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 Bront? 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.

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