YBCA

THURSDAY

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Aug. 17

Performance

SUPER VISION

Between birth and death certificates, our multiple data bodies circulate in a made-up universe called the datasphere, where they are both rigorously and haphazardly constructed, mined, and manipulated beyond the full awareness, let alone control, of the old physical bodies left behind. Not science fiction, of course, just the mundane information age. This weekend its ominous dimensions find sensory expression on a grand scale in SUPER VISION, a multimedia performance by New York experimental theater group the Builders Association in collaboration with high-tech design firm dbox. SUPER VISION is a tale (three actually) of the bit-based shackles made from proliferating consumer “choices” and technological possibilities. (Robert Avila)

Through Sat/19
8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
700 Howard, SF
$23-$30
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Theater

True West

Sibling rivalry is a bitch. Being the oldest of five brothers and sisters, I grew up in a semidaft household where the walls buckled with teenage angst and bratty pretensions. I can certainly sympathize with the vendetta the two brothers of Sam Shepard’s True West have against each other. Directed by Gabrielle Gomez, True West depicts the story of Austin – a conservative man with a peaceful life, caring for his mother’s house in Arizona – and his squandering brother, Lee, who unexpectedly visits him. True West marks the debut of the passionate and young Panhandler’s Theater company and features a performance by alt-country musician Jeffery Luck Lucas. (Chris Sabbath)

Through Aug. 26
8 p.m.
Artaud Gallery Theater
450 Florida, SF
$20
(415) 626-1021
www.artaud.org/theater

Big bang

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW Near the end of “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman’s woozy celebration of the universe contained within, he asks, “Do I contradict myself?” then responds to his own query, “Very well, then, I contradict myself.” This is followed by the oft-cited parenthetical thought, “I am large — I contain multitudes,” a sentiment that has been variously expressed in art since Whitman did so at the turn of the 20th century. “Cosmic Wonder,” a group exhibition featuring more than 20 emerging and established artists and an artists collective, offers a new take on Whitman’s lines as well as on one of the other overarching themes of the poem: the complexity of the American identity.
The heart of “Cosmic Wonder” revolves around the soul — more specifically, around a 21st-century reading of spirituality and our current relationship with the natural world. Threaded throughout are propositions toward articuutf8g the self within the context of an increasingly chaotic society that’s split between the built environment (manufactured slabs of concrete and acres of glass, metal, and plastic) and the myriad holes (some might call them black) within cyberspace. In the exhibition introduction, guest curator Betty Nguyen writes that among other things, “Cosmic Wonder” is about the “relationship of the individual to the multitude.” The contemporary “I” contains multitudinous parts; the song of the self is a dissonant dirge in multiple echo chambers; the largess of self is refracted across numerous surfaces. How to find oneself in this fractured landscape?
The black-and-white DVD projection Untitled (Silver) by Takeshi Murata (whose Monster Movie was part of “The Zine Unbound” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last year) is more of a kinetic painting than a video — the aesthetic is that of a painterly pixilation made of swooping gestures, as if an invisible brush is drawing the action. A woman moves through an indiscernible landscape, her figure dissolving between the abstract and wholly recognizable. Set to a squishy electronic soundtrack composed by Robert Beatty and Ellen Mollé, it suggests the ways identity morphs as we move through real and virtual time, shape-shifting in order to adapt to whichever environment we’re in. A stream of pixels trails the woman’s figure, as if she’s leaving programming code and bits of herself behind as she wends her way through a so-called meatland (as cybergeeks refer to life off-line) and cyberspace.
Shrines abound in various forms: Yukinori Maeda’s Eclipse/Eclipse Weeping Rock floor installation; Paper Rad’s wall-mounted installation consisting of hundreds of paintings and drawings and four DVDs; Mark Borthwick’s photographs, drawings, and performance environment Is My Nature My Only Way; and a giant mandalalike site-specific wall painting by Hisham Bharoocha. Spend a little time in the main gallery and it becomes difficult to determine what could be considered a shrine and what’s straight-up installation, especially in the context of the remainder of the show. Although taking cues from religious configurations, these shrines embody a more current vision of how to access the divine. What is offered can be seen as a sort of shrine reclamation project that eschews any particular religious doctrine in favor of celebrating those things that strike a more universal chord (inasmuch as anything can be considered universal in this age of political and religious partisanship). At the end of one of the videos serving as the centerpiece of the work by Paper Rad (a collective hailing from Pittsburgh, Penn., and Northampton, Mass.), the voice-over narration asks for a “nonexclusive real prayer” to put to rest a robot battle involving the U2 iPod, Adam Sandler, and … I forget what else. The point is it would be nice to think a “nonexclusive real prayer” could be said to help resolve some of the conflicts currently raging around the world.
Nature’s beauty is championed through chosen material (Jose Alvarez’s sculptural paintings made of mineral crystals and seashells), content (Doug Aitken’s geometrically reconfigured landscape horizon lines), and intent (Mike Paré’s illustrations of blissed-out festivalgoers and ritual-inventing skateboarders). Arik Moonhawk Roper’s animation Lazarian Forest is a darker and perhaps more accurate depiction of our current relationship with nature. Set to a squawking, increasingly agitated soundtrack, a strange flower blooms in stop-motion stages. Leaves unfurl skyward, a bulb sprouts from its stem, and the music reaches a crescendo as the bulb slowly cracks open to reveal a green human skull — the simultaneous celebration and destruction of nature encapsulated. Very well, then, we contradict ourselves. SFBG
COSMIC WONDER
Through Nov. 5
Tues.–Wed. and Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$3–$6
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Royal Fleischer

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Ever since somebody figured out that movies were, indeed, an art form, directors have been viewed as lone authors, or at least queen bees imperially orchestrating the efforts of mostly faceless subordinate collaborators. This is a flattering view, and sometimes a fairly accurate one. But they don’t call it the film industry — as opposed to, say, the film canvas — for nothing. Most employable directors are worker drones who just get the job done. Any job. After all, it’s competency that’s needed, not vision, the goal being entertainment rather than art.
When Richard Fleischer died three months ago, a final door closed on one of the most versatile, undiscriminating, and thoroughly Hollywood careers ever. In fact, the 90-year-old director had long been retired — his last feature was 1987’s Million Dollar Mystery, a starless farcical flop that coproducer Glad Bags promoted via a product tie-in: a $1 million treasure hunt. (The movie, alas, earned less than its title.) But his never stopped being ubiquitous as the “directed by” name on many of the most frequently televised films ever made. Some had originally been major hits, some bombed, some just punched the clock. But all were created equal in the eyes of the tube — and most likely, it seems, in the purview of Fleischer himself.
Just try connecting the dots between the features Fleischer directed between 1966 and 1976, when he was at his peak as a critically derided but reliable veteran entrusted with millions in studio money. He bounced from the psychedelic sci-fi adventure of Fantastic Voyage — with body-suited Raquel Welch as its most special effect — to 1967’s elephantine family musical fantasy Doctor Dolittle, then wasted no time and probably less sleep before turning to 1968’s The Boston Strangler.
Next up was 1969’s notoriously stupid Che!, with Dr. Zhivago (a.k.a. Omar Sharif) as the romantic revolutionary and daft Jack Palance as Fidel. Then came straight-up WWII patriotism via 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, followed by a western, a Godfather knockoff, Charles Bronson avenging as usual, blind Mia Farrow walking barefoot on broken glass to escape a murderer, 1973’s immortal Soylent Green, 1975’s bad-taste campsterpiece Mandingo, and — perhaps most incredibly in this context — Glenda Jackson as The Incredible Sarah in 1976. (Pauline Kael griped, “To think we were spared Ken Russell’s Sarah Bernhardt only to get Richard Fleischer’s,” dubbing him a “glorified mechanic [who] pleases movie executives because he has no particular interests and no discernable style.”)
Somehow amid all this middlebrow showmanship, Fleischer snuck in a small, low-key, fact-based British movie during 1971. 10 Rillington Place — part of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “Too Scary for DVD: Neglected Horror on 35mm” series — is closer in spirit to the sharp, documentary-influenced B-grade noirs (1952’s The Narrow Margin, 1949’s Trapped) with which he started out his career, before Disney’s 1954 live-action smash 20,000 Leagues under the Sea promoted him to the A-list. Fleischer made several true crime films over the years, but arguably none truer than this chillingly poker-faced tale.
The Christie murders were infamous in Britain, not least because the execution of a probably innocent man played a significant role in that country’s abolition of the death penalty. Milquetoast landlord John Christie drugged, assaulted, and strangled numerous women, hiding their bodies in the Notting Hill house and backyard he shared with tenants and his oblivious wife. 10 Rillington Place focuses on those events of 1948, when a rather awful young couple (Judy Geeson, John Hurt) and their baby took the dingy upstairs flat. The Evanses were easy prey — the husband an illiterate compulsive liar with an IQ of 70, the pretty wife no exemplar either but understandably concerned that a second pregnancy would make their already marginal existence impossible. Christie (Richard Attenborough, future director of Gandhi) claimed knowledge of then-illegal abortion procedures, to Beryl Evans’s fatal misfortune.
Trading in British working-class miserabilism as if born to it (even Ken Loach would be impressed), the distressing yet nonhyperbolic Rillington delivers one credible version of the much-disputed case. Everything about it is astutely controlled, but two performances — Attenborough’s and Hurt’s — push that description into the realm of brilliance, indelibly etching the respective banalities of evil and of innocence.
One might call this sober replay of sordid reality an anomaly for Fleischer, but what film of his isn’t? Like several other major-league commercial directors of the ’60s (Robert Wise, Stanley Donen), he hung on through the ’70s but developed a serious case of irrelevance in the ’80s. Indeed, the embarrassments lined up like ducks: Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer, Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja, Amityville 3-D. No doubt he enjoyed the retirement that by then was so richly deserved. It is reported that he liked playing tiddlywinks with his granddaughter, perhaps while seated near his Mickey Mouse head–shaped swimming pool. (This despite his own father being Betty Boop creator Max Fleischer, Walt Disney’s leading early rival.) The director of Boston Strangler and Mandingo must have been a very nice, normal man to accommodate so many contradictions with so little fuss. He may be in the grave now, but it’s we the living who are spinning. SFBG
10 RILLINGTON PLACE
Thurs/20, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room
701 Mission, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

FRIDAY

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JULY 14

VISUAL ART

“Cosmic Wonder”

Green baked goods, acid flashbacks, good times, bad trips – one expects all that and more packed into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ latest extravaganza, “Cosmic Wonder,” guest curated by onetime Bay Area promoter, writer, and all-around nightlife scenester Betty Nguyen. The opening-night party will likely make you want to dunk your head in the Kool-Aid: Dreamy, drifting NY freak-folked collective Feathers headline with music culled from their recent self-titled disc on Gnomonsong. (Kimberly Chun)

July 15-Nov. 5.
Opening night party Fri/14, 8-11 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
701 Mission, SF.
Opening party admission $12-$15.
Regular admission $3-$6.
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

DANCE

Erika Shuch Performance Project

Dancer- choreographer Erika Shuch is a Bay Area wild child. She is running, always. Where to? She probably doesn’t know. But she usually ends up in some unusual places. Orbit examines that search for connection between us and whatever – if anything – is “out there.” (Rita Felciano)

Through Aug. 5.
Thurs-Sat, 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF.
$9-$20, sliding scale.
(415) 626-3311
www.theintersection.org

THURSDAY

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JUlY 6

LECTURE
Peter Camejo
Hear former Green Party candidate for California governor Peter Camejo talk about his new book on how corporations have taken control of our state, California Under Corporate Rule. (Deborah Giattina)

7:30 p.m.
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, SF
Free
(415) 282-9246,

Film
“Too scary for DVD”
Poor Roberto is a rock ‘n’ roll drummer who tangles himself up in a bizarre mess of murders. Featuring classic deaths like the needle-to- the-heart, and of course the “Did that guy really die?” death, Four Flies on Grey Velvet is more than any film buff could hope for. This rare Argento giallo has never been available on DVD or VHS but lucky you – you live in San Francisco! The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be showing an offbeat 35mm horror film every Thursday in July. Later this month David Lowell Rich’s Eye of the Cat will change the way you look at felines. Think you have landlord problems? Watch Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place. Finally, watch Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye for the best in psycho-delic slash. (K. Tighe)

Every Thursday in July
7 p.m., 9:15 p.m.
YBCA Screening Room [www.ybca.org]
701 Mission, SF
$6-$8
(415) 978-ARTS

Mini mini CinemaScope!

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The term CinemaScope might conjure a 2.66-to-1 vision of an extra-bodacious Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire, or, if you’re a certain breed of movie maniac, it might inspire a recitation of Fritz Lang’s famous Contempt-uous remark that the format is fine for filming snakes and coffins, but not for capturing people. Bizarre, then, that Liu Jiayin has taken an outmoded approach known for gargantuan celluloid spectacle and revived it — brilliantly — for small-scale digital family portraiture. Winner of numerous festival prizes, including the competitive Dragons and Tigers award bestowed in Vancouver last fall, Liu’s BetaSP debut feature, Ox Hide, has more than once been deemed the most important first feature to emerge from China since Jia Zhangke’s 2000 Platform. That’s a fest obsessive’s way of saying that Liu is the real deal — in addition to possessing a charismatically baby-butch camera presence, she knows how to write, stage, and shoot a funny, unsettling, and pointed scene.

Twenty-three scenes, to be exact, a number reflecting Liu’s age when she made the movie. Ox Hide consists of just that many immobile but rarely "static" shots, each used to depict a moment from the cramped and quarrelsome domestic life she shares with her mother and her father, the latter a stubborn and slowly failing leather goods merchant. (Thus the title.) Making "reality" TV look about as stupid as it is, Liu shares a unique use of format and a sharp focus on the family with ’90s teen PixelVision pioneer — and former Le Tigre member — Sadie Benning, and like Benning, she’s got terrific timing both on-screen (bickering about noodles at the dinner table) and off (using a close-up of a printer to reveal her kin’s economic struggles). Local curator Joel Shepard deserves thanks for bringing this movie to the Bay Area, kicking off a "Beijing Underground" series that will span a few more Fridays this month. (Johnny Ray Huston)

OX HIDE

Thurs/8, 7 and 9 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

$5–$8

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Multi-angle magic

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If you have any doubts about the imagination’s ability to transform time and space, you can find proof positive by going to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend. Thanks to Margaret Jenkins’s new A Slipping Glimpse, the YBCA’s Forum that ugly box of a multipurpose theater has been changed into a place of magic reality. Jenkins’s 75-minute piece (plus a 10-minute prologue performed outdoors) is a rapturous celebration of fragility and resilience, a canticle of what it means to be alive. And yet how ironic: This is a work whose fierce physicality is as ephemeral as a gust of wind or the felt presence of something that may not be there.

Jenkins has been choreographing and collaborating for more than 30 years. She has always chosen carefully, but rarely has a piece of hers emerged so completely from its mold. It helps that she has worked with three of her collaborators poet Michael Palmer, designer Alexander V. Nichols, and composer Paul Dresher for a very long time. Still, Slipping shows a remarkable congruence of spirits and style.

Major credit has to go to Nichols’s brilliant design of red-hued, multilevel platforms and elevated walkways positioned between four wedges of seating areas. The effect is of a theater in the round with a nondirectional performance space, where perspectives are shaped by where you sit. The musicians are placed on opposing balconies above everyone else. Dresher’s score is full of rich textures, sometimes percussive, sometimes ballad-like, with a quasi rock beat now and then, plus Joan Jeanrenaud’s cello soaring like a lark. While not offering much of a rhythmic base, the music provides its own commentary and often envelops the dancers in a multi-colored sonic mist.

Poet Michael Palmer’s suggestive texts, read on tape, give just enough of a grounding to set signposts for Slipping‘s four sections. First, he suggests oppositions to be considered; later he evokes a group of dancers’ dreams about sailing on a frozen lake.

Slipping is the result of a partnering between the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company from Kolkata, India, where the Jenkins company had a residency in 2005. Choreographer Shankar also worked with Jenkins’s company in San Francisco. The resulting work is performed by 15 dancers, including four from India. At times the two groups intermingle, but the Indian dancers also perform by themselves. It is gorgeous to observe how the Americans and the Indians so differently trained despite the fact that both perform in contemporary styles move from a common base. The details of the gestural vocabulary and use of levels, for instance, are varied, but similarities are striking and unforced.

Slipping opens with a tableau on one of Nichols’s red platforms. One by one the dancers find individual ways to lower themselves onto the equally red floor. In a traditional greeting gesture, they fold their hands in front of their faces, then open them as if peering into a mirror or a book. Then off they go, on communal, loping runs that move forward and also recoil back. Picking up gestures from each other, they pull and they yield. Twice, multi-level chains form and simply dissolve when lifted dancers cannot breach the space between the two groups; overhead horizontal lifts often freeze in time.

Jenkins also showcases her dancers individually. Heidi Schweiker, whom I have never seen dance better, roams the stage on her own while everyone else is busy on platforms. Melanie Elms burrows into a knot of bodies only to emerge on the other side. When the stage is packed with multiple activities, Ryan T. Smith runs around its periphery tying them all together. Levi Toney is all over the place, holding Schweiker and “dropping” her to the floor; he later partners a splendid new dancer, Matthew Holland, who has his own jaw-dropping solo.

Slipping recalls Jenkins mentor Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, particularly in the way the choreography is multi-focused. Even though the lighting cues provide some direction, audience members make their own choices about what to watch. At one point, my eye caught four dancers on one of the platforms as they deeply inhaled and exhaled toward their colleagues. Were they sending them energy or were these movements a coincidence? At another moment, the four Indian dancers appeared high above, posing as temple statues, as a vigorous male duet unfolded on the floor. Why then, why there? Right in front of me, a woman pulled away from another dancer who had reached out to her. Who else saw that gesture?

Slipping doesn’t have a linear trajectory, but its ebb and flow, the way hyperactivity balances stillness, suggest purpose and something like an underlying unity and maybe even order. SFBG

A Slipping Glimpse

Wed/24–Sat/27, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

$18–$25

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

“Dance/Screen: Innovative International Dance Films”

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PREVIEW Dance on film looks flat, distorted, and without nuances, right? Yes and no. In general, dance does not take kindly to the screen. Good enough for documenting or teaching, films simply don’t convey the effervescent presence of a live performance. But in some cases the medium goes beyond simply recording and actually partners with the choreography in a way that can be every bit as exciting as a live performance. As a genre, dance films are fairly new and, often, still don’t get no respect. Charlotte Shoemaker, who curates San Francisco Performances’ "Dance/Screen" series, is doing her best to change that perception. Every May she packs a collection of what she can find internationally into a one-evening program. This year that includes the 60-minute CounterPhrases, by Flemish filmmaker and composer Thierry de Mey, Anna Teresa de Keersmaker’s longtime collaborator. De Keersmaker is one of Europe’s most influential, rigorous, and imaginative choreographers, and CounterPhrases is based on 10 of her dances, each set to a different piece of contemporary music. The program also includes Miranda Pennell’s British homage to Wild West fights, Fisticuff, and Arcus, a short directed by Alla Kogan and Jeff Silva and choreographed by Nicola Hawkins. (Rita Felciano)

DANCE/SCREEN: INNOVATIVE INTERNATIONAL DANCE FILMS Tues/23, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room, 701 Mission, SF

$7. (415) 392-2545, www.ybca.org