas de deux for two of King's most touching dancers, Laurel Keen and Brett Conway.

King's finest duets have an arresting way of moving between superhuman ballet curvatures and all-too-human postures of vulnerability, and that is the case with "Rasa," but taken to new heights. As Hussain's score floats through mournful cries and atmospheric effects that sound like footfalls in the distance, Keen and Conway cling and entwine. She cradles his calf and foot; he straightens his leg to eject. She climbs back up his legs; they roll pressed to one another all the way across the stage. Romantic desperation this is not - some solemn, struggling communion is happening."

Click here for the full review.

November 04, 2007 · 09:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Miami City Ballet: Much More Than Balanchine

I was mightily impressed by Miami City Ballet at Cal Performances:

"There's long been plenty of buzz about Miami City Ballet, but usually it follows a certain story line. The company's artistic director, Edward Villella, is a dance icon replete with a famous, stereotype-busting life tale: scrappy Brooklyn boxer becomes George Balanchine's greatest male star, known for his athleticism and - as his own program bio now puts it - "virility."

Then in 1985, two years after Balanchine's death, Villella goes to Florida and starts building a new company. At a time when many of the leading interpreters of Balanchine's masterpieces are becoming persona non grata at Balanchine's own New York City Ballet, Villella brings in those shunned greats, like Suzanne Farrell, to maintain the flame by coaching in Miami. Thus a reputation is born: Though Miami City Ballet might not be quite a world-class company, it's the place to see Balanchine done with rare spirit.

Turns out this is only half the story. It was no surprise Friday to see the Miamians deliver Balanchine's stunning milestone of modernism, "Agon," with verve and bite. Perhaps it should have also been no surprise to discover that the troupe's verve extends well beyond Balanchine.

The bookends of this program were two hugely contrasting Twyla Tharp ballets, part of the Cal Performances salute to Tharp that continues next week with a visit from American Ballet Theatre, also at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. Tharp's relentless invention is thrill enough, but the real spectacle was the Miami City Ballet's nonstop energy and unfailing clarity. If this isn't world-class dancing, I don't know what is."

The rest of the review is here.

October 28, 2007 · 09:41 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Lines Ballet's Silver Anniversary

Alonzo King's Lines Ballet is turning 25. My story for this Sunday's Chronicle:

"Alonzo King motions to the pianist to cut the music, then steps to the center of a musty Market Street studio.

"I am not limited," he says in a soft but strident voice. "Get that in your head! I am not a victim of habit."

Two dozen sweaty dancers stare as King gathers the fingers of his right hand and draws them in front of his face, down his broad, thick chest, toward his heart.

"You're not living in the moment," he says. "How do you make new what you are going to do with the rest of your life? This is huge!"

The room is motionless.

"If any of you are in relationships, which you are - with yourself, with your art ..."
King's enormous, curly-lashed eyes flutter wide.

"You want to be what?"

Heads nod, and King throws his long arms open.

"A galaxy!"

Is this a ballet class or a spiritual-improvement seminar?

Technically, this is daily practice for the students of the Lines Ballet Ensemble and Training Program, a school for serious teenagers drawn to King and his demanding teaching style as well as to the sleek, sculpted beauty of his company, Lines Ballet.

But as always with King, the physical is the vehicle to the transcendent.

"Line, circle, cross," he says after class, pausing in the middle of a hasty lunch of a ham sandwich and some chocolate truffles to make classical ballet shapes with his arms. "That means horizon, sun, crucifix."

He takes the fifth position en bas, arms rounded low.

"This has to be the sun. It's radiance from that inner world. Not fake, not playing at ballet."

He sits in his office on the third floor of Lines' bustling San Francisco Dance Center at Seventh and Market streets in San Francisco, where his nine-member troupe rehearses, and where every month more than 800 students take classes in everything from hip-hop to flamenco. On King's desk sits a framed portrait of Paramahansa Yogananda, whose "Autobiography of a Yogi" serves as King's constant inspiration. On the other side of a locked door are the administrative offices of Lines Ballet, the company King founded, along with two die-hard believers in his artistic gifts, 25 years ago.

The changes that quarter century have brought are astonishing: Lines is now internationally renowned, touring Europe yearly, dancing two home seasons annually at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and offering a bachelor of fine arts degree through Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

King's style, so nascent 25 years ago, is now fully formed and instantly recognizable: classical, yet tangled and twisted, exquisitely weird shapes melting into vulnerable human gestures. He's worked with a dazzling list of musical collaborators, from saxophone master Pharoah Sanders to a tribe of Pygmies from the African rain forest, and has created works for such companies as the Frankfurt Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His troupe is one of the great successes of the San Francisco dance scene, and one of its greatest anchors.

But King doesn't dwell on all that, except to say that "those 25 years passed like a blink of the eye" and "the work has just gotten deeper."

He doesn't have time to revel in past glories.

Lines' silver anniversary season, opening Friday, will present two new King ballets - one set to Baroque music and featuring live musicians from the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the other to a new score by Zakir Hussain, to be played by the tabla master."

Click here for the full story.

October 26, 2007 · 12:01 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Oakland Ballet Reborn

My review in today's Chronicle:

" "Welcome back, Oakland Ballet!" a man called during the standing ovation at the Paramount Theatre on Saturday. Onstage stood the city's native son, Ronn Guidi, 72 years old, beaming after an unlikely resurrection. It was hard to know what was more heartwarming: that ballet was back in Oakland, or that Oakland Ballet was back in the world.

Guidi tested the waters for a comeback with performances of his "Nutcracker" last year, but Saturday's two shows marked the inauguration of his reborn Oakland Ballet Company, and the first repertory program staged under his direction since his sudden retirement in 1998. This was a well-chosen, eagerly danced selection showcasing the warmth and humanity that brought Oakland Ballet such unlikely international repute in the 1980s and '90s, when Guidi hit his stride reviving rare Ballets Russes masterpieces and Americana classics. The show also drove home how much was lost while the old Oakland Ballet - which shut its doors in 2005 - foundered under Guidi's successor, Karen Brown.
Saturday's matinee was class all the way, from the live music by the Oakland East Bay Orchestra to the thoughtful program notes. And the most encouraging sign was that these 23 dancers clearly knew what - and whom - they were dancing for.

Take Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 "Afternoon of a Faun," one of those lost masterpieces with which Guidi built the Oakland Ballet's name. It was good to see the curtain rise on Leon Bakst's lush, gorgeous backdrop (repainted by Ron Steger) and Greek-inspired costumes. It was even better to see Ethan White as the Faun and Jenna McClintock as the Nymph invest the revolutionarily spare choreography with its full eroticism, saying so much with a stare or a tilt of the chin while the Debussy score swirled and swelled. When White returned to his Faun's nest with the Nymph's scarf, the clarity of his arching back and gasping mouth left little doubt just what kind of climax (ahem) Nijinsky meant to suggest.

White, moonlighting from Smuin Ballet, has never danced better, and his performances say much about what Guidi does best. Under him, the Oakland Ballet found its niche not through technical virtuosity, but through theatricality, passion and heart."

Click here for the full review.

October 22, 2007 · 12:56 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of Bill T. Jones' "Chapel/Chapter" for the Chronicle:

" "I have to get out of here," a man said as he fled Bill T. Jones' "Chapel/Chapter" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday. Soon, another person slipped out, then another. "It's too disturbing," a woman whispered to her friend.

There are things we don't want to see, but ought to. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's YBCA engagement, running through Sunday, is one of them. An icon of American dance since the 1980s, Jones is no stranger to walkouts, but Thursday's were different.

There is no political provocation in "Chapel/Chapter," no tackling the alarmist issue of the day, as Jones has done with everything from AIDS to the Iraq war. "Chapel/Chapter" is about murder, about death both natural and unnatural, or whether the distinction even exists, about the evil and the need for redemption within us. It is not about the prison system or justice - its concerns are dark ones from the deepest corners of the soul.

Proximity is part of its horror. Created for a small Harlem performance space last December, "Chapel/Chapter" is staged in the YBCA's Forum. Blood red curtains frame a square filled with a shape like a cathedral window. (The set design is by Bjorn G. Amelan.) Pews sit on one end, and the audience on all sides.

As it begins to tour nationally, "Chapel/Chapter" is also being adapted for proscenium stages, but up close is the way to see it, though this will not be pleasant. It brings you face-to-face with the murder of a family: mother, father, children; tied, strangled, asphyxiated. This is re-enacted by the dancers (and nimble Erick Montes as the family dog) in two ways. First, brutally, with the murderer describing his actions to an interrogator in a cool, collected tone. Later the murder is replayed more like a series of biblical tableaux, with Alicia Hall Moran singing that same gruesome account in a piercing clear chant, like a High Catholic mass."

Later in the review, I could not help but mention that "Chapel/Chapter" struck me particularly hard:

"Violent crime and incarceration are things Jones must know about intimately through his sister Rhodessa, who leads the Medea Project, which stages theater by imprisoned women. In full critical disclosure, murder is something I also know intimately, having woken up one night at age 10 to find my father slain in an unsolved crime nearly as grisly as those in "Chapel/Chapter." Whoever the murderer is, I would wish transcendence and redemption for that person as much as any other.

"Chapel/Chapter" made me think on this, but in a new way, because of its refusal to offer anything remotely redeeming or humanizing about the murderers. It left me with the awful feeling of having become the murderer, and it left me feeling the holy had become dark rather than the dark holy. It left me with questions only a second viewing could help answer, and that is certainly one sign of art worth wrangling with, whether or not you finally embrace the answers you find."

Click here for the full review.

October 19, 2007 · 10:12 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up: I reviewed LEVYdance for Tuesday's Chronicle:

"LEVYdance has the appeal of youth: fresh-faced, chiseled dancers with the urban cool of club kids, sexiness infused with smarts and a young choreographer, Benjamin Levy, worth getting excited about.
His style makes a drama out of anatomical chain reactions, energy zipping from joint to joint like an electrical current. And he knows how to create an emotional arc. In his 2002 duet, "Falling After Too," two men manipulate each other's knees, shoulders and hips with relentlessly deflective intimacy. When at last they knock chests but their arms flail past each other, unable to hug, you feel the oomph of that tragedy like a statement of the human condition.

Small wonder, then, that Bay Area dance watchers have been waiting for Levy to break out in a big way. His company's fifth annual home performances on Friday and Saturday seemed designed to do it. The crowning premiere "Bone Lines" had all the trappings of the next big step: a bigger-than-usual venue at the Jewish Community Center's Kanbar Hall, costumes by haute couture designer Colleen Quen, set by sculptor Rick Lee and a commissioned score by Keeril Makan recorded by the Kronos Quartet.

But this proved a case of getting too much too fast. Levy's solemn dance for four looked overwhelmed by all these elements, with movement serving merely as glue to keep it all together."

Click here for the full review.

October 19, 2007 · 09:53 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of Julie Kavanagh's new Nureyev biography, appearing this Sunday in the SF Chronicle's book review:

"Ballet biographies are getting raunchy: Meredith Daneman's insightful 2004 portrait of that bastion of British dignity, Margot Fonteyn, taught me more than I ever expected to learn about the great dancer's Kegel muscles, and Julie Kavanagh's 1997 study of choreographer Frederick Ashton hardly shied from exploring his more profane inspirations. Now Kavanagh is back with a revealing 782-page tome on that most mega of ballet stars, Rudolph Nureyev. But one can hardly blush at its sexual descriptiveness. It was, after all, not only technical feats but ballet as a channel for that wild, amorphous sensuality that fueled Rudimania for decades after his headline-making 1961 defection, that had women and men alike sleeping on sidewalks for tickets to his performances, that enthralled everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Mick Jagger. And Nureyev himself never hesitated to boast about his exploits, claiming (probably falsely) to have impregnated several ballerinas. You can imagine Nureyev looking on from the afterlife with that mischievous smirk of his as you read Kavanagh's dishy, detailed treatment, for he emerges as a prodigious and insatiable lover.

But there is much more than bedroom gossip to smile about, because Kavanagh, trained from childhood in ballet, knows the art. "Nureyev: The Life" earns the definitive article of its subtitle, weaving deftly together, for instance, the difference between the Vaganova and Bournonville schools of ballet training, and the torrid passion between Nureyev and the famed Danish star Erik Bruhn. From the age of 7, when his mother smuggled him into a ballet performance in their provincial Bashkirian town of Ufa, Nureyev knew dancing was his life; after his exhausting dramas with Bruhn, he even swore off committed relationships in servitude to his career. That didn't end his offstage adventures, from being arrested at a Haight-Ashbury weed party in the 1960s to trashing film director Franco Zeffirelli's mansion in the 1980s. But in Kavanagh's hands what happened behind the curtain becomes illumination for the mesmerizing spectacle that Nureyev created in front of it."

Skipping down, the best quality of the biography is this:

"If Nureyev was later widely known to pick up hustlers, he made love with mostly one person, and that was himself. He emerges on these pages as a raging narcissist, shamelessly using fans and friends and casting them aside if they make any emotional demands in return, living only for the glory of performing and therefore dancing embarrassingly beyond his prime. But narcissists are often supremely charming and charismatic, and that is certainly the case with Nureyev in Kavanagh's portrayal. She not only tells us about the many admirers who became Nureyev's surrogate families after his defection left him homeless and motherless; she also makes us see why they loved him, because you can feel in her prose that she loves him, too."

Click here for the rest of the review.

October 12, 2007 · 12:38 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed the Smuin Ballet for today's Chronicle:

"Death privileges the living. Had Michael Smuin survived the heart attack that felled him during company class in April, he would be incensed to see me reviewing the latest Smuin Ballet show. Never a darling with the critics, Smuin was happy to return the disdain, but he and I were a special case. As a young dance writer itching for a nemesis, I was only too pleased to sneer at his populism. I hope if he could read these words he would also take satisfaction in seeing me apologize for my tone.

I hope too that he'd be happy to know the Smuin Ballet program that opened Friday and continues this week at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre may be an ideal representation of his legacy. It proves why thousands of fans sell out his company's engagements, and why reviewers routinely harped on his unsubtle ways. It also proves that to fault Smuin's choreography for lacking nuance and sophistication is to miss the point."

Click here for the full review.

October 09, 2007 · 10:00 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I wish I could say I was more excited about the Joffrey Ballet program that repeats today at Cal Performances. My review in today's Chronicle:

"It's less than two weeks since the news hit, and there in the program Thursday night was his name: Ashley Wheater, artistic director, Joffrey Ballet. A visit from the Joffrey is always notable - the Chicago troupe is rarely seen in the Bay Area, and hasn't played UC Berkeley's Cal Performances in decades - but the fresh appointment of Wheater, ballet master and assistant to the artistic director at San Francisco Ballet, made it something more.

This was a chance to check out what he'd be inheriting: an energetic and spunky 51-year-old company known for its richly diverse repertory and a penchant for breaking rules. Unfortunately, the rules being broken in the program continuing tonight are circa 1973. And although rule breaking can be timeless - think Balanchine's 1928 "Apollo," as fresh now as the day he made it - everything on view at Zellerbach Hall looks dated and stale.

That's not these capable dancers' fault. With American Ballet Theatre and Miami City Ballet also visiting soon, and all dancing Twyla Tharp, Cal Performances decided to build something of a festival around her work. Alas, "Deuce Coupe" is one Tharp dance I'd rather read about in the history books than see.
A sensation in the '70s, it was the first "crossover" ballet by a modern dance choreographer, setting its 15 dancers in little halter dresses and "Saturday Night Fever"-issue pants shimmying to a Beach Boys medley with typical Tharpian attention deficit.

To underscore its then-eyebrow-raising street cred, there's a backdrop of spray-painted graffiti.

There's also a lone soloist (Heather Aagard) in silver dancing classroom ballet steps, a prissy visitor from the other side of that modern dance/ballet Berlin Wall. Perhaps this could all come off as winking good fun (as Tharp's "The Golden Section" does when Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs it). But the Joffrey dancers don't seem to have their heart in this. The delectable wit of Tharpian phrasing is missing, along with the slouchily virtuosic insouciance. Only Valerie Robin in her sultry "Got to Know the Woman" solo gets in the spirit."

Click here for the full review.

October 06, 2007 · 10:22 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My latest dance review, in today's Chronicle:

"f you've never heard of the North Indian classical dance form Kathak, San Francisco's Pandit Chitresh Das has one word for you: rhythm. As in, bring-the-house-down, feel-it-in-your-bones rhythm.

Two years ago, on his never-ending quest to take Kathak to the American masses, the 62-year-old Das teamed with tap dance phenom Jason Samuels Smith for a cross-cultural conversation. In "India Jazz Progressions," unveiled Friday at the Cowell Theater before a national tour, he's brought more voices along for the ride. Watch out, Savion Glover; you may have "Da Funk," but you don't have Chitresh Das.

No matter that one form uses five pounds of ankle bells and the other metal taps; no matter that one evolved centuries ago in the Mughal palaces, the other much more recently on the streets of New York. Das brings East and West together and lets them talk straight. At stage left stands the jazz ensemble - drums, bass, piano. At stage right, the Indian musicians - tabla, sitar, sarangi. When their voices first begin to mix, it is strange talk indeed.

But then Das' leading disciple, Charlotte Moraga, comes whirling on, stamping out ear-teasing percussive patterns in that vigorous, upright Kathak way. She calls out the tal - or rhythmic cycle, which in Kathak can be anything from your standard eight-count phrase to more mind-bending variations, like nine and a half beats - and she chants her variations - taka di, taka di, da, da. When tapper Chloe Arnold comes hoofing on, she's doing a very different thing, arms flying, hips swinging, feet sliding and hitting. But they have an instant rapport, and they're trading riffs in no time.

The solos and duets that follow are an embarrassment of riches."

Click here to read the rest.

October 02, 2007 · 10:20 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed Nora Chipaumire's solo show "Chimurenga" Saturday--not for the Chronicle, but for the Dancers Group publication InDance. If you're at all interested in Bay Area dance and have never checked out that paper, you should. It's been reinvigorated under its latest editor, Bonner Odell (in fact, Dancers Group as a whole has been reinvigorated by the return of Executive Director Wayne Hazzard), and though it's now available by subscription only, the comprehensive performance listings alone make it worth the price. InDance has granted me permission to also post my review here (see below), but please also consider chipping in for a subscription. Click here to learn all about Dancers Group.

Next week I'll be reviewing the Erika Shuch Performance Project's new "51802" at Intersection for the Arts, and Chris Black's new outdoor baseball-themed show, "Pastime," at a park near you. See you at the theater, or in this case, at the ballgame.

And without further ado:

"Chimurenga"
Nora Chipaumire
ODC Theater, San Francisco
September 8, 2007

I don’t think anyone breathed during the last twenty minutes of “Chimurenga,” Zimbabwe-born Nora Chipaumire’s one-woman show. You could feel the audience grow rigid with suspense as her entrancingly roiling shoulders gave way to joyous African shakings and stompings, as she stood at the front of the stage shouting ugly epithets—“kaffir,” “woolie”—that slowly morphed into softly whispered remembrances—the smell of rain on sand, the taste of Mazowe orange juice. That last item brought knowing hisses of “yes” from the fellow Zimbabwe natives present at ODC Theater, a final burst of release. The standing ovation was immediate.

It was a powerful return for a singular dancer well known in the Bay Area, a Mills College grad who performed with a host of local companies before joining New York’s Urban Bush Women in 2003. Tall, shaven bald, arrestingly muscular and yet feminine, Chipaumire is her work’s own best asset. And yet “Chimurenga” does not merely showcase her beauty, and does not rely on sociological topicality. Though Chipaumire lived through Zimbabwe’s war for independence, and through much of Robert Mugabe’s subsequent regime, there are no discernible politics in “Chimurenga,” only anger, grief, and hope. At its best, “Chimurenga” transforms these into pure movement imagery.

The dance was made in three sections over the last five years, partly at ODC’s own Pilot program, and it progresses from the oldest and most amateur material to the newest and most accomplished. Consequently, the first two-thirds of “Chimurenga” are slow going. In the opening section, “Kaffir,” you can see Chipaumire taking first steps towards discovering her own movement vocabulary, and more importantly her own movement dynamic—she toys with a crooked raised leg, doesn’t do much interesting with it, then resorts to miming throwing rocks, a motif that is too literal in execution to reward so much repetition.

In “Convoys, curfews, and roadblocks” that raised leg becomes more interesting, hovering to tip her torso towards a square of light, and Chipaumire’s shoulders take on their own character, sensuously rolling, like the movement of muscles through a snake. But it isn’t until the final section, “Pungwe/musingoutloud about the revolution,” that we see the distinctive Chipaumire, and it turns out she is a master of subtle illusion, in a starkly Expressionistic way that hearkens to the early moderns.

Here in the final section what was earlier a red shirt, stretched in Graham-esque “Lamentation” pulls, becomes a billowing red dress, hiding Chipaumire’s legs as she kneels in funereal ritual, so that she seems to be hinging via slow levitation towards the ground. Sidelights play shadows with her arms, splaying symmetrical black splotches like butterfly wings behind her.

Chipaumire is aided enormously by Alex Pott’s sound score—as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” first emerges on tinkling music-box notes, then a chorus singing the Rhodesian national anthem, and finally resolves into African drum rhythms, the effect is chilling, then triumphant.

At the end, surrendering to her verbal purge, Chipaumire speaks like a woman possessed, her voice rich and sonorous, her chin jutting in outrage, her face finally shape-shifting into a smile of delirious love for her troubled homeland. It is the voice of a woman immersed in her material, confident of her absorption in it and her mastery over it. And well she should be. The last third of “Chimurenga” shows us the transformation from arresting dancer to promising artist.

September 10, 2007 · 03:43 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My fall dance preview for the SF Chronicle is now online. It's a big fall for ballet. American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet, and the Joffrey are all making appearances at Cal Performances (and all dancing Tharp). Oakland Ballet is mounting a comeback under founding artistic director Ronn Guidi. Smuin Ballet is pressing onward after the death of Michael Smuin. And Alonzo King's LINES Ballet is marking a 25th anniversary with world premieres using live music by Zakir Hussain and members of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Phew! Off the ballet-track, here are a few personal picks I have high hopes for:

Chitresh Das Dance Company: The cross-cultural chemistry was dazzling two years ago when Indian Kathak master Chitresh Das teamed with tap phenom Jason Samuels Smith. Now the two rhythmic virtuosos continue the conversation, and add new voices, in "India Jazz Progressions." Sept. 28-30. Fort Mason's Cowell Theater, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. (415) 345-7575, www.kathak.org.

LEVYdance: Talented young choreographer Benjamin Levy's five-dancer troupe is athletic and edgy. His ambitious new work is "Bone Lines," exploring his Persian Jewish heritage and his family's exile from Iran, and featuring impressive collaborators: composer Keeril Makan and couture designer Colleen Quen. Oct. 12-13. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco's Kanbar Hall, 3200 California St., San Francisco. (415) 292-1233, www.levydance.org.

Sean Dorsey: Sean Dorsey's storytelling dances about the transgender experience tend toward the tender and touching, and are beginning to attract an ardent fan base. Nov. 15-17. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., San Francisco. (415) 826-4441, www.dancemission.com.

See you at the theater.

August 28, 2007 · 10:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

The San Francisco Ballet danced at Stern Grove Sunday. My review in the Chronicle:

"It was awfully accommodating of the San Francisco Ballet to take a day out of preparations for their staggeringly ambitious 2008 season and treat more than 8,000 fans to free ballet alfresco Sunday. It was even more generous of them to dance as though they'd just come back from a long, refreshing vacation.

Perhaps the dancers can't be thanked for everything; perhaps it only seemed as though their warmth chased away the clouds shrouding Sigmund Stern Grove during this penultimate offering of the Stern Grove Festival. But this was dancing of enough lightness and energy to shine through the foggiest of San Francisco summers. And it was a very good omen for bright things to come next spring during the company's 75th anniversary.

Of course, it helps that Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's programming skills extend to perfect picnic fare. Paul Taylor's "Spring Rounds," not among that modern master's finest creations, looks better in the open air, where the green-clad cast seems to frolic onto the stage right from the meadow. And "Elemental Brubeck," Lar Lubovitch's sometimes swinging, sometimes weirdly turgid jazz whirl, seems like just the thing to send you off into a Sunday sunset groove.

But the heart of the afternoon was George Balanchine's "Divertimento No. 15," to Mozart. When done right, it is not merely pretty but life affirming. And at Stern Grove the nearly moral conviction of its well-manned beauty could make you forget the bucolic surroundings.

The casting was mostly familiar from last spring's repertory season, but everyone seemed in especially good graces. Lorena Feijoo led the gathering with stately aplomb, her turns perfectly controlled in speed and placement, while Frances Chung enlivened the drawing-room atmosphere with her unusual style, big and buoyant. Katita Waldo and Vanessa Zahorian were in crisp form, while Julianne Kepley made a good first impression as a newly hired soloist: blond, confident, all-American.

But the gentle pathos of the ballet came through in the subtle presence of the men. Jaime Garcia Castilla's line was pure gentility. Nicolas Blanc's jumps landed softly right on the end of a musical phrase, the way your head might hit a pillow at the end of a satisfying day. Blanc, especially, brought out the dance's emotional core, in the ardor of his arms when he stepped back from his ballerina, in the angle of his head as he partnered. When Kepley extended her leg in a front développé, then leaned back upon his chest, you could see in Blanc's face the idea of civility as a luxury - and as a luxury easily lost. You could see something cherished, something at stake."

Click here for the full review.

August 14, 2007 · 10:30 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Thanks to everyone who answered my call for performances to include in the Chronicle's fall dance preview. The response was tremendous and tremendously helpful, not just for making the preview as complete as possible, but for alerting me to shows to keep on my radar in the months to come. The fall dance preview won't be comprehensive, but I've tried to make it damn close. Look for it in the Chronicle's Sunday Pink section on August 26.

The open call was so useful--and I was so surprised to find some people timid about submitting information--that I thought perhaps I should state publicly: I'm always happy to receive press releases about events on the Bay Area dance scene via email (please no hard copy). Send them any time of the year to rachel at rachelhoward dot com.

Meanwhile, we're in the deadest dance month of the year, and I'm using the slowdown to work my tail off in grad school and press forward on my fiction. Aside from a review of San Francisco Ballet's Stern Grove performance this Sunday, you won't be seeing much of me in the Chronicle until September. But then the dance season gets busy--and after finishing the fall preview, I know there's much to look forward to. See you in the theater next month.

August 06, 2007 · 02:18 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Oakland Ballet founder Ronn Guidi is back full tilt. My report in the Chronicle today:

"Ronn Guidi rises from the restaurant table, leg suddenly stretching into full développé as he recounts a rehearsal with the famous choreographer Leonide Massine.

"You see, half the dancers were doing this," Guidi demonstrates with a sweeping arm, nearly knocking into the next table. "And half were doing this. And I said to Massine, 'Which is it?' And he turned to me and said, 'Ronn, it's not the steps. It's the integrity behind the movement.' "

Guidi is somewhere between 70 and 73 years old - he says he's lost track - but with his spry frame, wiry black hair and thick beard, he could pass for someone in his 50s. His face is wild-eyed and puckish, as it always is when he talks about the glory days of the Oakland Ballet, but today he looks especially excited. He's about to attempt a remarkable resurrection. Forty-two years after founding the Oakland Ballet, 20 years after raising it to unlikely international repute, nine years after suddenly retiring, and seven years after watching his beloved creation begin a steady slide toward death, Guidi is bringing the Oakland Ballet back.

The resuscitation started cautiously, with four performances of his "Nutcracker" last year, danced by a swiftly assembled ensemble of Oakland Ballet alumni and other freelance dancers. But with those shows well attended and cash-flow positive, Guidi says he's ready to go full tilt. The new Oakland Ballet Company will give its inaugural performance at the Paramount Theatre on Oct. 20, under the auspices of the Ronn Guidi Foundation for the Performing Arts.

The program will include a reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinksy's 1912 watershed "Afternoon of a Faun," Marc Wilde's "Bolero" and Guidi's own "Trois Gymnopedies" and "Carnaval d'Aix." Then, in December, "Nutcracker" will return for six performances before touring to Lake Tahoe. All shows will feature live music from the Oakland East Bay Symphony. Rehearsals will be at the Oakland Ballet Academy, where Guidi still teaches 13 classes a week.

Twelve dancers have been hired, and further auditions will soon be announced. Chevron and Target have signed as major sponsors. The city of Oakland's Cultural Funding Program has also pitched in on the $80,000 currently secured toward a $350,000 fundraising goal.

"I want to work in the black, no deficit spending," Guidi says. With that caveat, he's looking further into the future. "Nutcracker" dates have been reserved at the Paramount for 2008. Guidi plans to program smaller March shows to begin rebuilding a subscription base. His most cherished goal is a 2009 festival marking the 100th anniversary of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the groundbreaking company whose masterpieces Guidi so lovingly brought back to life."

Click here for the full story.

July 28, 2007 · 04:58 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The new and improved West Wave Dance Festival is underway. My review of Week One in the Chronicle:

"The standing ovation for Amy Seiwert's ballet troupe Im'ij-re had a movie-moment sense of triumph Sunday. More than a handful of noted choreographers and star dancers sat among the sold-out audience, fans who have become Seiwert believers during the six years since she started making strikingly of-the-moment, thrillingly inventive ballets in San Francisco.

She's fielded commissions for companies from Oakland to New Jersey, and found a regular outlet for her work with Smuin Ballet, the company in which she dances. But until Sunday, Seiwert had never presented an entire evening of her own ballets. That changed at Project Artaud Theater, in an urgently danced program boasting two world premieres. It was a major accomplishment.

It was also a major turnaround for the West Wave Dance Festival, rebounding from a 2006 season so amateurish and dreary that you had to wonder if even the dead summer months would be better off without it. But Executive Director Joan Lazarus believed in her mission: giving emerging choreographers a chance to show their work without shouldering crushing production costs. So she took a hard line on high quality and a hard look at the festival's format. Gone is the random programming. Instead, the festival's second week, launching Thursday, groups choreographers into stylistic slates: ballet, modern dance, "world forms" and dance theater.

Lazarus' boldest reform, though, was kicking off with "4 X 4," a series giving four choreographers each a night of their own work. Of the four - all except Seiwert, notably, based in New York - only one, Christopher K. Morgan, was an overearnest dud. Bay Area transplant Kate Weare opened the festival with an impressively mature style - rangy, primal, often crouched like a tiger - and one dance to make you sigh with feeling, a sweet duet of sorority with the fabulously dramatic redhead Leslie Kraus. On Saturday, Monica Bill Barnes proved herself also the real deal - a space-devouring mover who works in an absurdist, smartly detailed, often Chaplin-esque mode. But "4 X 4" was really an opportunity tailor-made for Seiwert, who ran with it."

Click here for the full review.

July 25, 2007 · 11:42 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

memo to the Bay Area Dance Community

My deadline for the San Francisco Chronicle's Fall Arts Preview is August 8. If you'd like your show to be included, please email information to rachel at rachelhoward dot com by August 1. Thanks!

July 19, 2007 · 10:38 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I'm just back from ten days at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where I've started the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in writing. The program requires at least 25 hours a week, which means I won't be writing much on this site from here out, though I will continue to post my newest articles and reviews in the Chronicle. Speaking of, I previewed the revamped West Wave Dance Festival for the pink section last week in this piece. The festival's much-needed new format will give the very talented ballet choreographer Amy Seiwert her first full-evening show, this Sunday. I'll be attending that, and the festival's launch with a full evening of work by Kate Weare tonight. Look for the review early next week.

July 19, 2007 · 10:27 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Must-See: Scott Wells and Dancers

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The more I see of scrappy stuntman Scott Wells, the more I become an evangelizer for his work. It's the best-kept secret on the San Francisco dance scene: wild yet carefully crafted, slouchy yet smart--and oh, yes, as you can see from the photo above, it's a spectacle. His company's 15th anniversary season continues at ODC Theater this weekend, and I can't imagine who wouldn't relish it. There are two new giggle-inducing dances for eight men, one involving balance beams and lovingly satirizing everything from Mary Lou Retton to "Les Sylphides;" in the other, the guys sit around grunting as though on a New Age male-bonding retreat, then cheer on a contact improvisation jam as though calling out a boxing match.

Voice of Dance's Allan Ulrich loved the show; I profiled Wells for Sunday's Chronicle. The deepest and most thoughtful appreciation, though, comes from Paul Parish in this month's San Francisco Magazine. He writes about Wells as only one who "follow{s} Wells as some movie-goers followed Kieslowski," as he once admitted, could--and he explains how Wells manages to make an inherently non-theatrical form like contact improv wittily, side-splittingly theatrical. So pick up the magazine if you can, but by all means check out the show.

June 27, 2007 · 04:10 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Pity the dance critic who raises the ire of James Wolcott. From Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog:

"When Alastair Macaulay springs a leak, it's a gusher.

Gush--gushy praise and tender teardrops--has been Macaulay's chief export since being named first-string dance critic of The New York Times, replacing John Rockwell, who had ironing to do. I first became acquainted with Macaulay's dance criticism--probably most of us strapping balletomanes did--when he subbed for Arlene Croce twice at The New Yorker during her tours of duty with the Israeli Air Force, first in 1988 and again in 1992. What I remember about his New Yorker reviews was their frictionless, informed, unforced urbanity; his prose had a smooth, even spread, like Brendan Gill's minus Gill's boisterous, gentleman's-club bonhomie. I also followed Macaulay after he joined the salmon pages of the Financial Times, where his reviews were distributed in smaller doses. There, like most Brit crits, he doled out the praise and demerits with smart, light little dabs, seldom making large claims but seldom sticking in a gratuitous dig either. When it was announced that Macaulay would take over the dance spot at the Times, I assumed he was bringing his elegant sheen with him, that he might class up the dump. Such foolish hopes. Yet again I overestimated the human animal, as I so often do when I extend the benefit of the doubt. Sometime during the transatlantic flight Senor Suavity seems to have transformed into a complete hayseed who writes as if he's pinning corsages with each compliment and who inserts himself into the nougat center of every review. Perhaps the pale enamel of Croce's Mother Superior austerity inhibited Macaulay during his first American sojourns, but now that she's vacated the scene to her mink ranch in Rhode Island, he's free to express every quivering sentiment and glandular effusion he once stored below deck, lathering and slathering his prose with palmfuls of the "simple creamy English charm" that was the blight and despair of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Worse, the cream has curdled, and the charm is so unctuous it seems to be begging for applause."

Lest you wonder how Wolcott finds the time to be so au courant in dance criticism, he is married to New Criterion dance critic Laura Jacobs.

Via Ballet Alert.

June 26, 2007 · 01:15 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Back from Chicago, where I had a wonderful time meeting Dance/USA members from around the country and hearing Vanderbilt sociology professor Steven Tepper discuss his forthcoming book (co-edited with Bill Ivey) “Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Social Life” at Friday morning’s opening session. From the synopsis provided, the book seems to synthesize a great deal of research as well as an astute understanding of trends from blogging, online communities, and the ease of producing art due to cheaply available technologies (think Mac’s “Garage Band”) to propose that art in America is entering a new “folk art” period of “amateur art makers” who are happy to pursue their music or writing or dancing or painting in their free time and no longer see art-making as such a rarified professional realm. The message Tepper offered for choreographers and presenters was that audiences today don’t want to simply enter the theater and consume art like a product; they want to engage with it, have the curtain drawn back on the process of creating it, be in relationship with it. He talked about the popularity of shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” (and took an interesting impromptu poll—about half of the choreographers and presenters detested “Dancing with the Stars” and about half liked it) as reflecting this new ethos that anyone can be an artist. And he offered a lesson: The old model for presenters and dance companies, Tepper said, was offering audiences value; instead they should be offering the chance to create meaning.

I haven’t read the book yet, and so can’t offer much response to its theories, but I was especially struck by Tepper’s yoking of three obvious trends: the rise of the amateur, the audiences’ desire to be in relationship or dialogue rather than spoken to from on high, and the desire to have the “curtain drawn back” and be behind the scenes. I wondered what they meant for me as a dance writer.

The panel I served on, just after Tepper’s, was practically oriented, so I didn’t theorize much. Instead, as the representative blogger speaking on “Connecting with Audiences via the Press, the Web, and In-Person,” I pointed out some of my favorite dance blogs (culled from the list of 70 and growing on Doug Fox’s Great Dance): The Winger, Apollinaire Scherr, Ann Murphy, for starters. I talked about the ease and cheapness of blogging, the way it allowed me to sustain a dance writing presence back when the Chronicle wasn’t using me much, and the way it’s allowed me to be in direct dialogue with my readers, even though I haven’t exploited this fully for some time. And I exhorted choreographers and companies to try launching their own blogs.

Meanwhile, the Boston Herald’s Theodore Bale gave nuts and bolts tips on getting your dance company covered in the newspaper (that old chestnut, have strong photographs), and our moderator Suzanne Carbonneau talked about offering program notes and pre-performance talks, etc. Doug McLennan, founder of the indispensable arts news aggregating site Arts Journal, laid out the new media landscape for the crowd: newspapers are suffering because they haven’t figured out how to monetize the web, and we’re in an awkward phase of not knowing what model will replace them.

I hope the panel was useful. But I kept thinking of all that Tepper had said during the earlier panel. And I wondered if, despite all my evangelizing, the migration of dance writing from newspapers and onto the web weren’t so bad for dance and dance writing at all, but only for me personally. After all, the unpaid writing found at the online DanceView Times is as informed and insightful or often far moreso than what can be found printed in the dailies, even if it speaks directly to a dance audience rather than a broader public. Do dance reviews in newspapers ever draw general readers to dance anyway, or is that a naïve fantasy? Perhaps it is simply more efficient to let dance lovers find what they want to read directly online, and write directly for them.

Perhaps I mostly bemoan the leeching of arts coverage from print publications because I happen to want to make a living at it, and happen to cherish an ideal of writing for the widest audience possible.

But with many competent and even dazzlingly talented dance writers willing to write for free, is the dance world any worse off?

And, a forecast: Perhaps the writers who will make it through this new media/old media shakeout are the ones who take full advantage of blogging and the web to relentlessly self-promote, to build their audiences directly instead of relying on print publications as portals, to cultivate their personal “brand” as a writer. Perhaps the writers who make it are the ones who figure out how to convert their web presence, via advertising or some other channel, to income.

I don’t think I’m enterprising enough for this new landscape.

INCIDENTALLY: Doug’s Arts Journal is hosting a group blog conversation about the new book “Engaging Art,” in anticipation of the Nashville conference “Every City, Music City,” here.

June 19, 2007 · 12:12 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I'm at the Dance/USA Spring Council in Chicago, speaking on a panel titled "Connecting with Audiences Via the Press, Web and In-Person." I'm the panel's representative blogger, a role I find ironic since, although I was one of the first dance bloggers when I launched this site in 2003, I've hardly written any posts over the last year, using this venue instead to link to my Chronicle stories. I also find it ironic since, even though I was here relatively early, I've never been a blog evangelizer. I've always been an advocate for keeping dance prominently in the pages of print publications instead, clinging to the perhaps nostalgic notion of that general reader who might happen upon a dance review over her morning coffee, get sucked in by that first sentence, and start reading about dance even though she had no intention of doing so when she picked up the paper.

That notion seems even quainter this week as the San Francisco Chronicle continues to hand pink slips to the 100 newsroom employees who won't survive the paper's latest round of budget cuts. For once, I'm in a relatively cushy position as a freelancer, watching the layoffs from the outside even as I wonder what future the paper can possibly hold for me in the midst of such a crisis. It's dark times at the Chronicle, and though I know few editorial employees there beyond my direct editors, I feel for those losing their jobs, and I can't help but share the grim mood. Remember when the San Francisco dance community was actually mounting a pressure campaign upon executive editor Phil Bronstein to hire a full-time Chronicle dance critic? How luxurious those days now seem.

So: blogging. It's cheap, it's easy, it's quite good depending on the individual writer, it's unpaid, and it's read by specialized, fragmented audiences. Is this what dance writing is left with?

Also, I'm hearing murmurs of discontent among the dance community with new Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay. To which I say: Macaulay is the best thing to happen to American dance coverage in at least 15 years, a voice at the Times who writes passionately and for a wide audience. He's given me a fresh level of liveliness to aspire to--I believe my own dance reviews are improved now that I'm regularly reading his. To lament Macaulay's hiring because he's shaking things up, or beacuse of one particular cringe-inducing review is, I believe, incredibly short-sighted at a time when professional dance writing can't afford myopia.

So enough with the funereal grumblings. My intent on tomorrow's panel is to be as practically useful to the attendees as possible. Who knows where the Q and A might lead. If the excursions prove interesting, I will post about them here.

June 14, 2007 · 09:39 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, always one big happy party, starts this week. My preview in yesterday's Chronicle:

"Charya Burt fans her fingers like an exotic flower, lowers to her knees with her back leg bent skyward and bounces gently to the xylophone-like tones of a Cambodian roneat ek. It's a warm spring day in a Santa Rosa high school auditorium, but Burt is wearing traditional Cambodian attire: tight silk bodice, folded sarong pants -- and, far more unusual -- a microphone pack with a black wire snaking up her back.

Her throaty voice sounds natural as birdsong, but for a dancer to also sing is revolutionary in Cambodian classical dance. Even more extraordinary are the words that follow: "Isolated from tomorrow, surrounded by beautiful antiquities, surrounded by loneliness," she says, then takes tiny soft steps as her arms form exquisitely sculpted arcs.

This is Burt's new Cambodian dance take on Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," titled "Blue Roses" and depicting the fearful loneliness of a Cambodian princess instead of a fragile Southern belle. That may sound bold enough, but some of the real risk-taking is in the subtleties. In addition to musicians on the roneat ek and sompho drum, a violinist and cellist sit onstage, playing melodies created for Cambodian Pinpeat orchestra on Western instruments. "This was a way to merge the two cultures together, because I'm influenced by Western culture and Cambodian," Burt explains during a rehearsal break, her softly smiling face as serene as in performance. "I want to create living art, not a museum where you can't touch."

Burt is far from the only "traditional" dance artist acting on this sentiment. At this month's 29th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival -- during which Burt's "Blue Roses" will premiere on the second of three programs -- you can see just about every dance form imaginable: Chinese lion dances and Spanish flamenco, hip-shaking Tahitian spectacles and smoothly gliding Korean rituals. But much of what you will see this year will be brand new. Of the 29 Bay Area groups taking over the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre's stage, eight will present world premieres. Four of these are commissioned by the festival's producer, World Arts West, but the new works are also coming forward unprompted, in traditions as differing as Mexican folklorico and Indian odissi, West African and Filipino folk.

"Something's happening across the field," says Worlds Arts West Executive Director Julie Mushet. "So many of the performances this year are thrilling because you see a shift in perception, that these are not static forms. Anyone who sees Charya's piece will understand that Cambodian classical dance is still evolving." "

Click here for the full piece, including the story of Charya Burt's training in Cambodia, where an estimated 80 percent of traditional dance artists died under the Khmer Rouge.

June 04, 2007 · 02:23 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Ballet etiquette makes it to Craigslist. Via Criticaldance.

It's June, the deadest dance time of the year, and though I'm off to Joe Goode's latest tonight and Mary Carbonara Dances next week, I'm mostly seizing the downtime for my non-dance writing--nine pages yesterday, five thus far today. I'm not talking much about what I'm working on these days, and I'm trying not to fret about the nosedive my income will take without the freelance pay coming in. Wish me luck, faith, and momentum, and you'll hear more from me on dance later this month.

May 31, 2007 · 03:13 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up on this week's dance writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. First, Diablo Ballet:

"The case for survival was in the dancing Saturday.

Diablo Ballet needs half a million dollars by July 1 to carry on; the chamber-size East Bay company, which for 13 years has been heavily funded by Ashraf Habibullah, the founder of an engineering company called Computers and Structures Inc., recently lost most of his sponsorship. So far $100,000 has come in, and the troupe is resolute, according to co-Artistic Director Nikolai Kabaniaev, who took the stage between ballets at Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts. "It's going to be a difficult road, but we're confident and determined," he said. "We're here to stay."

That looked like good news indeed during a revival of KT Nelson's hip 2000 work "It's Not What You Think," to the pop music of Björk. I've long thought that Nelson's flirty, high-voltage commissions count among the things Diablo does best, along with respectable stagings of Balanchine and certain family-friendly one-act story ballets of Kabaniaev."

With the good comes the ugly, further down:

"It was an up-and-down night at a crucial crossroads for the company, for if "It's Not What You Think" is Diablo at its best, Kabaniaev's 2005 "The Legend of Taj Mahal" is Diablo at its worst. Forget the silly necrophiliac story -- dying Shah dances with long-dead wife -- forget the PG-rated sex, the pastiche soundtrack. The real sin here is the absolute absence of choreographic interest, the vapid, paint-by-numbers phrases. And the only real redemption was the steely dancing and chiseled torso of Bohnstedt."

Click here for the full review.

Next up, the debut of a new collective by two stars of SF modern dance:

"As up-and-coming choreographers, Bliss Kohlmyer Dowman and Kara Davis enjoy more advantages than most. Unlike so many would-be dancemakers who graduate from college and blithely put on a show, Dowman and Davis have spent years of apprenticeship as stars of the San Francisco scene: Dowman in the companies of Janice Garrett and Robert Moses, Davis dancing with Margaret Jenkins, Kunst-Stoff, Garrett and -- well, just about everyone else.

Both women are riveting presences, and they count among their willing friends many of the Bay Area's finest dance performers. This made Friday's opening for their newly formed Project Agora at Dance Mission Theater far more rewarding than most debuts.

"Agora" means "a public forum" in Greek, and this self-described curatorial organization comes with a grandly stated ambition: to "promote creative dialogue between artists." Grammar sticklers might want to correct that preposition to read "among artists" (as in, three or more) but perhaps "between" is really correct since, at this point, Agora counts only two.

Sure, there was also a dance film from Greta Jorgensen, but it was dull and felt like filler. The meat was that Dowman and Davis each had a premiere, and Dowman reprised a work from last year.

It's too early in their careers to crown one of these women the real talent, but Davis stole the evening with her "Second Infinity." It had the best music of the program -- a doleful score by Sarah Jo Zaharako, performed live on violin, bass and cello, then augmented with feedback and electronic distortion -- but, more important, for a fledgling choreographer, "Second Infinity" had keen structure and mounting tension."

Click here for more.

And finally, a feature on a ballet teacher who actually got my butt back into class for the first time in four years last week--a humbling but gratifying experience:

"Sally Streets opens her arms into an elegant second position, her face with its crown of spiky hair raised nobly to the mirror. "One, two, three," she counts, feet moving in tidy tendus as her students watch carefully. "Five, six, and a seven and ... what happened?"

She marks the steps with narrowed eyes, catches the missing piece of logic, smiles grandly. "I made a mess. That's part of the experience."

Looking spry in purple leggings at 73, Streets has a rich trove of ballet experience, but she rarely makes a mess. Her classes are so concise and clear that flop-footed hobbyists and polished retired professional dancers alike flock to them, making their way from a quiet, leafy stretch of Berkeley's College Avenue to a studio tucked in the back of the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts.

This morning, Streets' devotees include former Diablo Ballet dancer Erika Johnson and past Oakland Ballet star and choreographer Michael Lowe. But by far, Streets' most famous onetime student is her daughter, New York City Ballet principal Kyra Nichols, who retires next month after an astonishing 33 years as one of that company's most beloved ballerinas.

It's not the only milestone on Streets' mind: Last month the school she founded, Berkeley Ballet Theater, celebrated its 25th anniversary. Once a neighborhood operation, BBT now counts 275 enrolled children and sends alumni to prestigious programs like Juilliard and SUNY Purchase. And though Streets is artistic director emerita, she shows no signs of slowing, teaching five days a week and demonstrating combinations -- even thigh-busting développés -- full out."

Click here to read on.

May 24, 2007 · 04:13 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Another show worth seeing during a busy dance week--my review in today's Chronicle:

"Those who think postmodern dance sounds about as fun as a root canal need to get themselves to ODC Theater tonight to see the final performance of David Gordon's "Dancing Henry Five." Yes, those Judson Church rebels of 1960s New York could be an ascetic, left-brained bunch ("No to spectacle!" Yvonne Rainer famously railed), but Gordon was always one of their wittiest members, and his delight in the simple magic of theater is fresh as ever. "Henry Five" was an instant hit in Manhattan three years ago, and it was both a pleasure and a provocation Thursday, when it stopped on national tour as the anchor of ODC's newly reenergized presenting program.

Watching this hourlong reduction of "Henry V," you remember how much of what we consider "postmodern" -- the reflexive calling to awareness of how a work of art is working -- is latent in Shakespeare, and appreciate how Gordon has run with it. After all, Gordon's narrator (and wife), Valda Setterfield, is only quoting the Bard's own prologue when she beseeches the audience to use their imaginations, then adds that in this production "we have only seven dancers, three dummies and me."

The fun is in watching this cast -- clad in rugby gear -- bring the story to life using only a ladder, folding chairs and cardboard-looking placards. Their soundtrack is William Walton's cinematic score, interspersed with dialogue from the Laurence Olivier movie version, and Gordon's own text. "We're going to have to move this along pretty fast," the grand matron Setterfield says, providing cues like "Here follows a short court rubber ball dance" in appropriately Shakespearean intonation."

Click here for the full review.

May 19, 2007 · 04:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Worth a trip to the airport: My latest review in today's Chronicle:

"A few years ago, Joanna Haigood named one of her entrancing installations "Ghost Architecture." The title could easily describe her entire body of work. A Haigood piece is not so much a dance as it is a haunting, plumbing the spectral traces of a location's past through meticulous research. True, there's spectacle -- Haigood's use of aerial rigging sends performers scaling the sides of old granaries or crawling along the Ferry Building's clock tower. But the shock of airborne acrobatics wears off quickly as you watch dancers float ghostlike toward the earth, and the lulling effect is intentional: Haigood's work is all about calmly contemplating what has come before.

You might wonder whether she could find much to contemplate in a space as spit-shined and modern as the San Francisco International Airport's International Terminal, where her Zaccho Dance Theatre continues to perform "Departure and Arrival" through Saturday. But instead of looking back, Haigood has looked up -- to the hull-like structures that loom high above the vast lobby. These reminded Haigood of ship hulls that once carried slaves to the Americas. It's a perfect conceptual fit with the theme of this year's San Francisco International Arts Festival, "The Truth in Knowing/Now: A Conversation Across the African Diaspora." And "Departure and Arrival" made a perfectly thoughtful and thought-provoking way to kick off the festival's jam-packed 11 days on Wednesday night.

Among the large crowd, dozens of tired travelers stopped to gaze at the rafters, where a rope-harnessed Haigood slowly tumbled down toward the most striking element of Wayne Campbell's rigging design, three steel structures shaped like house frames. Below her, an all-African American cast danced on three platforms, Shereel Washington and Raissa Simpson in African-like stampings and hip rolls, Maurya Kerr and Robert Henry Johnson in a molten duet that soon had Johnson pushing her into doglike submission."

Click here to read the rest.

May 18, 2007 · 01:54 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My Chronicle report on the newly unveiled plans for San Francisco Ballet's 75th season:

"San Francisco Ballet will crown its 75th anniversary season with a New Works Festival of 10 world premieres in 2008, as well as an international tribute to the company with visits by the New York City Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, the Ballet announced Wednesday.

The season, which also includes a tribute to Jerome Robbins and the return of the classic story ballet "Giselle," will run Jan. 29 to May 6. San Francisco Ballet will then embark on a four-city national tour in September, including engagements at New York's City Center and Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center.
It's a strikingly forward-looking celebration for the country's oldest professional ballet company, the one nod to history being a revival of former Artistic Director Lew Christensen's 1938 piece of Americana, "Filling Station." Instead of staging a retrospective, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson is looking to the company's future with fresh choreography by an eclectic clutch of dancemakers both luminary and emerging.

Some New Works Festival participants, like Julia Adam, Val Caniparoli and Yuri Possokhov, are homegrown talents; others, including Paul Taylor, Stanton Welch, James Kudelka and Christopher Wheeldon, are international figures with long ties to the Ballet under Tomasson's 22-year tenure. One, Jorma Elo, is new to San Francisco. Mark Morris, always news-making, will use a new score by famed minimalist composer John Adams, co-commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Carnegie Hall. Also creating a work on the company is local modern dance great Margaret Jenkins."

Click here for more.

May 11, 2007 · 09:17 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Muriel Maffre's adieu at SF Ballet--my review in today's Chronicle:

"Muriel Maffre raised her impossibly long arms toward the War Memorial Opera House ceiling Sunday night, then let them drop -- clunk -- hopelessly into her shoulder joints like the limbs of an abandoned marionette. The image was famous -- Anna Pavlova's "Dying Swan" -- and yet in one keenly considered movement, Maffre had made us see it anew. The standing ovation came instantly: This was a charged evening at the San Francisco Ballet, a farewell gala for a dancer of international singularity.

Some ballerinas are especially loved for their charisma, some for their musicality, some for their technical prowess. During her 17 years at the Ballet, Maffre has been something else. A majestic presence at more than 6 feet tall en pointe, she has neither fought her height nor relied on the length of her legs for sheer spectacle, though they certainly provide that. Instead, she has rallied her formidable intelligence to investigate every mechanical possibility of her unorthodox physicality. Each role she tackled in her parting sampling of short showpieces offered a stunning study in kinesthetic logic."

Click here for the full review, and scroll down for this bit about Saturday's momentous "Don Q" performance, which I happened to catch:

"It wasn't the only dramatic bow of the weekend: On Saturday, Gonzalo Garcia graced the Opera House a final time in "Don Quixote." When his partner, Tina LeBlanc, injured her knee in the first act Garcia carried her off. Molly Smolen and Helimets rushed over to dance the second act and so Garcia could have his last dance, Vanessa Zahorian was called in to partner him in the third. At curtain LeBlanc was back, but in a knee brace, bearing flowers that Garcia accepted before again carrying her across the stage."

May 08, 2007 · 10:58 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Gonzalo Garcia gives his last performance in San Francisco with SF Ballet this Saturday. I interviewed him for the Chronicle:

"Gonzalo Garcia rises on tiptoe, brown eyes wide, chest reaching. He opens his arms for his ballerina, Tina LeBlanc, and she melts inside them, giggling.

It's the same swooning reaction legions of ballet fans have to Garcia's Spanish good looks and bighearted dancing, but there's an undercurrent of regret this afternoon in one of San Francisco Ballet's studios. The "Don Quixote" performances LeBlanc and Garcia are rehearsing for, with their final show scheduled for Saturday evening, will mark Garcia's last dance in San Francisco.

"I'm losing my favorite partner!" LeBlanc laments as they rewind the tape to run their romantic pas de deux once more. "We really feel each other," she explains.

"We breathe together," Garcia interjects in his sibilant Castilian accent.

"I wouldn't say we're one entity, but it's the closest I've come to that," LeBlanc says.

LeBlanc, the company's most sparkling veteran ballerina, knows just what she's losing. So do the Ballet's audiences. Garcia, 27, is a special case in San Francisco Ballet history, a joyful boy who grew up in the company's school to become a personal protege of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. His jumps are soaring, his musicality engrossing, his puppyish enthusiasm irresistible. But most all, his pure love of dancing is magnetic.

"Some people in the audience say, I feel like I own you," Garcia says during a rehearsal break, in a conference room with sunny views of the Civic Center. "And they do. They see things in my dancing I can't see. And I'm so happy they stuck with me from beginning to end."

But with familiarity comes fierce attachment, and small wonder fans were shocked and crestfallen at the announcement, a month ago, that Garcia would leave at the end of this season. The news came just as Garcia was hitting a high point of his career, secure as the company's leading male dancer in roles as iconic as Balanchine's "Apollo" and "Giselle's" Prince Albrecht.

His plans weren't revealed, except for a summer stint with Morphoses, star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's new pick-up venture. And no reasons were given, prompting gossip and incredulous speculation. Had there been a falling-out with Tomasson? With other dancers in the company? After Garcia's wildly successful guest appearance with New York City Ballet in 2004, was he finally jumping ship for that troupe?"

Click here for the full story.

May 02, 2007 · 02:39 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of SF Ballet's "Don Quixote" in today's Chronicle:

"Committed San Francisco Ballet fans will want to know this first: Lorena Feijoo and Joan Boada aren't performing in the current run of "Don Quixote," which closes the 2007 season this week. Boada, our happiest Basilio, is out injured, and Feijoo, the company's iconic Kitri, has understandably opted not to learn the role with a different partner.

But discoveries are made through just such casting deprivations.

Saturday, in their absence, two things were clear: The Ballet's "Don Quixote," though far from perfect, is a lively and lighthearted spectacle, satisfying in its own right. And Vanessa Zahorian has the role of her career in it. She was dazzling as Kitri, and not just because she possesses the perfect technical arsenal: freeze-frame balances, pirouettes so joyful and secure that she can't help tossing doubles and even triples into the famous Act III fouettés.

Often polished but distant in other ballets, she was full-blooded here, sashaying through every step with sensuality in her shoulders and a vivacious energy in her smile. "Don Quixote's" Kitri, when not performing great physical feats, must be a wily teenager, walking in that loose-limbed adolescent way. Zahorian made the dance steps the natural expression of Kitri's nondancing confidence and mischievousness."

Click here for the full review.

Usually my reviews aren't trimmed much, but this one got cut a lot. Here's what I originally wrote:

"Committed San Francisco Ballet fans will want to know this first: Lorena Feijoo and Joan Boada aren’t performing in the current run of “Don Quixote,” which closes the 2007 season this week. Boada, our happiest Basilio, is out injured, and Feijoo, the company’s iconic Kitri, has understandably opted not to learn the role with a different partner.

But through such casting deprivations discoveries are made. Feijoo and Boada, both born and trained in Cuba, were the real story when SF Ballet unveiled its first “Don Q” in 2003. They were made to dance this ballet, and dance it together, and their American debuts in it provided high drama: just before the premiere, the company announced it would not renew the oft-injured Boada’s contract; he lit up the stage and the decision was promptly reversed. Feijoo and Boada’s performances that night were so charged that they have seemed to own the ballet here ever since, continuing to constitute its local raison d’etre even as other fine dancers blossomed during the ballet’s return in 2004. But Saturday, in their absence, two things were clear: SF Ballet’s “Don Q,” though far from perfect, is a lively and light-hearted spectacle, satisfying in its own right. And Vanessa Zahorian has the role of her career in it.

She was dazzling as Kitri, and not just because she possesses the perfect technical arsenal: freeze-frame balances, pirouettes so joyful and secure that she can’t help tossing doubles and even triples into the famous Act III fouettés. Often polished but distant in other ballets, she was full blooded here, sashaying through every step with sensuality in her shoulders and a vivacious energy in her smile. The key in a story ballet is consistency: in the same way that “Sleeping Beauty’s” Aurora must be a princess, walking pristinely on half-toe between every dance passage, “Don Q’s” Kitri must be a wily teenager, walking in that loose-limbed blasé way of teenagers when not performing great physical feats. Zahorian made the dance steps the natural expression of Kitri’s non-dancing confidence and mischievousness. And that made “Don Q” not just a collection of ballet tricks, but real theater."

April 30, 2007 · 08:02 AM · Dance · Comments (2)

I'm already receiving quite a few emails from SF Ballet fans about last night's "Don Quixote." The disappointment is that Lorena Feijoo and Joan Boada won't be dancing the leads in this run--for reasons which I reveal in the first paragraph of my review set to appear in tomorrow's Chronicle. Unsurprisingly, the Cubans have developed a passionate following here. Check out the paper tomorrow to see what I thought of the replacement first cast.

And please, keep the emails to me coming--but if you have time, please CC the folks at the Chronicle, too. It lets them know that you care about dance and value reading about it in the paper, and it's important that the management know that during these difficult times for newspapers. Whether you wholeheartedly agree with me or think I've lost my head, let the paper know you're reading.

The official contact info, in case you feel so inclined:

"Send letters to Daily Datebook, The San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, or e-mail to datebookletters@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for verification. Letters may be edited for length and clarity."

April 29, 2007 · 06:26 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Last week was subsumed by the sudden death of Michael Smuin. A populist and popular choreographer, former co-director of the San Francisco Ballet, and founder of his wildly successful chamber troupe Smuin Ballets, Smuin was teaching company class on Monday when he collapsed in heart failure. Steven Winn wrote a thorough and excellent obituary for the Chronicle, which you can read here; I contributed some reporting, but in truth not much. The next day the Chronicle had me round up appreciations of Smuin, which resulted in this article; I'm told it turned out well, but I wouldn't know. Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman ended up reporting from the Smuin studios, and most of the material in the story, I suspect, is his, as I assume the byline rightly should be too. Because of guilt over this, I suppose, I haven't been able to bring myself to read it.

There is probably another reason I haven't read it, which is that my participation in any tributes to Smuin is awkward. Six or seven years ago, still very immature as a critic, I thought it good sport to savage Smuin's crowd-pleasing razzle-dazzle; my reviews started out mildly disappointed and confounded by his audience's ardor, and became increasingly and unnecessarily mean-spirited. Growing up and seeing the useless ugliness of sneering, I stopped going to his shows altogether. I figured I'd seen what he was about and didn't care for it; if I found it pandering and vulgar, I didn't need to keep harassing the company with that opinion. Recently, realizing what an unfair target I'd made of Smuin and embarrassed by my past penchant for snobbishness, I'd begun to think I should take in another Smuin Ballet performance to see how my reactions to his unabashedly showy dances had evolved. I wish I'd done this during his lifetime. His dances delighted hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps if I had not been so bent on proving my own rarified taste, I would have seen why.

I was very sorry to hear of his death. I know the 16 members of his company are in tremendous grief and shock. I hope the Smuin Ballet will continue, and wonder if it might not be turned over to associate director Celia Fushille-Burke, perhaps with the young choreographer Amy Seiwert, whose creative talents Smuin so enthusiastically supported, as resident choreographer.

Smuin was many things--flashy, fun, drawn to theatrical spectacle and over-the-top glitz. But he was never a snob, and for that and much more I admire him, and make my own belated apology.

April 29, 2007 · 02:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I've got a review in the Chronicle today:

"For those who don't know, it's worth stating plainly: Alonzo King is the real deal as a choreographer, one of the few bona fide visionaries in the ballet world today, and we are fortunate to have him and his Lines Ballet in San Francisco.

It's especially worth stating lest the deeper wonders of his latest project, which opened Friday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, be overshadowed by sheer novelty. For this 25th anniversary spring season, King has engaged seven Buddhist monks from China's Shaolin Temple. Renowned for their martial arts, they have lived in San Francisco since 2004 under the auspices of their monastery, and they are spectacular. The older monks flow through Wushu lunges with feline grace, then throw their legs into the air with explosive power; the youngest -- two of three 10-year-old triplets -- toss themselves into backflips that land them on their heads. In another move, they kick their shins to their eyeballs in full splits and then the twins drop -- whap! -- to the floor, like a plank.

Amazing feats, to be sure, but perhaps only King could have merged them with ballet in such a way that illuminates the honor and dignity of both forms, instead of engaging in cheap pageantry. He can do this because he's spent more than two decades stripping ballet of aristocratic veneer and presentational haughtiness, twisting its elemental geometries into a strangely recognizable, strangely alien language that converses with any culture -- and speaks earnest, sometimes overly earnest, truths about the human heart."

King's collaboration with the Shaolin monks is not without a significant flaw. To find out what, read the full review here.

April 16, 2007 · 11:09 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Don't you love it when your not-so-clever lead gets mangled into something absolutely stupid? The second sentence of my review of San Francisco Ballet's program seven used to read: "a name as unknown in these parts as it is unpronounceable." Ah, well:

"San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson attracts a roster of international choreographers to rival any company in the world, but he's always ready to take a chance on young talent. His latest pick is Matjash Mrozewski, a name that is unknown in these parts and not easy to pronounce either.

He's 31, a former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, and from the looks of "Concordia," which premiered Wednesday on the Ballet's Program 7, he still has a lot of growing to do. But there is no shame in producing a modestly scaled ballet that teaches you new lessons while keeping your audience reasonably engaged. And there is certainly no shame in being upstaged by a rousing performance of an ebullient masterpiece like George Balanchine's "Symphony in C," which closed the evening on a note of triumph.

"Concordia" has the aura of a "learning ballet" rather than an artistic statement. Kristin Long and Gennadi Nedvigin play the classical couple parading through stately promenades and ports de bras, she in a tutu; Muriel Maffre and Pierre-François Vilanoba are the contemporary couple, limbs melting like hot wax or contorting like the branches of some gnarled old oak."

Click here for the full review.

April 13, 2007 · 01:30 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up . . . My interview with SF Ballet soloist Rory Hohenstein in the Chronicle yesterday:

"Rory Hohenstein sets down his coffee and raises his arms, and suddenly it's as if he's a different person.

"It's weird internal movement all the time," he says, describing the steps in the ballet "Eden/Eden," stretching his chest wide and undulating his shoulders to demonstrate. His pale face, with its dusting of freckles, no longer looks so boyish; his slight 5-foot-10 frame becomes larger than life.

"I don't know how to explain it," he says, his brown eyes excited. "Some ballets your body just goes crazy for."

Hohenstein looks transformed -- and it is a transformation that San Francisco Ballet audiences have been seeing a lot of lately. Six years ago, as an 18-year-old corps newbie, Hohenstein had an onstage persona more like his presence in real life: friendly, sweet, a little shy. But when Hohenstein steps out in the Opera House these days, he is something else: impassioned, unabashed and possessed of leading-man intensity. Choreographers have taken note.

"Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris, William Forsythe -- everyone has singled him out," says company ballet master Ashley Wheater. "Whenever a choreographer new to the company watches rehearsal, they always say, 'Who's that boy in the corner?' And, inevitably, it's Rory."

No surprise, then, that Hohenstein is suddenly all over the place, dancing everything from a charming Frenchman in "Aunis" to one of the lusty sailors in Jerome Robbins' "Fancy Free." Currently he's stealing scenes as the head roper in Agnes de Mille's "Rodeo." This week he reprises his go-for-broke solo as the Red Man in Lar Lubovitch's "Elemental Brubeck."

It's the Red Man solo that launched Hohenstein toward his promotion to soloist in 2006 -- and not just because its razzle-dazzle steps drew on his childhood love of jazz and all things hammy. Exposed and all-out, the role pushed this normally reserved native of small-town Maryland past any last traces of bashfulness."

Click here for the full story--and to learn how Hohenstein got SF Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson to rush backstage after a Jeune Ballet de France performance and offer the 18-year-old a contract on the spot.

April 09, 2007 · 11:16 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I've got an on-the-scene little ditty in the Chronicle today:

"Forget the Big Game. A new rivalry was raging in San Francisco on Thursday night, and you could hear bloodlust and trash talk in the air. Dance, dance, baby. You know, you know, came the rallying cry. Dance, dance, baby. We told you so.

Throughout the Concourse Exhibition Hall, a well-heeled but revved-up mob sipped "Gatortinis" and munched mini corn dogs. They had paid $125 apiece to support ODC Dance Commons, the $9.5 million, 23,000-square-foot dance center opened by ODC/Dance, the city's most established modern dance company, in the heart of the Mission District last year. But the crowd also came looking for a showdown.

For years, millionaire investment banker Warren Hellman -- whose wife, Chris, is a former chair of the San Francisco Ballet board -- wanted to test the question: Who are the better athletes -- sports stars or dancers? The fantasy matchup sprang to mind after taking too many under-appreciative visitors to his box at the Ballet. As Hellman told the audience Thursday: "My wife and I would usually take another couple, and the man would usually be an overweight businessman. During the intermission, I'd ask him, 'So what do you think?' and I got so tired of hearing their responses -- 'It's so effete.' I'd say, 'You focus on one male dancer for five minutes, and you tell me if you've ever been able to do a single thing that they're doing in your life.' "

So with a worthy cause in hand, Hellman approached Sandy Barbour, UC Berkeley's director of athletics, who volunteered her student athletes for "Toe to Toe," a night of intense competition. Cal versus Stanford or UCLA or Southern Cal this was not, but a thirst for victory was clear. The Golden Bears brought out their Straw Hat marching band and cheerleaders decked out in blue and gold; ODC's "coaches" dressed their competitors in silk red and black robes, "Rocky"-style, and assembled their own, markedly funkier, spirit squad. "Work it out!" Corey Brady shouted to fellow dancer Yukie Fujimoto pregame, punching the air as she downed bottled water."

For the full story, and to find out who won--by a landslide--click here.

April 07, 2007 · 02:40 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Bad news about San Francisco Ballet's program six. My review in today's Chronicle:

"Apparently even the San Francisco Ballet isn't immune from the midseason slump. Granted, program five's crowd-pleasing extravaganza made a hard act to follow, but the sixth repertory slate that opened Wednesday is a bona fide dud. There's a pleasant-enough encore airing of Agnes de Mille's "Rodeo" and a warmed-over revival of Julia Adam's "Night." But what should have been the meat of the program is a world premiere by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. I'm sorry to report that "On Common Ground" is the worst ballet by him I've yet seen.

It's a shame because when Tomasson makes intimate ballets tailored to showcase the strengths of favored dancers, the results can be elegant, and sometimes stirring. And in this case, Tomasson began with talent worth exploring. On the veteran side, Tina LeBlanc and Lorena Feijoo share a duet, while Joan Boada and Davit Karapetyan get space-devouring solos. On the emerging side, the slinkily musical soloist Rory Hohenstein shares some teasing interludes with glamour girl Elana Altman and with Jennifer Stahl, a first-year corps member graced by striking long lines and a cool confidence.

Alas, Tomasson seems never to have discovered what he would like to say with this stellar bunch, for rarely has such an inharmonious confusion of theatrical elements appeared on the Opera House stage. The music for "On Common Ground" is by Ned Rorem: swelling, ominous strings, competent but forgettable. Or perhaps you never get a chance to fully hear the score, so quickly are you distracted by Sandra Woodall's visual design.

A layer of giant white gingko leaves, or so I'm told they are, floats high above the stage; they look suspiciously similar to the hovering lotus leaves seen last fall in the butoh troupe Sankai Juku's "Kagemi." The costumes Woodall has paired with this vista are truly flummoxing: black-and-neon leotard dresses that resemble bicycling jerseys for the women; burgundy-and-neon leotards for the men."

Click here for the full review.

April 06, 2007 · 07:43 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I'd heard whispers of this for weeks, but the San Francisco Ballet just made it official. Gonzalo Garcia--the company's big-hearted Spanish principal, and truly its main male star--is leaving the company. I'd figured the company was awaiting confirmation of his next endeavor before announcing his departure, but the press release states only that Garcia will guest with Christopher Wheeldon's new pick-up company Morphoses this summer and fall. The press release also makes no mention of why Garcia is leaving.

To say his departure is a surprise is an understatement--and it is also a major loss. Garcia rose up through the San Francisco Ballet school and became a clear protege of artistic director Helgi Tomasson. As a student he won the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne--the youngest dancer ever to do so--but he was so fastidious that when Tomasson first offered him a contract, he deferred in order to train an extra year. His early performances had puppyish excitement --I'll never forget the sweat spraying from his brow like a sprinkler head in the whiz-bang finale of Tomasson's "Prism." From the start he had an incredible jump and clear technical prowress coupled with a wild, almost ragged energy. But what really endeared him to the audience was his obvious, irrepressible joy in dancing. Few dancers give so much of themselves so exuberantly onstage.

I'll never forget his performances as the Brown Boy in Robbins' "Dances at a Gathering," or in Balanchine's "Rubies." I always especially loved his hands, which were big, more like paws, so natural and without artifice. I won't speculate on why he's leaving. I just know we'll all miss his presence so much.

April 03, 2007 · 07:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is in San Francisco through Sunday. My review in today's Chronicle:

"The Paul Taylor Dance Company's annual San Francisco Performances engagement is one of the happier harbingers of spring, but this year the troupe's visit to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts arrives with twinges of sadness. For one thing, after this week's three programs close, the Taylor dancers won't come our way until 2009, so see them while you can. For another, it's impossible to watch Taylor's newest work and not be moved to mourning. "Lines of Loss," the centerpiece of Tuesday's opening program, is gut-wrenching, and gorgeous. It leaves a weight in the heart. And it leaves no doubt that, at 76, Taylor is far from coasting.

Like many of the best Taylor works, the subject of "Lines of Loss" seems so evanescent, and the staging is so deceptively simple that you wonder how the dance can seem so distinct from all the other wonderful Taylor dances that have preceded it. The answer is the music -- an assemblage of elegiac selections by Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part, John Cage and others, all on a recording by the Kronos Quartet -- and Taylor's responsiveness to it. Santo Loquasto contributed the white costumes and striking set, a backdrop of charcoal lines that evoke water, or striations of stone; Jennifer Tipton created the shadowed lighting. As usual, they considerably enhance the whole. But the emotional depth is in the movement.

It is sometimes monklike, as the 11 dancers pace the stage with meditatively folded hands, and sometimes ragged. Lisa Viola's hinges into deep backbends become swifter and lower until, upon rising, she is clutching her abdomen as though stabbed. Michael Trusnovec's solo is the beating heart of the piece, as he stretches his arms like a mole groping through darkness."

Click here for the full review.

March 29, 2007 · 09:49 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Apparently San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson agreed with my assessment of Sarah Van Patten in "Carousel (A Dance)" and "The Fifth Season," because she and Rachel Viselli have just been promoted to principal. Thanks to the sharp-eyed balletomanes at Ballet Alert for the tip-off.

Here's Van Patten in "The Fifth Season," opposite Pierre-Francois Vilanaoba:

And in "Carousel," also with Vilanoba:

Of course neither image really gives you any idea of the originality of her dancing.

Both photos by Erik Tomasson, courtesy SF Ballet.

March 24, 2007 · 04:42 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

My review of San Francisco Ballet's program five in today's Chronicle:

"On paper, the big news for San Francisco Ballet's Program 5 on Thursday was the company premiere of "Fancy Free," the charming 1944 ballet that launched Jerome Robbins' career, and indeed it looked delightful. But delight was in abundant supply well before this sweet tale of sailors on shore leave arrived to cap the evening. There are three other ballets on the bill, all of them mighty fine, and finely danced. A pleasanter time could not be had at the Opera House.

Part of the gratification is sheer variety. Mark Morris' "Pacific," the opener, is windswept and magisterial; Christopher Wheeldon's "Carousel (A Dance)" (like "Fancy Free," a company premiere) is romance and glee. The return of Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's elegantly brooding "The Fifth Season" lends the program a melancholy gravitas. It was also a big night for the passionate young soloist Sarah Van Patten, who ought to be given a chance to steal the spotlight more often.

She was the lovely girl in yellow at the center of Wheeldon's "Carousel," a distillation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set to a suite orchestrated by William David Brohn. Whether you know the show's plot makes no difference, as Wheeldon captures not its action but its essential feeling -- and does so with remarkable imagination. A large corps whirls round the stage, the women even riding high on their partners' shoulders and holding poles to bring the carousel image to full life.

The ensemble work is full of whimsy -- cartwheels that look like Ferris wheels, and of course lots of carousel waltzing. But the heart of the ballet is a long, lush duet for Van Patten and Pierre-François Vilanoba as a carnival barker.

Van Patten is an unusual dancer who has been slow to receive her full due here. Two years ago, she danced a startlingly realistic "Romeo and Juliet" opposite Vilanoba, but it was third or fourth cast; "Carousel" is the first role to showcase her talent so fully since. She is at her core an actress who works through pure movement, and every step she took in "Carousel" was suffused with emotional motivation, from her tottering, ambivalent run away from Vilanoba's embrace to the woozy loll of her head as she swooned in his arms."

Click here for more of my thoughts on Van Patten, as well as a terrific first cast for "Fancy Free."

March 17, 2007 · 03:01 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Catching up on dance reviews I wrote for the Chronicle over the weekend: ODC program two and Janice Garrett & Dancers, both of which repeat this coming weekend.

Here's ODC:

"The members of ODC/Dance looked a little wide-eyed and taken aback by the vigorous ovation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater on Friday, but they really shouldn't be so surprised. They're performing with such clarity and abandon that's it hard to decide which game is more fun: watching how the ensemble feeds off the intoxicating group energy or picking favorites. To see these 12 dancers slash through co-Artistic Director KT Nelson's "Stomp a Waltz" like the detritus of some renegade tornado is to understand why ODC deserves its status as San Francisco's most established modern dance company. And if there's one thing this 36th anniversary home season will be remembered for in years to come, it's the fierce fineness of the dancing.

It would be nice to say this season will also be remembered for its choreography, but while the performing is top-notch, the premieres are not. There are two new works on Program 2, which repeats this weekend. Nelson's is ambitious, earnest and unintentionally silly; Artistic Director Brenda Way's is modest, pleasant but less than potent. Lest all the glory go to the dancers, it's worth remembering that great companies do not assemble themselves -- directors do. And you can hardly fault those directors for occasionally coasting or taking big risks.

The latter is what Nelson has done in "The Water Project," which is clearly a labor of love, and intended -- you knew the pun was coming -- to make a splash. The visual design, by Kim Turos, hangs coiling tendrils, hoses and sheets of plastic from the rafters. Linda Bouchard's sound collage juxtaposes dripping noises with interludes of clanking industrial calamity, usually without interesting effect."

Click here for the full review.

And here's Janice Garrett:

"Janice Garrett seemed to burst onto the San Francisco dance scene fully formed, sprung from the brow of Zeus. That's because Garrett, who is now in her 50s, danced in the Bay Area in her youth before leaving for New York and then cutting her teeth as a freelance choreographer throughout Europe. She spent more than a decade in this peripatetic way, and when she finally resettled on our shore, in 2001, her "Ostinato" was revelatory: a lush, sculpturally gorgeous, thoroughly accomplished modern dance.

Garrett founded Janice Garrett & Dancers the following year. It's been one of San Francisco's finest companies from its first performances, and its fifth season, which opened Friday at the Cowell Theater and repeats this weekend, proves again why. Few choreographers can match the rich beauty of Garrett's movement, her unerring gift for flowing, complex line. Every step Garrett sets -- and there are lots of them -- arranges her dancers' joints and muscles into the kind of loveliness one could only learn from studying, say, Michelangelo. There is nothing static about her physicality -- it just pours on and on.

But as it pours onward, it raises issues. The truth is, none of Garrett's subsequent works, for all their loveliness, has matched the singular spirit, the heart, the raison d'etre, of "Ostinato." Garrett tends to choreograph by the yard, with sufficient formal ideas but few dramatic ones, and the result is that within those two camps -- comic and lyrical -- all of her dances tend to feel the same. So the question is this: Can a choreographer at this mature stage of development break out of her ways enough to lend her dances meaning, not just prettiness?

Garrett seems to be trying this in "10 Studies on the Vicissitudes of Grief," one of two premieres, and the results are encouraging. "

Click here for the full review.

More readers have been writing in lately to debate my take on things--I love this. Possibly the most important purpose of a review is to spark dialogue--so good or bad (but please not ugly), keep the letters coming. Here's the official info:

March 13, 2007 · 12:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of the opening of ODC/Dance's home season in yesterday's Chronicle:

"Brenda Way is a choreographer with no shortage of smart ideas. The trouble comes when she tries to throw them all into one dance.

"A Pleasant Looking Woman in Sensible Clothes," her latest, has a clear and timely subject: the political terrorization of ordinary people in their own homes. It also has a lot of accoutrements: video by the Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa, '50s suburban costumes by Cassandra Carpenter, chairs for dancing on as part of Alexander V. Nichols' evocative stage design and a hodgepodge recorded score by David Lang. There are men in suits representing the intrusion of government surveillance into our private lives, a rolling steel door to symbolize our imprisonment within fear, and a generous helping of movement invention. The one thing the dance doesn't have is an emotional arc.

Don't let that keep you from catching ODC/Dance's Program 1, unveiled Thursday during the gala opening of this 36th annual home season, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The troupe, full of young talent, has probably never danced better -- both in Artistic Director Way's new piece and in the two very fine dances that flank it. Co-Artistic Director KT Nelson's new "Scramble," set to Bach, is a baroque delight, while Way's 1999 "Investigating Grace," also to Bach, showcases performances worthy of its serene beauty. In fact, the exquisite clarity of these bookends sets the conceptual clutter of "A Pleasant Looking Woman" in stark relief."

Click here for the full review.

March 04, 2007 · 03:01 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I took my mother and grandmother along to Alvin Ailey Wednesday night. It was my grandmother's first encounter with modern dance, and I thought I couldn't go wrong starting her on "Revelations." She loved it, but then, who doesn't?

My review of program A in today's Chronicle:

"What makes one dance dated and another a delightful reflection of its times? "The Golden Section," the all-dance finale to Twyla Tharp's otherwise problematic dance-drama "The Catherine Wheel," screams '80s. "Solid Gold," roller rinks, Jazzercise: It's all there, in the "Wonder Woman" costumes, in the dazzling turns that burst into shimmying shoulders, in the leaps that stop on a dime before a sprint of "Flashdance"-style running. "The Golden Section" is a time capsule in the best sense, because it doesn't reflect its era so much as reveal Tharp's culturally omnivorous ability to capture it. Or maybe it just seems that way because the members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform it with such infectious playfulness.

Ailey is back at Cal Performances all week with three programs, two of which close with the eternally soul-stirring "Revelations." That classic is reason enough to rush to see them, but as added incentive, Program A, which opened Wednesday and repeats Saturday and Sunday, is one of the stronger Ailey offerings to visit the Bay Area in years -- and "The Golden Section" is a hoot."

Click here for the full review.

A note on the writing: I've been experimenting with these long, more essay-like or narrative-leaning ledes lately--check out the huge block of text that constitutes the first paragraph of this review--and the Chronicle editors have been going for them. Does the approach work? You tell me, but I've been having fun with it.

March 02, 2007 · 07:26 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of SF Ballet's "Sleeping Beauty" in the Chronicle yesterday:

"Yuan Yuan Tan let go of her cavalier's hand in "The Sleeping Beauty's" Rose Adagio and held her attitude balance one second, two seconds, three seconds, four. It's a famous feat, and other esteemed ballerinas have managed it, but the twittering applause Saturday had to do with more than circus tricks.

Tan has long inspired love-hate reactions among San Francisco Ballet fans: love for her elegant, spindly lines and irrepressible glamour, and hate for her icy reserve. She's started to thaw in recent seasons -- her Odette in "Swan Lake" last year was as tender as she was tragic, but almost no one would have expected Tan's unfailing warmth as she bust onstage as Princess Aurora. From her first pas de chat, she was joyous, vulnerable, exuberant and, as she considered her suitors, downright bashful. You couldn't help but share in her triumph. And the transformation from Ice Princess to Princess Aurora was complete.

"The Sleeping Beauty" has a way of revealing transformation in ballet dancers and in ballet companies, and right now -- it runs through Sunday -- it's revealing some attractive things about the San Francisco Ballet. The crown jewel of 19th century Russian classicism, boasting the most shimmering of Tchaikovsky's ballet scores, "Sleeping Beauty" is the supreme test of a company's style. In that regard, the Ballet fails: The company's focus these days is on contemporary ballets, and though you don't get the sense that the corps is ingesting its lessons like broccoli -- they look like they're enjoying themselves -- their approach is eclectic at best.

But "Sleeping Beauty" is also, among classic story ballets, the best showcase for an array of soloists -- all those fairies and divertissements. It hasn't been seen at the Ballet since 2001, and a new crop of talent is ripe for it.

Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's 1990 production gives them a classy, efficient vehicle. The late Jens-Jacob Worsaae's visual design moves the story to Russia, contrasting the Tsarist fashions of the first act with the powdered wigs and French influences when the court awakens 100 years later. The historical approach is all wrong for a fairy tale, but you forget about it quickly enough while still luxuriating in the painterly sets and opulent detail.

Meanwhile, Tomasson's staging moves speedily -- too speedily. Tomasson's latest adjustment is to eliminate the intermission between Acts 2 and 3, sending us barreling from the Prince's kiss and Aurora's awakening straight through the nuptials. The emotional effect is blunted, and it's too much to take in at one sitting. A good "Sleeping Beauty" should let you savor the dancing, especially when the dancing is this fine."

Click here for the full review.

A sentence got removed in copy editing; its gist was that Tomasson (following Peter Martins' lead in streamlining NY City Ballet's "Beauty") has cut a lot of the Fairy Tale character divertissments from Act III, and ought to restore some of them. Having only the White Cat and Puss in Boots and the Bluebird Pas feels like a pretty stingy invite list.

I turned around and went right back to see the soloist Rachel Viselli make her debut as Aurora Sunday; a lot of balletomanes were there eager to see what she'd do with it. You can't really fault her: she has that beautiful physique with that long torso, such pretty lines, such technical assuredness, such a sweet face. She looked nervous in the Rose Adagio, understandably, but didn't flub anything, then opened up into a bit more lyricism in the Vision Scene. The ballerina-oglers in attendance seemed to approve.

But--but. I still don't get her. I still don't understand the spark that Tomasson must see. Because what I saw in that Rose Adagio was a technically accomplished dancer giving me pretty steps. You can chalk this up to nerves, but it's been consistent throughout her performances--all the equipment is there, but I don't feel her sharing anything with the audience. I don't see any surprises on stage, any on-the-spot decision-making in her phrasing and musicality, and most elusive of all, I don't feel who she is.

Yet she danced an Aurora she should be proud of. I just can't say it's a performance that will linger in my mind, or my heart.

I was, however, rather impressed with Davit Karapetyan as her Prince. Temperamentally and physically, he's not a stereotypical fit for the role: He's an athletic guy, with big powerful thighs more suited to a body-builder than an aristocrat. So his dancing was far flashier than Tiit Helimets, but also big and exciting--such jumps! Such turns! And most of all, such clear, generous mime. Hardly a textbook interpretation, but a thoroughly credible and enjoyable one.

I would have loved to have seen Tina LeBlanc tonight, but we can't live at the opera house, can we?

Please leave a comment if you're a Rachel Viselli fan. I really would like to understand the appeal. And I would love to see her take her gifts and share them in a more human way with us.

February 27, 2007 · 11:49 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

I profiled ODC/Dance founder Brenda Way for yesterday's Chronicle; ODC's 37th annual home season opens Thursday:

"Brenda Way is not the kind of woman you'd think of as flitting, but that's what she's doing this gray morning in the kitchen of her Oakland home. She twirls to put on the teakettle and reaches for sugar on a high shelf with an agility that belies a recent hip operation. She takes a seat at the table almost giddily, eager to share her reactions to Trisha Brown's latest dance at Cal Performances. But when the conversation turns to her own work, her blue eyes become serious and her makeup-free face assumes its usual expression of formidable thoughtfulness.

"I feel so compelled by what's going on around me," she says, cradling her mug in both hands. "The political situation has just been dire. And what you're doing when you make new work is saying, 'Consider this.' "

Way, 64, who founded the company now known as ODC/Dance 36 years ago, has been uncannily prescient in what she's asked her audiences to consider. In 2000, her "Crash" evoked the irrational exuberance that preceded 1929's Black Tuesday -- and the dot-com stock market faltered soon after. But Way's most arresting moment of topicality came in 2004, when her "On a Train Heading South" adorned the stage with hanging blocks of slowly melting ice -- two years before Al Gore made us all acknowledge a certain inconvenient truth.

Normally, after such a socially charged piece, Way would retreat to pure movement invention, but last year she pressed onward with "Time Remaining," an allegory about religious extremism. Now she's unveiling what she conceives as the final installation of a trilogy. "A Pleasant Looking Woman in Sensible Clothes," premiering during ODC's annual home season this week, uses video by the Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa. In the early frames, a toy plane flies around a house. Soon more join it to form a horde.

"I thought that was how I felt about the use of terror in our lives," Way says. "It's invaded our homes. And this fear debilitates us."

The title comes from a New York Times story on Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
"It's the phrase they used to describe Samuel Alito's wife," Way says. "And it's such a slam of every woman that I thought, 'Well, excuse me!' And I think it's that kind of person who's terrified by what's going on, an ordinary housewife."

If Way takes the Times' phrase so personally, that might be because it evokes aspects of her. Way, who had two children before age 20, has always been domestic. And like a good wife and mother, she has often stood quietly in the background of great accomplishments -- not only her children's but also her dance company's.

Way is rarely front and center, choosing to flank herself with ODC co-Artistic Director KT Nelson and Kimi Okada, school director and associate choreographer -- even though Way has been the primary force behind this successful and influential modern dance institution, now with a school, a theater and a $9.5 million headquarters in the Mission District.

"There's no major development regarding dance in this town over the past 30 years that Brenda hasn't been a part of," says Stanford University dance Professor Janice Ross, who first saw Way's work when ODC, then in Ohio, toured to San Francisco in 1974. "She's one of the great unsung teachers in the way she's raised the level of conversation about dance here." "

Click here for the full story.

February 26, 2007 · 10:06 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of William Forsythe's "Three Atmospheric Studies" is in today's Chronicle:

"Much fuss has been made over William Forsythe's decision to tackle the Iraq war in his "Three Atmospheric Studies," which had its keenly anticipated U.S. premiere at UC Berkeley's Cal Performances on Thursday. The issue isn't whether choreographers should make dances about the war, but whether William Forsythe should.

Forsythe has long attracted such scrutiny: He's an American who left for the headier intellectual climate of Germany, where the Forsythe Company, which rose last year from the ashes of his celebrated Ballett Frankfurt, is based; and he's a former savior-apparent of the ballet world who instead forsook classroom steps for relentless experimentation. He's also the only dance artist I can think of capable of evoking war with such visceral devastation. "Three Atmospheric Studies" is sobering and deeply disturbing. It is incredibly difficult to watch, which is exactly why it ought to be seen.

There is much that is striking about "Three Atmospheric Studies," but most important is this: It unfolds entirely from the innocent civilian's point of view.

Forsythe builds his triptych of scenes around four images. Two are 16th century crucifixion paintings, one by Lucas Cranach the Younger, and one by Cranach the Elder; Forsythe's interest in each is the bereaved Mary mourning her slain son. The other two images are recent photographs of mayhem on the streets of Iraq. The analogy is not subtle: Mary as an Iraqi civilian grieving over her child; the Roman Empire as -- no, this is not a new idea -- the American occupation. But even if one takes issue politically with the comparison, there is no arguing with the realities of carnage and suffering Forsythe puts on stage."

Click here for the full review.

Generally, as I'm sure you'll gather, I'm a Forsythe admirer. But my response was also very personal. I have a brother, Emmet, serving as an Army sniper currently in Baghdad. It's the soldiers who have to see this suffering up close--and they hate to see it. They are doing their jobs as best they can, and they know the reality of this war, as we back home watch from afar. Emmet comes home on leave for two weeks March 15; he had been scheduled to end his deployment (and his employment in the Army) in June, but now may be held over for four to six months. Obviously my family is anxious to bring him home.

As to the more trivial discussion of whether "Three Atmospheric Studies" is dance, I don't see why it matters. It is dance, and it is theater, and it is sound art and it is visual art. It is deeply upsetting, which is exactly what it is intended to be, and dismissing it as "not dance" seems to me myopic.

February 24, 2007 · 09:07 AM · Dance · Comments (1)

It's 2:30 in the morning and I've just finished writing my review of William Forsythe's "Three Atmospheric Studies." GO SEE IT. You have only one more night. My review will be in Saturday's Chronicle.

February 23, 2007 · 02:28 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

So everyone in the dance world has had a chance to chime in about Alastair Macaulay's appointment to the top dance critic spot at the New York Times. I haven't said much because I prefer writing about dancers and dances to playing insider baseball, and because I'm not extensively familiar with Macaulay's work, though I like what I've read (and used to read him in the Times Literary Supplement while an undergrad student in London). But a few words must be said about Apollinaire Scherr's overheated reaction, which, if you haven't read her hot-off-the-presses post, boils down to this: The Times should have hired a woman critic, even though no better qualified female candidate emerged.

Scherr's reasoning runs thus: 1. Most players in the dance world--dancers, choreographers--are women. 2. Female critics need the affirmative action because women have a hard time being assertive enough to make it in journalism.

Her argumentation is especially specious. The headline of her post says it all: "Man leads 'girls' at the Times." The real reference here, lest you be misled by Scherr's methods, isn't to Macaulay. It's to outgoing chief critic John Rockwell who, Scherr reports, would refer to the female freelancers as his "girls." To tar Macaulay by association for his mere maleness is outrageous.

As for her other points, number one seems equally sexist as the attitudes Scherr decries. Number two I think has far more substance to it. I do think women, for all kinds of cultural reasons, generally have a harder time being as opinionated as men--I see this every day in the lunchroom gender dynamic of the Writers Grotto, the office co-op where I work. But the way to correct this is coaching for female critics early in their careers, not through hiring less-qualified candidates into top positions. Also, I've seen younger female critics be quite opinionated indeed: Gia Kourlas clearly has no troubles stating her mind (which I thoroughly enjoy), and the female interns I had under my watch at the Examiner were so eager to slash and burn that I actually had to teach them judiciousness, not coax them out of meekness. Which leads to one final thought: Why assume good criticism ought to rely on the sterotypical male qualities of bombast and imperiousness? Deborah Jowitt's work--and her career and reputation--have done very well without them. As much as I admire the intellectual energy behind Scherr's writing, she might do well to shed a little bombast and imperiousness, too.

I've been hard-pressed to find dissenters who claim Macaulay is anything but wonderfully qualified. This is a controversy in search of a target. I look forward to seeing what he does at the Times.

UPDATE: Doug Fox at Great Dance widens the discussion beyond griping and insider cattiness, thank God. To quote Doug:

"The discussion about Alastair Macaulay's qualifications to be the new New York Times chief dance critic and whether or not a woman should have been appointed instead, fails to address a much more pressing issue about the future of dance criticism.

Essentially from a business and practical perspective, dance criticism is a dying art form in the US. There are now fewer and fewer paying opportunities for dance writers because many newspapers have cut back (or eliminated) the number of articles devoted to dance. . . .

. . .It appears that dance writers would rather argue over the remaining handful of dance writing gigs that pay real money than join forces to explore new, more lucrative opportunities for a larger numbers of dance writers."

I whole-heatedly agree, and share his vexation, even if I may count among the dancer writers who fail to fully explore how new media could change the profession. Doug goes on to detail how dance writers could be working with online video, and more tagging, and linking. Personally I'm not ready to trade in the notion of "dance critic" for "dance facilitator," and to me producing quality thought and writing must remain utmost, but there's a lot of useful technical information here and much to think about, and I thank Doug for his indefatiguable efforts.

February 20, 2007 · 10:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Alastair Macaulay is the new chief dance critic of the New York Times! Balletomanes rejoice. Apollinaire Scherr goes off the deep end.

And I, having no dance shows to review this week after a busy two weeks, rush off for tango class.

February 16, 2007 · 07:49 PM · Dance · Comments (2)

I reviewed the Stephen Petronio Company for today's Chronicle:

"For fans of music star Rufus Wainwright, Stephen Petronio's latest dances sounded like a dream match: One of America's hippest choreographers takes on Canada's hippest nasal-voiced singer-songwriter.

But the early word from the Stephen Petronio Company's native New York was not warm, and over the weekend the troupe's San Francisco Performances engagement at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts proved why. The problem was not that Petronio's hard-edged aesthetic -- bodies that slash through space, legs and arms that work like switchblades -- stands emotional worlds apart from Wainwright's warm, witty pop-folk-opera mash-up. The problem was that Petronio uses Wainwright's music like wallpaper.

The cleverest element of "Bud Suite," set to four of Wainwright's best songs, was Tara Subkoff's costumes: half a blazer held on by straps for the two men in "Oh, What a World," campy tutus in "Vibrate" and post-coital-looking white men's shirts above red underwear for the women in "This Love Affair" and "Agnus Dei." Petronio himself had little to add to the music: His rocket-propelled couplings and signature closing tableaux neither contrasted meaningfully with the songs nor made any comment upon them. Lest this seem a mere pitfall of choreographing to contemporary pop music, let the record show that another New York choreographer, Doug Elkins, has made a wonderful toreador-inspired solo to "Vibrate."

Petronio's lack of a fruitful connection -- or disconnection -- to Wainwright's music only intensifies in the more ambitious "Bloom." Here the commissioned score is Wainwright in operatic mode, setting Whitman, Dickinson and a Latin Mass to droning choral harmonies (mostly his voice, recorded)."

Click here for the full review.

February 13, 2007 · 01:01 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed Robert Moses' Kin for today's Chronicle:

"It's not easy to break out of the middling modern-dance pack here in San Francisco, but Robert Moses has done it. The reasons are many: an edgy but eloquent style that roils from jive to jete in an instant, a brilliant facility for carving space, and a confrontational way off addressing the absurdities of race in America without ever simplifying or sermonizing.

A similar bounty marks the 12th annual outing of his company, Robert Moses' Kin, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco's Kanbar Hall. There are two world premieres by Moses, three revivals and a new work by the gifted young ballet choreographer Amy Seiwert. It's an overstuffed slate, too rich to digest in one sitting. It's also this troupe's most impressive home season in at least five years, and it repeats next weekend.

The substantial new Moses work is "Penance," set to a score by Daniel David Feinsmith, performed live by his Feinsmith Quartet. After several years of revising the conceptually cloudy "The President's Daughter" to uneven success, Moses has returned to pure movement invention with a vengeance. "Penance" is a primal battle of the sexes in which no one wins but the audience. The motifs here are falling and flailing, the men tossing the women about like ships on stormy waters. At one point, Katherine Wells is hoisted into the air to become a battering ram; the effect is truly disturbing. Later, men spar with men; tribal lines grow hazier; no hopefulness or happy answers are provided.

Feinsmith's music gives Moses a richly textured engine, churning fast, complex rhythms among piano, cello, electric bass and acoustic guitar. The whole machine loses a little momentum two-thirds through. But it never loses bite."

Click here for the full review.

February 10, 2007 · 10:48 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

This is what happens when a critic doesn't feel quite ready to pronounce judgment and writes a largely descriptive, diplomatic review: the opinions get supplied for you. Thus the headlines for my Chronicle review of Yuri Possokhov's new "Firebird" would leave you to think I felt rather upbeat about it, when in fact I left the theater feeling mildly unsatisfied, but wanting to see it once more to confirm this and pinpoint why. The review:

"The good news about Yuri Possokhov's "Firebird" at San Francisco Ballet is that the production really moves, as one pleasantly surprised luminary of the local dance scene enthused while dashing from the Opera House on Thursday.

Possokhov, the company's principal dancer-turned-choreographer in residence, was born in Ukraine and began his stage career at the Bolshoi. Russian through and through, he folds folk elements into his group dances with native naturalness, and the ensemble moments in this "Firebird" are filled with an exuberance to match Stravinsky's majestic score.

But the fact that this ballet should be lauded for being merely "dancey" says a lot about "Firebird's" problematic nature. Beloved musically since the 1910 Ballets Russes premiere, "Firebird" has, in the myriad versions that followed Fokine's, proved far more memorable as a star vehicle than for its choreographic interest. Ballerinas from Karsavina to Fonteyn to Kirkland have graced it, and the same intractable challenges have remained: The story is both simple and perplexing, difficult to stage with continuity and even more difficult to make emotional sense of. In memory, "Firebird" tends to condense to a glittery bird-woman flitting about, a lot of weird stuff with monsters and a sorcerer, and suddenly everyone's dancing and happy. The End.

Possokhov's tack in this staging, expanded from a 2004 production for the much smaller Oregon Ballet Theatre, is to run with all that. This is "Firebird" as a children's tale, though more cartoon than storybook. Prince Ivan -- danced with beautiful form by Tiit Helimets -- is a dolt; the princess -- sweet-faced Rachel Viselli -- is downright goofy. The evil Kaschei (go-for-broke Pascal Molat) is more silly than menacing. The cartoon approach finds its most over-the-top expression in the climactic fight scene, when Ivan gets hold of the magic egg and Kaschei and his horde of monsters chase after him in slow motion -- running in place like Wile E. Coyote before he realizes he's going to fall off a cliff. The opening-night audience ate this up."

Click here for the full piece.

I did return for a second look last night. I liked it far better then, for reasons of casting: Corps member Lily Rogers made a stunning Firebird, assured and glamorous. Rogers is a tall, fine-boned dancer made more fascinating by paradox: She looks frail but dances fierce. Sarah Van Patten danced the princess, lending the role her singular dramatic skills. One is tempted to say she missed her true calling as an actress--but when you see the unfurling of her legato line, you have to wonder if mere words could supply such a channel for her emotionality. Ruben Martin was the prince, and because he is younger than Tiit Helimets, his naivete seemed more natural than manufactured.

I walked away with a new appreciation for the invention of Possokhov's ensemble choreography, too. But even with an ideal cast, I am no fan of this "Firebird." It lacks sophistication. I'm all for comedy in the opera house, especially when it comes with the cutting, naughty edge of, say, Mark Morris--but Possokhov's "Firebird" lacks an adult knowingness; it comes across like a children's production. Several colleagues have said this "Firebird" would make a wonderful outreach ballet for elementary students, and I agree. As the marquee attraction for a company of San Francisco Ballet's caliber, it doesn't cut it.

Also, the scenery is downright ugly.

There. I said it.

Busy day, must dash---

UPDATE: Helimets is the same age as Martin (see comment below), which I never would have guessed. So Helimets' princely refinement and Martin's puppyish sweetness are entirely reflections of their stage personalities, not age--and I apologize for the presumptuousness.

February 08, 2007 · 10:52 AM · Dance · Comments (4)

I reviewed Manuelito Biag's "The Shape of Poison" for today's Chronicle:

"There was nothing gimmicky or trendy about "The Shape of Poison," the new full-evening work by young Manuelito Biag that premiered at ODC Theater over the weekend -- no multimedia conceptualizing, no self-important sociological statements, no cleverness. The dance is absorbing from start to finish for one reason: absolute craftsmanship. If that sounds unexciting, the results are anything but.

That's because each step Biag conceives for his company, called SHIFT >>>Physical Theater, springs from deep emotional motivation. Watching "Poison's" central duet for Biag and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart is like coming across a couple fighting in the street -- you can't help eavesdropping even as you cringe at every half-whispered recrimination, every carefully calculated barb. When Stuart slinks away and Biag launches into a passage of explosive failing, you feel it more acutely than the loudest screams. Bay Area dance followers have been alert to Biag's carefully controlled intensity for several years now, but this is his first full-length attempt, and it marks the full arrival of a major new talent."

Click here for the full review.

February 05, 2007 · 01:35 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of San Francisco Ballet's program one is in today's Chronicle:

"William Forsythe's "Artifact Suite" is designed to slap you in the face, but the startling thing last year was how the San Francisco Ballet corps danced it. They gave themselves to the limb-tearing extremes as though lives were at stake, teetering above gaping échappés like would-be suicides at the edge of a skyscraper.

Arms reached from torsos as though blown in a gale storm; legs stretched to the breaking point. The corps had enjoyed triumphs since Helgi Tomasson became artistic director in 1985, hitting new benchmarks in classics such as "Swan Lake." But "Artifact Suite" was the first work they seemed to possess in the way the Kirov might claim the works of Petipa, or the New York City Ballet, those of Balanchine. Their fierceness made a group statement: This is the San Francisco Ballet under Tomasson.

"Artifact Suite" is now a year old at the War Memorial Opera House, but the thrills were still fresh Tuesday, when the opening of this first repertory slate was a revelation of undiminished commitment."

Click here for the full story.

I wish I'd had more space to write about "Divertimento," which I saw again last night with a second cast. Not only is it one of my favorite Balanchine works, but it's the perfect test of young talent, and the scoop this year is that several of Helgi Tomasson's chosen favorites are coming into their own. It's a delicate proccess, grooming a new generation: at first the youngsters get cast in the roles of veteran dancers they physically resemble, and fans of the old guard (like myself) may bristle at the inevitable comparisons. For a while, Tomasson seemed to be developing Rachel Viselli to replace the irreplaceable Julie Diana, and while Viselli is lyrical and lovely, she lacked Diana's depth of vulnerability. Similarly, tall Elana Altman kept getting thrown into Muriel Maffre's roles--and if you've seen the ever-commanding Maffre, you know that seeing a sweet-faced thing like Altman as, for instance, the tall girl in "Rubies" just can't measure up.

But in "Divertimento" this week, comparisons were out the window. Viselli was absolutely radiant, and a touch glamorous with that exaggerated line through her neck. Likewise Altman, whose upper-body is beginning to find a creamy fluidity. Both were warm, gracious, and at ease in that way a dancer can only be when she is dancing like no one but herself.

In other reports on the new guard, I'm beginning to wonder what will happen with Sarah Van Patten. She has an actress's instinct, a natural drama that oozes from her legato dancing, but that quality often evaporates when the tempo picks up. Her upper and lower halves don't seem to want to move as a unified whole under brisk paces, and in her variation she seemed brittle. All was redeemed in her andante pas de deux. I don't even remember her partner, to be honest, but I remember her sense of spiritual yearning in it. There is more than drawing-room pleasantries beneath the surface of "Divertimento," and she alone plumbed its depths.

Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun stuck more to the pleasantries--but how pleasant they were. I think I've figured out the secret behind her bright, easy smile--her tawny skin. It makes those white teeth shine all the more winsomely. Outrageously fluid extensions don't hurt, either, along with pliant feet and perfectly plumb balances and turns. Let's face it--she has it all.

February 01, 2007 · 01:26 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

The Chronicle commissioned me to write a series of articles on African Americans in dance in advance of the third Black Choreographers Festival, which I preview here. I also talked to a sampling of black choreographers from both the Bay Area and beyond about the lingering assumptions behind that old genre label "black dance":

"A lot has changed since Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus took the 1940s concert dance world by storm, since Arthur Mitchell startled audiences by partnering white ballerinas at the New York City Ballet, since Donald McKayle created "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" to protest injustices in the South.

Hip-hop dancing, with its roots in the African diaspora, is an international phenomenon. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is now one of the most popular troupes in the world, and contemporary choreographers as distinct as Bill T. Jones and Ron K. Brown are at the forefront of their field.

And yet when UC Davis Professor Halifu Osumare leads a panel discussion next month as part of the Black Choreographers Festival, she hopes to revive an old question: "What is black dance?"

The terminology has long bothered her. "The label buys into the racial divide in America: 'white dance' versus 'black dance,' " she says. "But we're a culture of sound bites and shortcuts. It's so easy to say 'black dance' and think people know what you're talking about. If black choreographers are doing anything and everything in dance, 'black dance' is a misnomer. I say 'dance by black choreographers.' "

Osumare is hardly alone: 'Black dance' as a genre label is no longer used as a crutch as it was through most of the 20th century. But conversations with leading black choreographers suggest that the concept still provokes heated debate.

The Chronicle asked four black dancemakers, working in San Francisco and beyond, a deliberately open-ended question: What do you think are the main challenges to African Americans in dance today? Their answers were as individual as their aesthetics, and yet the recurring themes made clear that the assumptions behind "black dance" may still be with us, even if the label is not."

Click here for the full story.

And I talked with Aesha Ash--formerly of New York City Ballet and now with Lines Ballet--and Ikolo Griffin--formerly of San Francisco Ballet and now with Smuin Ballet--about what it's like to be a black dancer in the American ballet world. Click here for that story, and for a particularly beautiful photo of Aesha. Incidentally, according to my site stats, "Aesha Ash" brings more ballet fans to this site than any other ballerina (strong runners up being San Francisco Ballet's Yuan Yuan Tan, Lorena Feijoo, and Sarah Van Patten, with Nutnaree Pipit-Suksun quickly gaining ground).

The Chronicle, you'll notice if you visit sfgate.com lately, is becoming much more multi-media. One immediate perk is this video footage of highlights from Black Choreographers Festivals past. Click through for some great clips of New Style Motherlode, Jason Samuels Smith, Diamono Coura, and others.

January 29, 2007 · 07:45 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of the San Francisco Ballet gala in today's Chronicle:

"Galas take the temperature of their times, and the tone was subtly sober Wednesday as the San Francisco Ballet started its 74th season. A subdued audience claimed its seats with surprising promptness, depth of feeling marked the most affecting dancing, and individual artistry trumped odd programming choices. The austerity was strangely refreshing: This was a gala in which works of substance, and not the usual sugary bonbons, most satisfied our appetites.

That's not to say there weren't moments over the two hours of virtuosic movement to prompt smiles. Who wouldn't grin at the crisp spontaneity of Kristin Long and Joan Boada in Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's "Soirees Musicales," or giggle at Tina LeBlanc's whirlwind phrasing in Gerald Arpino's "L'Air D'Esprit"?

Yet an elegiac intensity marked the finest performances. Lorena Feijoo, always a committed artist and often a gala standout, danced the second act pas de deux from "Giselle" with such pathos that even viewers unfamiliar with the story could not help but feel for her Albrecht, the princely Tiit Helimets. He mourned at her graveside with beautifully placed extensions and feather-soft landings; she pleaded for his life with urgent, fluttery jumps and arms gently rounded in the Romantic style. From the worry on her striking face, you could almost picture the full corps of ghostly Wilis behind her, commanding that she dance her lover to death."

Click here for the full review.

January 26, 2007 · 12:06 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

In the midst of all the ballet bustle, my review of Shinichi Iova-Koga's new solo show is also in today's Chronicle:

"It's always heartening, as an observer of the local dance ecology, to find a young maverick artist so gifted that audiences seem to discover him through natural buzz about his talent. Such has been the case with Shinichi Iova-Koga, who divides his time between Berlin and the Bay Area, and who founded his performance collective inkBoat in 1994.

Iova-Koga is part of the Bay Area's butoh boom; he studied with Berkeley's famed Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, themselves disciples of Japan's Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the two progenitors of this darkly absurd, apocalyptic dance form. Like many of his generation, Iova-Koga has cast off butoh's calcified cliches -- the shaved head, the white body paint, the glacial pacing and practically patented look of horrified despair -- and yet retained its expressionistic, grotesque essence. He's also found a circle of brilliant avant-garde collaborators in sound and design. Call what Iova-Koga does butoh or post-butoh or whatever you want; it amounts to great movement theater. And judging from the crowds at his 2005 duet "Ame to Ame," the word seemed to be getting out about that.

So it was surprising, Friday night, to witness the engaged but small turnout at Brava Theater for "Milk Traces." Granted, "Milk Traces," which repeats next month at the cozier NOHspace, is small-scale, a 75-minute solo. But each of its simple elements is deeply thoughtful and apt, from Sheila Antonia Bosco's spine-tingling soundscape to Allen Willner's fog-drenched lighting to Cassie Terman's poetic fragments (printed only in the program). And the images and provocations Iova-Koga conjures with just his body and a few props amount to a worthy teaser for inkBoat's more ambitious premiere with experimental music group Nanos Operetta coming in July, and a brilliant performance in itself."

Click here for the full review.

January 26, 2007 · 12:00 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

The San Francisco Ballet's 74th season launches Wednesday with the opening gala. Allan Ulrich profiles departing ballerina Muriel Maffre in today's Chronicle. Meanwhile, the paper asked me to highlight some up-and-coming young dancers. I chose Jaime Garcia Castilla, Frances Chung, Rory Hohenstein, Nutnaree Pipit-suksun, Lily Rogers, and Sarah Van Patten. Click here to find out why. And look for my review of the gala in Friday's Chronicle.

January 21, 2007 · 11:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

This was a fun little ditty to write for the SF Chronicle--and Penni Gladstone snagged some colorful photos:

"The rest of San Francisco may have been frigid Sunday afternoon, but it was positively tropical in the Palace of Fine Arts' Dressing Room B, where two dozen women in bikini tops and towering headdresses practiced hip swivels and fluffed the pom-poms on each other's grass skirts.

"They're saying it's a good crowd out there," called Lisa Aguilar, director of the Te Mana O Te Ra, a Tahitian dance company. She wore a batik-printed robe and a priestess-style hat, and she looked like she meant business. "You set the momentum. You're going to make this rock 'n' roll for the rest of the afternoon. All right?"

"Five, six, seven, eight," the dance captain shouted as Aguilar looked on sternly, and the room filled with the swish of straw and muffled calls of "Oh sorry, sorry" as the women ran through their steps -- and into one another -- in the too-tight space.

But what are close confines to keep you from rehearsing when an appearance in the 29th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is on the line? More than 100 dance groups from across Northern California converged to compete for about 25 spots Friday through Monday.

The auditions were packed with "It's a Small World" moments: flamenco dancers in polka-dot shawls charging to their warm-up room, while Indian folk dancers folded sari pleats; a Polish dancer in embroidered black pants stopping a 14-year-old Peruvian star to check out his badge, which bore a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Korean performers floated onstage with feathered fans, while Mexican folklorico mujeres high-fived around the water cooler. Tango vixens waved their hands -- the silent backstage stand-in for clapping -- as a Bharatanatyam practitioner rushed for the wings, panting. It could have been a pep rally for the United Nations.

But it was all local. And the pressure was on. The house was nearly full, packed not only with friends and family, but also curious dance fans happy to check out the smorgasbord of styles for just $7 a day. And in the center row sat the eight expert panelists there to decide which groups would win a coveted spot in June's big show."

Click here for the rest.

January 18, 2007 · 10:57 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

This has to be one of the most memorable theater-going experiences of my career:

"You expect wild sights when you go to something billed as a "fire ballet." So it took a while, at Wednesday night's opening of "Romeo and Juliet," to realize that the torrential onstage downpour wasn't just part of the spectacle.

One minute, a giant flaming chandelier draped with aerial dancers was rising toward the ceiling; next thing you knew, attendees of the Capulet ball were strutting through a Category 5 hurricane. The first few rows of audience members remained gamely seated, like SeaWorld visitors who couldn't complain about being splashed by Shamu.

Only when one of the slippery-handed aerial dancers cried out, "Someone let us down!" did it dawn on many viewers that the emergency sprinklers had just been accidentally triggered.

The Oakland Fire Department rushed over to replace the broken sprinkler -- and a large crowd cheerfully waited an hour and a half in a frigid warehouse for the show to go on. Both responses are a tribute to the reputation of Michael Sturtz, executive director of the Crucible.

In 1999, he founded the West Oakland workshop to offer community classes in the "fire arts": welding, blacksmithing and less practical applications like flame throwing and fire swallowing. In 2004, he produced his first "fire opera," "Dido and Aeneas"; he's also since produced "The Seven Deadly Sins." But "Romeo and Juliet" was his first foray into ballet. And it was worth the wetness, and the wait."

There was real dancing, with Maurya Kerr of Lines Ballet as Juliet. Click here for my full review in today's Chronicle.

January 12, 2007 · 10:01 AM · Dance · Comments (2)

"You know how people say, 'crawl, walk, run'? Well, for me it was always 'crawl, walk, ballet'."

--Democratic Caucus Chair and former ballet dancer Rahm Emanuel today on Fresh Air.

January 11, 2007 · 06:52 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

My "forecast" of 2007 dance events to look forward to appeared (much truncated) in yesterday's Chronicle. Three less obvious picks that I'm especially optimistic about:

inkBoat ("The Crow Line": Jan. 19-20, Brava Theater; Feb. 8-11, Noh Space. Nanos Operetta collaboration: July 12-28, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) Founder Shinichi Iova-Koga is a third-generation butoh artist whose psychological insights reach right into the deepest, scariest parts of your brain. I've been impatient to see more of his work since 2004's explosive duet, "Ame to Ame." Koga is back in a big way in 2007: first with a new solo, "The Crow Line," that will tour to the New York Butoh Festival. Then, in July, a large-scale ensemble collaboration with Nanos Operetta, a San Francisco experimental music group with a macabre wit that should make an ideal fit with the inkBoat sensibility.

David Gordon (May 9-13, ODC Theater) David Gordon, the wittiest of the 1960s' Judson Church rebels, and the Pick Up Dance Company will bring the hit "Dancing Henry V," Gordon's off-kilter take on Shakespeare.

Scott Wells and Dancers (May 17-20, ODC Theater) Scott Wells is one of the Bay Area dance scene's best-kept secrets, a daredevil dancemaker who turns the freewheeling form of contact improvisation into a vehicle for astonishing acts of physical and emotional stuntmanship. For this 15th anniversary show, he'll premiere a new work for eight men, "Wrestling With Affection."

Since space on the web is infinite, here's the stuff that got cut:

Presenter Cal Performances saved all this season’s hot dance attractions for spring: William Forsythe’s new company visits Feb. 22-23; the painterly works of Shen Wei Dance Arts return Mar. 23-24, and superstar French ballerina Sylvie Guillem brings her collaboration with Kathak-trained British choreographer Akram Khan May 5-6.

Diablo Ballet: This Walnut Creek-based chamber troupe’s most promising spring offering presents a new “Hamlet” set to Shostakovich and choreographed by Viktor Kabaniaev, whose previous works have shown an astute musicality and a keen taste for drama. Also on the bill: twin brother Nikolai Kabaniaev’s “Grand Pas D’Action,” to Glazunov; and the pas de deux from Balanchine’s fun and fizzy “Stars and Stripes.” (Mar. 23-24, Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts).

ODC Theater director Rob Bailis has assembled a terrific dance slate for spring, with a new work by Shift Physical Theater’s enormously talented Manuelito Biag in February, postmodern luminary Deborah Hay in March, and evenings from local choreographers-to-watch Alex Ketley in May and Mary Carbonara in June.

Joe Goode is the grand finale of a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts-presented lineup that includes African Diaspora-influenced Reggie Wilson in February; a collaboration between local veteran Kim Epifano and Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company that same month; and Chinese-born Yin Mei’s “The River” in March. (Joe Goode: May 31-June 9, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts).

San Francisco Performances also brings the whiplash Stephen Petronio Company in its new work set to Rufus Wainwright music in February.

Other dance events to anticipate: Robert Moses' Kin's 2007 season runs February 8-18. And ODC/Dance brings its 36th season to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts March 1-18.

January 08, 2007 · 10:21 AM · Dance · Comments (1)

Christopher Wheeldon is starting his own ballet company. Nice to see that SF Ballet played a small part in this. From the NY Times:

"The idea began taking shape last summer when the San Francisco Ballet presented one of his pieces at the Lincoln Center Festival. The choreographer William Forsythe had a work on the same program, and the two spoke at length.

“He basically told me that I needed to take a step forward on my own and do something different, and coming from him — he is a man who has continued to invent himself — it was immediately resonant,” Mr. Wheeldon said."

January 05, 2007 · 01:07 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I was very sorry to learn that Sara Linnie Slocum, lighting designer much appreciated and loved in Bay Area dance circles, died December 27. Appropriately, her memorial service will be held at the Cowell Theater this Sunday.

January 03, 2007 · 10:25 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

the dance year that was

I recap the Bay Area's year in dance for today's Chronicle:

"HIGH: ODC Dance Commons ODC/Dance opened a gleaming 23,000-square-foot, $9.5 million center for dance in the Mission. With classes for young and old, rehearsal space for up-and-coming San Francisco companies, a physical therapy clinic, community lounge and -- every dancer's ultimate dream -- clean showers, this bustling hub is a boost to the entire dance community.

LOW: Oakland Ballet Just months after a 40th anniversary comeback, the company announced in January that it would dissolve after floundering under Artistic Director Karen Brown. But then in December, Oakland Ballet's beloved 70-year-old founder, Ronn Guidi, brought his "Nutcracker" back to the Paramount Theatre -- a move he hopes is prelude to starting a new ballet troupe in Oakland.

MOST IMPROVED: Erika Shuch. Her intuitive style of dance theater is tender, hip and unafraid to ask big, childlike questions. Her talent announced itself early -- but then the growing pains came. Intersection for the Arts let her keep exploring, even when the immediate results were distanced and diffuse. Then in July she unveiled "Orbit" -- sweet, silly and serious all at once, and her best work yet.

MOST VALUABLE PLAYER: Yuri Possokhov. The San Francisco Ballet principal dancer retired from dancing, but not before being named resident choreographer. This dramatic Bolshoi alumnus has too much talent for the company to let him get away."

A list of top 10 performances follows, and I'm rather pleased with it. My personal seared-into-memory favorites: Kathak master Birju Maharaj, San Francisco Ballet in Forsythe's "Artifact Suite," and the kinesthetic superheroes of Batsheva Dance Company.

I deliberated long and hard about the rest of the field because it was, locally, a better-than-average year for dance. Just six years ago the San Francisco dance scene was in crisis, forced out of its real estate by the dot com boom, angry, and panicked. Now Margaret Jenkins has her own space again--and one of her best works in years, "A Slipping Glimpse," soon to embark on national tour. Brenda Way at ODC has given us a light-filled dance center, home to the come-as-you-are classes of Rhythm and Motion, to local companies, and indeed to the whole dance commuity.

Over on Market and 7th, the San Francisco Dance Center is filled not just with professional dancers but also the students of LINES Ballet's new BFA program--and artistic director Alonzo King has just won a prestigious new USA Artists grant. Rob Bailis is now at the helm of ODC Theater, bringing us smartly curated programs of Bay Area and national talents alike. San Francisco Ballet is dancing better than ever, and gearing up for a 75th anniversary season in 2008.

Could we be entering another Bay Area dance boom? 2007 is looking awfully good. I'll have a list of 10 dance performances to look forward to in next Sunday's Datebook. The obvious picks are there--San Francisco Ballet, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor--but so are several lower-flying San Francisco-based talents I've had my eye on. Watch out for the link here next Sunday, and in the meantime let me know your own highlights from 2006.

Here's to much more great dancing in 2007. Happy New Year.

December 31, 2006 · 12:03 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

the "Nutcracker" cure

I was in an utterly foul mood before I entered the Opera House Thursday night, and within twenty minutes of San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker," all felt right with the world. Here's my review in the Chronicle:

"Everyone loves unwrapping shiny new things at Christmastime, but the true test of a "Nutcracker" is how it ages. San Francisco Ballet's $3.5 million production looked dazzling when it premiered two years ago. It looked even better Thursday, when the company gave it an opening-night performance full of spirit and warmth.

To say that Martin Pakledinaz's elegant costumes still sparkle and Michael Yeargan's stunning Edwardian-era sets look freshly minted is to miss this "Nutcracker's" deeper satisfactions. Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson placed a shrewd bet on civic pride when he set his "Nutcracker" in San Francisco circa the 1915 World's Fair -- but he did so much more right besides.

It's easy, and common, to transpose the action embedded in Tchaikovsky's eternal score to a novel time and place, but far more rare to make such emotional and storytelling sense of it. I can only imagine Tomasson's excitement when he hit upon the device -- too clever to reveal here -- that allows a grown-up ballerina to dance, as Clara, with her Nutcracker Prince. The moment lifts this "Nutcracker" from mere fantasy to a richer plane, the sweet tale of a not-so-little girl's first brush with maturity. The whole production, already bathed in lighting designer James F. Ingalls' luminous pastels, glows more brightly because of it."

And you have to click through to see this photo of the snow scene by Chronicle photographer Katy Raddatz. Beautiful.

December 16, 2006 · 10:30 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

This is fun . . . and sort of treacherous. Time Out New York lets the New York dance community review the New York dance critics. The Village Voice's Deborah Jowitt comes out on top, followed by the Wall Street Journal's Robert Greskovic, the Times' Jennifer Dunning, and the New Yorker's Joan Acocella. Newsday's relative newcomer Apollinaire Scherr makes a strong showing, and Time Out's own Gia Kourlas gets good marks but also draws commentary nastier than anything ever printed in her controversial reviews. (What were the editors thinking when they printed that bit about her being a "fashionista and a bitch"? That they didn't want to be seen as going soft on their own?)

Over on her blog, Apollinaire leaps on the list and deems it a potentially serviceable undertaking. I share her issues with the methodology, and I too wondered, where is Tobi Tobias?

I'm not brave enough to call for a similar ranking of West Coast critics.

December 07, 2006 · 06:12 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Memo to the Bay Area Dance Community

I'm putting together a list of ten dance performances to look forward to in 2007. My deadline is December 20. If you'd like to be considered, please email information about your performance to rachel at rachel howard dot com no later than December 13.

Many thanks!

December 07, 2006 · 10:11 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed Ivory Coast troupe Compagnie TcheTche for today's Chronicle:

"Pain has probably never displayed itself so authentically as on the faces of Compagnie TchéTché, a quartet of female dancers from Ivory Coast. Suffering was inescapable Friday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum as the 9-year-old troupe made its Bay Area debut, throwing themselves into each other's arms, clutching their throats as though strangled and then offering their hands to the sky in desperate, disintegrating prayer.

The real drama, though, was in the eyes: tense, watery, constantly on the verge of tears. At the end of the hourlong "Dimi" -- which translates roughly to "sorrow" -- the women broke down into audible sobs, and their mournful expressions at curtain call suggested this was no Herculean feat of acting.

Rarely, though, did the power of their feeling come across in movement. In one of the more effective episodes, Nina Kipre flies backward across the floor as though shot, clutches her hands to her crotch, then removes her corduroy blazer and rolls it so tightly against her stomach you almost feel it's a baby she might crush out of a sheer desire to shield it. It's chilling when she then saunters off, hand swinging as though to an imaginary beat.

But, mostly, founder Béatrice Kombé's choreography comes off as a series of disconnected studio exercises, lacking through-line and structure."

Click here for the full review.

December 04, 2006 · 02:48 PM · Dance · Comments (1)

I was surprised and saddened yesterday to receive a press release announcing that Summerdance Santa Barbara, the fantastically smart and provocative festival of contemporary dance founded by Dianne Vapnek, is suspending operations after ten years. I followed this festival from its start, when I was a twenty-year-old would-be dance critic writing for the Santa Barbara Independent and Vapnek brought out Doug Varone and Dancers, the first company of real sophistication I'd ever had a chance to watch in rehearsal and lecture demonstrations. From the beginning, the festival’s biggest asset was Vapnek’s good taste, which leaned toward the brainy and slightly naughty: Doug Elkins, Larry Keigwin, and Aszure Barton, for instance, with forays into flamenco and tap. The festival’s other major asset, of course, was setting: There is nothing quite like watching the Brian Brooks Moving Company dance on the lawn of the Santa Barbara Mission with the view stretching towards mountains on one side and the ocean on the other on a balmy July day.

Vapnek didn’t just import companies: She gave them time and space to work, and commissioned new dances. She also brought kids from the impoverished Orange County town of Santa Ana to take class with world-class teachers. At last July’s festival, everything looked full-tilt: Mikhail Baryshnikov stopped with his Hell’s Kitchen Dances program as part of Summerdance, Robert Battle set a work on local company State Street Ballet, Doug Varone and Dancers began a new piece, and Aszure and Artists danced sold out shows.

The festival was a labor of love for Vapnek, who invested so much of her own money in it. Perhaps she needed a rest, and she deserves it. No doubt she’ll continue feeding the national dance scene in myriad behind-the-scenes ways. The festival never got the wider attention I felt it deserved, perhaps because L.A. didn’t have a substantial enough dance scene for Summerdance Santa Barbara to become a satellite to. But it helped change Santa Barbara from a sleepy resort town into a destination for truly sophisticated art, and it gave me and thousands of other audience members some of the most charmed dance experiences of our lives. I’ll be in mourning come next July.

December 01, 2006 · 03:08 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

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I reviewed the SF Hip Hop Dance Fest for today's Chronicle:

"The idea of a hip-hop dance festival may seem gratuitous in an age when everyone from Justin Timberlake to a squeaky puppet named Elmo is doing it. But there was no festival dedicated exclusively to the form in 1999, when San Francisco dancer Micaya created the SF Hip Hop DanceFest.

Do we still need a hip-hop dance festival? Absolutely. You'd have to do more than surf through countless music videos to come up with a survey of hip-hop dancing as wide ranging, fresh and -- oh, yes -- roof raising as the two programs that kept the beats pounding and the bodies shaking over the weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

Friday's opening night was a party. It was also eye-opening exposure to hip-hop gone global. Who knew that in Montreal, a sextet of women calling themselves Extreme freak furiously while wearing '80s-esque acid-washed jeans and flinging Jon Bon Jovi-worthy feathered hair? And who could imagine a talent as sui generis as Japan's Takahiro Ueno, a skinny, Chaplin-esque fellow who krumps and pops -- hilariously -- to everything from Richard Rodgers to Verdi."

Click here for the full review.

November 20, 2006 · 12:55 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I felt both dazzled and skeptical about Sankai Juku's recent visit, which I reviewed for the Chronicle yesterday, and I can't say I've yet resolved my ambivalence:

"It's not hard to see why Sankai Juku is the leading popularizer of Japanese butoh, so wildly loved that co-presenters San Francisco Performances and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts counted themselves lucky to book a sold-out, two-night midweek run at the YBCA Theater.

Bald and covered in white body paint per now-standard butoh cliche, these dancers look like eerily wise, ancient tortoises.

And yet they have the alabaster allure of mannequins in a Neiman Marcus window, so bathed is their every deliberate movement in brilliant light.

In "Kagemi," the 2000 work now on national tour, they also have a stunning set: a ceiling of giant white lotus leaves that hover as though floating on water. Choreographer and founder Ushio Amagatsu has subtitled his work "Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors," and apparently he intends us to see the dancers as though peered through the reflection of a lake, swimming in some primordial subconscious state. But whether you see "Kagemi" as flowing with watery meaning or flooded with empty butoh stereotypes may depend on the consciousness you bring to it."

For the full review, click here.

November 17, 2006 · 01:48 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

I reviewed Lines Ballet's latest home season for today's Chronicle:

"Alonzo King is not the kind of choreographer who can operate on autopilot with passable results. His concern is nothing less than the transcendent possibilities of the human heart, which his sleek, eminently rubber-jointed dancers explore in intensely allegorical, New Age-tinged encounters.

In a King pas de deux, the man doesn't support the woman as she twirls through perfectly centered, regal pirouettes. Instead, he folds her limbs like elaborate origami, she presses her hands against his chest as though pleading for emotional distance, he bends her at the waist until she's on all fours, she throws herself upon his back, spasming with vulnerability. When King is on, such a duet can leave you in awe of its profundity. When King is going through the motions, it can look like the world's most pretentious game of Twister.

Both effects are on display now at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, where King's Lines Ballet opened its fall home season Friday with two recent pieces new to San Francisco. "Migration," a commission for Germany's Wolfsburg Festival, is a heavenward journey laced with virtuosic dancing and tender, touching moments -- King at his best. "Sky Clad," which uses live music by Hindustani vocalist Rita Sahai, is a soulless trudge through half an hour of vague exoticisms and empty symbolism. The contrast is fascinating."

Click here for the full review.

November 06, 2006 · 10:06 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

Joan Acocella's latest New Yorker column on British choreographer-of-the-moment Akram Khan is one of her best pieces of work, in my opinion. After grappling with the musical complexity and historical intricacies of kathak myself for the past month, I'm dazzled by how simply but masterfully she breaks the form down for a general audience. Speaking of 68-year-old kathak master Birju Maharaj, she writes:

" He showed us how to lay a three-count foot-stamping phrase over a four-count musical phrase, and how to fit fives into sixteens. Saswati Sen did a dance to a count of nine and a half, a feat few people would have dreamed of. She accomplished it by taking some of the beats at double speed, and that is something else about kathak: how fast it gets, with no sacrifice of clarity. The dancer may be spinning like a rotary blade, but, from second to second, the head and arms are making exactly this shape, then exactly that. You can’t believe it—that so many different things are coming out of one source. And that’s not to speak of the mime dances, usually based on Hindu mythology, that are done in alternation with the rhythm studies. In these routines, the kathak performer often plays several characters In a tale from the Ramayana, Sen was now virtuous wife, now the god who seduced her, now the enraged husband, and also the river flowing by. Kathak is probably at least eight hundred years old, and in that time it has developed extraordinary subtlety.

Occasionally, for this reason, it is confounding. "

She goes on to contend that Khan is overwhelmingly popular because, in combining "ethnic" dance with modern, he gives audiences something now rare in modern dance: a driving beat. I could have used a few examples of how modern dance purportedly eschewed musicality long prior to the Judson Church rebels (she's talking about Cunningham, I suppose, though I'd like to know how far she thinks the rift with musicality reaches back), but I'm intrigued by the assertion. Definitely read Acocella's full column, here.

October 28, 2006 · 01:29 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Good news for ballet in Oakland . . . My story in the Chronicle today:

"Ballet in Oakland is a long saga that revolves around a single man: Ronn Guidi. He founded the Oakland Ballet in 1965, led it to international notice with revivals of rare masterpieces, and watched along with a heartsick community in recent years as the ballet faltered after his retirement.

Now, as Oakland arts lovers are still smarting from the Oakland Ballet's closure, Guidi is back. "Ronn Guidi's 'Nutcracker' " will run four performances, Dec. 22-24, at the Paramount Theatre, with live music from the Oakland East Bay Symphony. The return of this 33-year tradition is also the first glimmer of possible regeneration for ballet in Oakland.

"So many people on the street were saying, 'You better come back with your 'Nutcracker' this year, we're waiting,' " said Guidi, who recently turned 70. "My batteries are recharged to make this happen. I'm in for the long haul."

Guidi has so far raised $110,000 toward a $200,000 budget, with a $25,000 donation from the Chevron Corporation. He plans to channel ticket profits toward future performances, and he already has his sights on a 2009 festival marking the 100th anniversary of the Ballets Russes, the artistically revolutionary Paris company whose landmark ballets he so lovingly revived."

Click here for the full story.

October 06, 2006 · 10:08 AM · Dance · Comments (1)

My review of "Kathak at the Crossroads" is in today's Chronicle:

" "The 'one' is Krishna," Birju Maharaj told an entranced audience Friday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. "All the beats want to reach toward Krishna, to one, to home," said the 68-year-old master of Indian Kathak dance. "You are going everywhere, but you are coming back home."

By "one" he meant the downbeat, the start of a new rhythmic cycle and the mystical moment of wholeness in Kathak, which is as much about musicianship as movement. And over the next hour he took his audience on ever more surprising journeys there, toying with time so that you could almost hear it in three dimensions, testing silence to the point that you wondered how he could ever reconnect, and always, astonishingly, arriving home with perfect surety.

His rhythms were an education in recognizing order in seeming chaos, like hearing music in rainfall or suddenly seeing a stunning design in the night stars. They seemed to promise that everything in life will be revealed to have pattern and purpose, if you have patience to wait for the downbeat.

Maharaj was the banner attraction of Kathak at the Crossroads, a landmark international festival organized by San Francisco's own esteemed Kathak guru, Chitresh Das. His performance revealed why the ancient art form thrives, and why its future is worth worrying about. The three-day festival was a celebration, to be sure, with dozens of gurus and disciples flown in from India, and crowds of connoisseurs from the Bay Area's large Indian community in attendance."

Click here for the full review.

October 03, 2006 · 01:15 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Apollinaire Scherr, one-time Bay Area dance-watcher and now a feistily individualistic (and sometimes controversial) dance writer for Newsday, has just started a blog at the invaluable Arts Journal.

Among the topics her first post poses for exploration:

"--Do I have to leave my brain at the door? Some definitions of "stupid" in dance, and why people don't need to tolerate it
--Blackface in ballet: some definitions of "offensive" in ballet, and why people don't need to make excuses for it
--Civility in criticism: what would that be and what's it worth?
--The complaints about New York City Ballet's Peter Martins, and why he's not listening
--The trend in modern dance of using untrained dancers, and the trial it puts us through
--The contempt some modern-dance choreographers have for critics: do we deserve it?"

San Francisco's own Paul Parish has already jumped in. Go here to check it out.

September 28, 2006 · 10:56 AM · Dance · Comments (0)

My review of "Classical Savion" appeared in yesterday's Chronicle:

" "Can you get rid of that?" Savion Glover called to a harried stagehand at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Friday night. And then, after the speaker's hum persisted, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to do this next number ex-amplification."

No one worried. Just 10 minutes into Glover's latest touring show, "Classical Savion," it was clear the onetime "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" prodigy doesn't need mikes. In fact, it takes a while to adjust to the thunderous boom of Glover's taps on a hollow wood stage as behind him a nine-piece string ensemble plays everything from Mendelssohn to Shostakovich. But even when Glover's rhythms were as light and crisp as castanets, the crowd was rapt .

It's hardly news that you can put a fresh beat under Bach and come up with something swinging, and "Classical Savion" is no longer so novel. The show played Marin Veterans' Memorial Auditorium in November before coming to Cal Performances for this one-night stand. But to hear the way Glover absolutely infiltrates Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" -- sliding a sunny Latin rhythm beneath the last flutters of "Spring," letting the lull in "Winter" sway before hitting eighth notes like a sudden storm -- is to witness deep musicianship, not gimmickry. This show has reportedly been retooled since its January 2005 unveiling; whatever the past failings, Glover can now keep a vast auditorium spellbound for the better part of two hours without an intermission."

Click here for the full review.

September 26, 2006 · 01:17 PM · Dance · Comments (0)

Kathak at the Crossroads

Dozens of Kathak gurus and disciples straight from India are about to take over the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for a major international conference. I wrote about the man behind the gathering, San Francisco's own Chitresh Das, for today's New York Times:

"IN most classical dance forms, effortlessness is an illusion, but in Indian Kathak it’s a force of will. That seemed the only way to explain the strained, determined smiles of a dozen women as they stamped and spun, tunics soaked with sweat and feet laden with five pounds of bells. At the front of the room Chitresh Das, the wild-eyed man who styles himself the George Balanchine of Kathak, slapped the tabla. “Taka dimi, taka dimi,” he shouted, chanting the beat. “Come on, I’m not hearing you. Louder!”

The rhythms rushed to an ecstatic explosion, and as the climax faded, Mr. D