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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
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Big bang
SUNDAY
JULY 23
Event
Progressive Dems potluck
Come to the second annual Progressive Democrats-East Bay Picnic and Politics Barbecue and meet current and new members. Bring something to grill and something to share. (Deborah Giattina)
Noon-4 p.m.
Codornices Park
Near intersection of Euclid and Eunice, Berk.
(510) 636-4149
Theater/event
SF Theater Festival
They say that three’s a charm, and we’re betting that the third annual San Francisco Theater Festival in Yerba Buena Gardens will be just as charming, not to mention action packed, as its predecessors were. Prepare to be amazed by the sheer audacity of a festival showcasing 70 performances by 36 theater companies, 14 solo performers, 10 improv groups, and 10 children’s theater productions, on 10 stages in just six hours. (Nicole Gluckstern)
11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Yerba Buena Gardens, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Zeum Theater
Third and Mission; Fourth and Howard, SF
Free
(415) 291-8655
www.sftheaterfestival.org
FRIDAY
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
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
Goode is great …
Before his dancers had even taken a single step, a huge round of applause greeted Joe Goode at his group’s 20th-anniversary concert at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Goode is probably the best-loved choreographer in town. For two decades he has chronicled his generation’s unease about living in its own skin. When AIDS began to devastate this town in the early ’80s, Goode was there to speak out with pieces that were blunt, poignant, and theatrically savvy.
Goode is the poet of anxiety, pain, and uncertainty. He’s able to see a major catastrophe on its own terms but also as a metaphor for what ails us. His heroes — and they are heroes — are the outsiders, the watchers, and the misfits whose values and existence society would like to deny. He has a self-deprecatory wit that makes us wince and laugh at the same time. And he has developed a genre of dance theater that’s exceptionally successful at blending speech and movement. Very few choreographers have Goode’s ability to use language so acutely.
The anniversary concert offered the standing-room-only audience two pieces, the new Stay Together, to a score by San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, and the haunting 1998 Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood).
In Stay Together, Goode tackles what is glibly summarized as the midlife crisis: when long-term relationships unravel, careers begin to meander, and time ahead is shortening. A secondary strand explores the process of creating a piece, of finding a direction in which to take it. The ever-efficient Liz Burritt, clipboard in hand and glasses on her nose, was there to give the largely silent Goode plenty of advice of the “listen deeply” and “be in the moment” type.
The challenge here for Goode was to make a work about being clueless without coming up with a piece that goes nowhere. It’s a challenge he doesn’t quite meet. To achieve “a perfect little euphoria” is, no matter what Burritt says, no easier in art than it is in life. Despite good collaborators and several splendid episodes, there’s something wan about Stay Together that makes for a disconcerting theatrical experience.
Tilson Thomas’s score is perfectly serviceable, with monochromatic sections punctuated by percussive elements. Several times it hilariously called up sci-fi and Movietone music associations.
Goode and Melecio Estrella, as his maybe young lover, maybe younger self, had some telling shadowing duets together. During their first meeting, silhouetted against separate screens, heads longingly turning toward each other, they almost trembled with excitement and fragility. Throughout, Austin Forbord’s live videos contributed excellent tonal nuances and a sense of sometimes almost painful intimacy.
Stay Together‘s most theatrically cutting moment came with Marit Brook-Kothlow’s sex-starved Norma Desmond figure. The intensity of the character’s obsession split her screen image and spilled over into some vigorous dancing.
Deeply There remains one of Goode’s finest works. Robin Holcomb’s on-tape score, with its echoes of Shaker and Americana folk tunes, is inspired; the a cappella singing by Goode’s dancer-actors, haunting. With this quasi–musical theater work, Goode hones in on and pays tribute to a community that pulled together and learned to take care of and bury its own. Goode’s piece just barely avoids sentimentality by calling up equal measures of laughter and tears.
On many levels the piece remains disjointed. The outrageous Imelda figure (Ruben Graciani) and a voguing Jackie O sequence have little to do with the work’s subject except to point to the excesses of the times. These are the segments that today seem the most dated, perhaps because they look so innocent.
Yet the work rode an emotionally convincing trajectory from the opening prologue between Frank (Goode) and little Willis (Joshua Rauchwerger), who wants to know where Goode’s lover Ben is, to the last monologue about carrying on, however uncertainly. The scenes seamlessly flowed one to the next; the characters looked all too plausible. Estrella as the well-meaning goody-goody neighbor was positively nauseating, while Brook-Kothlow has grown in stature as D.D. the dog and Felipe Barrueto Cabello’s silent Mauricio has more backbone. The only false note remains Joyce (Burritt), Ben’s virago of a sister. She is still too much of a caricature. SFBG
joe goode performance group
Fri/9–Sat/10, 8 p.m.; Sun/11, 7 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater
700 Howard, SF
$16–$40
Multi-angle magic
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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
“Dance/Screen: Innovative International Dance Films”
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
Rankin’ Reykjavik
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER I love the fact that whenever you leave this country, you immediately come to the discomfiting realization that … you’re such a damaged by-product of capitalist America. Case in point: Last week I gazed upon the beauteous, barren, and treeless expanses of Iceland, miles and miles of rock, scrubby grass, and mirrorlike pools of ice. Iceland in the spring is the chill, brown-white-and-blue equivalent of the Southwestern desert, austere yet fragile in the face of certain global warming, and barely containing an undercurrent of volcanic energy reminiscent of Hawaii’s Big Island. So why do I look at these moonscapes and wonder where all the people are and why there aren’t any houses, strip malls, or ski resorts out here? Why do I look at untrammeled land and see real estate?
Reykjavik: I’m here on a press trip with other media field operatives from BPM, OK!, Nylon, and Vapors, studying the club culture, seeing the sights, taking in gutfuls of fresh, fishy air by the wharf, gazing at snowcapped mountains, and perusing menus in shock. I just couldn’t help blurting a culturally insensitive, "Omigod, that’s My Little Pony!" when I saw the roast Icelandic foal with a tian of mushrooms, caramelized apples, and calvados sauce on the bill of traditional Icelandic restaurant Laekjarbrekka.
Likewise, the Icelanders probably can’t help turning those cute puffins and herb-fed lambs into meaty main courses to warm them through those long, dark winters. The real, long-haired, sweet-faced Icelandic horses turned out to be more engaging and curious than I’d ever imagined, strolling up to our group out in the wilds near Thingvellir to examine the hipsters (and hip-hoppsters) and be ooohed over. "They’re more like dogs than horses!" our Icelandair rep, Michael Raucheisen, exclaimed.
After a scrumptious Asian fusion meal at the elegant, cream-colored, deco Apotek (started with kangaroo tartare and finished off with a mistakenly ordered $125 bottle of Gallo cab; travel tip number one: Reykjavik is not the spot to sample California vino), our wild bunch was more into checking out a local strip club than settling in with a good book like Dustin Long’s charming Agatha Christie parody, Icelander (McSweeney’s), or the catalog for the National Museum of Iceland’s current photo exhibit of fishing village life in the southeast, "Raetur Runtsins" ("Roots of the Runtur"). We were more likely to price the local, ahem, pharmaceutical offerings ("$175 for a gram of coke is not cheap!" was one assessment) at the city’s nightclubs than shop for runic love charms or grandmotherly woolens.
One reason for the aforementioned vast, unpopulated expanses: There are only 300,000 people in the entire country — albeit well educated, well employed, relatively youthful, and wired. (Is it any wonder this isle has the highest concentration of broadband users in the world?) Most of the youth culture was happening in the capital, where about a third of the population lives it up, sucks down Brennivin and macerated strawberry mojitos, dances with compact little hand motions that resemble a funky elfin hand jive. I must confess that, watching Deep Dish’s Ali "Dubfire" Shirazinia skillfully work Iceland native Björk into his house mix at NASA, I’ve rarely seen more hot, seemingly straight men dancing, en masse, on the floor, on the mezzanine, in the booths, every damn where. Where did they get the energy — from a geothermal pipeline or those mischievous sprites called Julelads?
As we piled into the van to steep at the sulfur-scented but soul-soothing Blue Lagoon and study the brand-spankin’ Icelandic Idol Snorri Snorrason (I kid you not) serenading the soakers lagoonside with Jack Johnson–like tunes, I could only sit and plot my next visit — possible when Icelandair resumes its summer flights from SF in May? It’ll be too late to catch late April’s new Rite of Spring alt-jazz and folk music festival, but not for October’s Iceland Airwaves music fest (Oct. 18 through 22, www.icelandairwaves.com), where big tickets like the Flaming Lips have filled the city’s venues alongside Icelanders such as Sigur R??s. I’ll have to catch these new Icelandic rock artists:
Ampop, My Delusions (Dennis)
This trio was getting the royal hype in Reykjavik — posters were plastered everywhere. How nice to find that their jaunty yet dramatic English-language orchestral psych-rock traverses the dreamier side of Coldplay and Doves.
Mammut, Mammut (Smekkleysa)
Polished though quirky, this bass-driven, all-lady post-punk fivesome takes a bite of the Sugarcubes, Siouxsie Sioux, and the Raincoats, with plenty of all-Icelandic lyrical histrionics.
Storsveit Nix Noltes, Orkideur Havai (12 Tonar; to be released on Bubblecore)
Last glimpsed at South by Southwest’s Paw Tracks/Fat Cat showcase, these Animal Collective tourmates draw inspiration for their instrumentals from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the Balkans.
Mugison, Mugimama — Is This Monkey Music? (12 Tonar)
The Mark Linkous of Icelandic rock digs into the raw stuff on this acclaimed full-length. He also recently scored Baltasar Kormakur’s film A Little Trip to Heaven, reinterpreting the Tom Waits track of the same name.
For the real folkways, check out Raddir/Voices: Recordings of Folk Songs from the Archives of the Arni Magnusson Institute in Iceland (Smekkleysa/Arni Magnusson Institute), which includes a great booklet on the music, collected between 1903 and 1973 and revolving around Icelandic sagas and cautionary fables of monsters, ogres, and child-snatching ravens. SFBG
CH-CH-CHECK IT OUT
Anthony Hamilton, Heather Headley, and Van Hunt
Hamilton killed, from all reports, at SXSW, and we all know how good that Hunt album is. Wed/19 and Mon/24, 7:30 p.m., Paramount, 2025 Broadway, Oakl. $39–$67.75. www.ticketmaster.com
M’s and the Deathray Davies
Chicago cock-rockers meet quirk poppers. Wed/19, 8 p.m., Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. $8. (415) 861-2011
Tinariwen
The chairs are pushed back when this band of Tuaregs, the indigenous people from Eastern Mali, break out the guitars. Wed/19, 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. $14–$20. (510) 238-9200
Keyshia Cole
The gritty girlfriend that might be the next Mary adds a late show. Fri/21, 11:30 p.m., The Grand, 1300 Van Ness, SF. $32.50. (415) 864-0815
Kronos Quartet
The ensemble premieres a collaboration with Walter Kitundu, takes on a Sigur R??s number, and teams with Matmos on "For Terry Riley." Fri/21–Sat/22, 8 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $18–$35. (415) 978-ARTS
Maria Taylor
Saddle Creek’s electro-folk-pop sweetheart steps out from Azure Ray. Sat/22, 9 p.m., Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $10. (415) 861-5016 SFBG