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Dance

Delicate power

Andrew Lam
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Delicate power

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE When Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered Mikhael Fokine’s Scheherazade in June 1910, Paris exploded. Not only had the choreographer forsaken the hallowed halls of classicism, he had put on stage the most sensually explicit ballet ever seen in that city’s stage. Its orientalism and Leon Bakst’s exquisitely lush design influenced fashions and design for years.

None of this impressed Alonzo King when it came to his commission from the Monaco Dance Forum for its Ballets Russes centenary in 2009. King drew upon versions of One Thousand and One Nights that have floated around the Middle East and India for centuries. What he has picked up is the delicacy of the storytelling, in which one fable spins out of another. King’s Scheherazade feels as evanescent and shimmery as a spider’s web; yet its resilience comes from the way he deploys his dancers. The skewed balances, fractured lines, and abrupt transitions are intended to open doors to deeper perception of the potential that King sees in everything, dancers included. Here — until the flattish ending — they were enveloped in a transparent lucidity, no doubt much enhanced by Axel Morgenthaler’s sophisticated lightening.

King kept traces of the Arabian Nights narrative in which Scheherazade ultimately wins her life and marries the King. Anchoring the choreography is an extended “Pas de Deux for Scheherazade” (Laurel Keen) and Sharyar (David Harvey) that aspires toward myth. It is physically fierce as well as lyrical, passionate yet also impersonal. These dancers could be lovers, male/female principles, or natural forces. They reject entanglement even as they acknowledge its inevitability. When Keen grabs Harvey’s head with both hands, you don’t know whether she is about to tear it off or embrace it. Hanging onto limbs, crawling between legs and swimming on arms, these two equals struggle to keep apart until the tender resolution. Expressively complex, Harvey has finally stepped into his own as a King dancer; longterm company member Keen seems to become stronger the longer she keeps dancing.

A potent presence was Corey Scott Gilbert who, in his long red robe, flowed through Scheherazade as perhaps a guiding spirit. In Fokine’s version, the sultan’s wife fell in love with a Nubian slave, danced by Nijinsky in black face. The racism of that portrait has rendered the ballet unperformable. Tall, strong, with a reach that seems limitless and an ability to hone in on the smallest detail and be vulnerable, Scott Gilbert seemed a tribute to and vindication of that slave.

Scheherazade opens on a note of intimacy. Keen is surrounded by three attendants (Meredith Webster, Ashley Jackson and newcomer Jeannette Diaz-Barbuda) who introduce themselves in personalized solos as she, stretched in a classic oriental divan pose, watches them from the sidelines. This gentle woman-centeredness set the tone for the rest of the ballet. Jackson became the first among equals, exquisite in her phrasing, and drawing strength from who knows where.

Not that King shortchanged his men. Ricardo Zayas shot through his variations like a rocket. Following Keelan Whitmore as he wove himself in and out of ensemble work was one of the evening’s great pleasures. The work also gave showy opportunities to new apprentices Michael Montgomery and Christopher Bordenave.

Composer/percussionist Zakir Hussain incorporated elements of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade into a rich mellifluous score of world and electronic music—performed live — that immeasurably contributed to King’s choreography. As did the opulent but ever so restrained designs for set and costumes by Robert Rosenwasser and the fabulous Colleen Quen. By following Diaghilev’s dictum that music, design, and dance need to support each other for a unified theatrical experience, King paid the master impresario his most appropriate tribute.

Unfortunately, Scheherazade ended on a flat note. A free-for-all involving the company and assorted additional dancers flooded the stage with, judging from the music, what was supposed to be an atomistic hymn to joy. A great ensemble choreographer King is not.

SCHEHERAZADE

Thurs/21–Sun/24, $25–$75

Novellus Theatre

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Hula heartbeat

Andrew Lam
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0
Hula heartbeat

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Quite a few hula companies populate the Bay Area, but none is led by a kumu hula (teacher) quite as charismatic as Patrick Makuakane. Watch him warm up an audience, and you’d think he could charm cash out of a bunch of IRS agents. Then he steps on stage, grabs a drum, and starts to chant, and you know that this is an old soul, somehow still in touch with hula’s roots as a spiritual practice. “We love that duality about him,” explains Makani da Silva Santos, one of his longtime dancers.

Makuakane’s choreography for his Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu company, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, reflects his complex personality. He is as much at ease creating hulas based on pop songs as he is at excavating meaning out of ancient chants or creating politically searing dance dramas.

Hula, like many other dance forms—Indian, Balinese, West African—was born in rituals that both strengthened a group’s identity and attempted to get in touch with the Divine. In Hawaii, that meant paying tribute to natural forces, particularly the goddess Pele. But missionaries who colonized Hawaii in the 19th century and tried to force Christianity on its people prohibited hula. They considered all Hawaiian culture crude and lascivious. They almost succeeded when King David Kalakaua restored hula and other native customs, saying famously: “Hula is the language of the heart and therefore the heartbeat of the Hawaiian people.” Even so, long after the king’s death, hula had to be practiced in secret. Makuakane’s stark 1999 The Natives are Restless unsparingly looks at that sorry part of Hawaiian history. In one haunting passage, a “priest” tattoos a cross onto bare-chested women.

You can’t miss hula’s deep connection to the earth. Often the dancers wear garlands, head-dresses, and anklets made from flowers and plants. Watching the dancers sway, step, and turn in unison, bent knees opening and closing, feet firmly planted on the ground, you can sense that they are engaged in something that goes beyond simple entertainment, even when dressed in modern garb.

That doesn’t mean hula isn’t also great fun to do and to watch — Don Ho was not all that wrong. Makuakane once told an interviewer that he wanted two things for his dancers: to have fun and to develop a sense of community. Watching her mother in Makuakane’s classes at the age of eight, da Silva Santos first experienced that sense of belonging, When Makuakane asked her whether she wanted to dance, it made her feel special to be invited into this group of grownups. (There were no children’s classes at the time). Twenty-five years later, she is still at it and hopes that one day her daughter “will also dance hula because it’s a link to my Hawaiian culture.”

In addition to dancing with the company for many years, da Silva Santos has undergone the Uniki process, an extensive formal training in Olapa (master dancer) and Ho’opa’a (master chanter) which, as she explains, demands a “disciplined frame of mind” to study the “deeper meanings of the ancient chants and practices”. Does she speak Hawaiian? “I am learning,” the Vallejo resident says. Even after all these years she — in the company of other dancers — still makes her own leis. They no longer have to fashion the skirts themselves. “Fortunately, we now have seamstresses,” she laughs. “Though I do sometimes miss those long nights working together.”

Along with works from the repertoire, Na Lei Hulu will premiere Ke Kumulipo, based on the epic Hawaiian chant of creation. If past celebrations are any indication, you can expect to see many of the students who take hula classes every week for the sheer fun of it — as well as the more than 40 professional dancers.

25 YEARS OF HULA: A SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY PERFORMANCE

Sat/16 through Oct. 24

Palace of Fine Arts Theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 392-4400

www.CityBoxOffice.com

 

On the way

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
On the way

ODC Founder and Artistic Director Brenda Way put it best when, toasting the crowd at the end of the premiere of her Architecture of Light, she said: “If you don’t leave a footprint, you will be forgotten. If you tread lightly, you’ll fly away. So here’s to you who hit the ground running.”

It was indeed a gala — festive, fancy, and fun — as ODC opened its new 36,000-square-foot facility. Elaine Buckholtz’s masterful lighting transformed the exterior into a glistening jewel without obliterating the solidity of architect Mark Cavagnero’s X-beam trusses that so solidly anchor the building on the ground.

But the real action happened inside, as small groups of audience members — high heels clacking — traipsed through the three-story structure for a series of installation performances. From my group’s perspective, Architecture built a beautifully logical trajectory. Others might have experienced the sequences differently. It started with Corey Brady’s index finger gently tracing on a studio floor and ended with him at the center of a huge gathering of professional and audience member dancers in which he partnered the mother of Bay Area dance, Anna Halprin.

In his intimate solo, the bare-chested Brady, an impressively nuanced and athletically nimble dancer, explored his sense of self as he became familiar with the terrain around him. Tracing geometric patterns or slithering through them, he happened upon unexpected frozen moments of frozen balance. Several times Brady appeared to sniff the air around him. At the next location, Vanessa Thiessen — strong, fast, and assertive — put a tie on Brady. A gift? A challenge? Initially the two engaged each other in what looked like a private sign language, then they began to connect more directly. At times they circled and engaged like boxers, though without the violence, finishing with only their fingertips gently touching.

In an adjacent area that could only partially be seen, a quintet — three dancers and two others who reshaped the space around them by means of white strings — looked at perspective, both the one in front of us and in a “parallel universe.” I am not sure that this concept worked. Architecture also somewhat clumsily tried to include “ordinary folks” by having some streak through at the end of episodes. The effect was akin to a joke that missed its punch line.

A ground floor episode made good use of the area’s physical space. Dancers poured in from the street, alternately melting into what probably is a closet or slinking out of sight down a hallway. The dancing had an ambling, relaxed quality about it, with the performers responding to the music’s tick-tock beat with shakes of heads, hands, and shoulders. At one point they even engaged in a stick-out-your-tongue competition.

An audience-involvement section divided dancers and visitors into two groups. Led by the dancers, we learned simple five phrase patterns that then were juxtaposed with each other. Often these exercises can look forced and awkward. This one worked because the moves were simple, the “teachers” good humored, and the audience willing to participate.

The grand finale in the theater proper — a space with the same footprint but twice the height — brought everyone together. Twenty-five dancers each partnered a lay performer while the rest of us watched. Either these unison duets had been rehearsed ahead of time or this city abounds in some very good recreational dancers. At the end of the smartly-timed, one-hour gala, there were chocolates, toasts, and champagne. The festivities continue this month with “JumpstART” on Oct. 16, a free, daylong celebration of dance, theater, and music curated by local artists including Joe Goode and Mark Jackson.

JUMPSTART

Oct. 16, noon–11 p.m.

ODC Theater

351 Shotwell, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

 

Visionary movement

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Visionary movement

DANCE Celine Schein, executive director of Chitresh Das Dance Company and its Chhandam School, was not born into Indian culture. But difficult Hindi words flow from her tongue with the ease of a native speaker. It’s a skill that should stand her in good stead during this weekend’s “Traditions Engaged: Dance, Drama, Rhythm,” which includes evening and daytime performances, lectures, panel discussions, and demonstrations of Indian classical dance.

Schein, a former ballet and modern dancer, has absorbed Indian dance into her very being. Yet it started almost by accident when she happened to fall into a Kathak class that classical dance master Pandit Chitresh Das was teaching at San Francisco State University. “I first loved the richness of its rhythms and movement patterns,” she recalls. “But then I was increasingly intrigued by [Das’] vision, even though it took me a long time to realize what exactly that was.”

Das is indeed a visionary. Committed to the rigor of exacting standards, he is also an innovator within the parameters of his art. He has, for instance, collaborated with tap virtuoso Jason Samuels Smith and Bharata Natyam dancer Mythili Kumar. His invention of Kathak yoga, which combines the two disciplines, is positively revolutionary. But other aspects of Das’ performances, like when he talks to the audience, are deeply traditional. “There is no fourth wall in Indian classical dance,” Schein explains. “Dancers interact with audiences and they are expected to respond. His own guru would comment during a performance, even criticize him.”

Indian classical dance gained a foothold in this country with the burgeoning interest in Eastern philosophy starting in the 1960’s, but grew stronger as Indian communities formed in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Many families initially had little interest in Indian classical dance but wanted their children to grow up with the values it provided. Yet I once heard Das admonish the parents of his pupils that Kathak was a serious art, not just a spray-on for a young woman to look pretty on her wedding day.

A striving toward spirituality is deeply ingrained in Indian classical dance. Das’ mother told him “to dance from the gutter to the heaven.” He puts it into contemporary terms —the “vision” that so impressed Schein — by saying that dance allows you to become more yourself. Of course, none of this precludes enjoying Indian classical dance as a purely esthetic experience.

India has strong, highly diversified folkloric dance traditions, but “Traditions” focuses on classical dance forms: Bharata Natyam, originally a temple dance from southern India; Kathak, which blossomed at the Moslem Moghul courts of North India; Odissi, which was repressed by the British and revived after independence; Manipuri, a dramatic genre that deploys an expressive upper body; Kuchipudi, best known for a copper platter on whose rim the dancer performs; and Kathakali, which features spectacular masks and costumes. Also represented will be a new, recently recognized form, Gaudiya Bharati, from the Bengal region.

Unlike the scholar-oriented Kathak Festival in 2006, “Traditions” is solely devoted to practitioners. “We wanted to bring the best master artists together to talk about their work and perform — not just short snippets, but in depth,” Schein explains. Friday’s program will be focused on movement; Saturday’s on drama; and Sunday’s on rhythm. 

TRADITIONS ENGAGED

Thurs/30-Sun/3;

$25–$75 ($235–$295 for festival pass)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Fresh “Horses”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Fresh “Horses”

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Some choreographers pack enough material into an hour of dance to leave you more satisfied than those who take twice as long and say less. Such was the case with “18 Virgo Horses” (Sept. 16-18), a double-bill by Dana Lawton and Jia Wu, who earn their rent money teaching at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. The old saying that inspiration wedded to craft makes for good art came to mind as I watched Lawton and Wu’s four pieces at CounterPULSE last week. The evening made me glad that the dance season has started again.

In her new solo Del Mar, Lawton opened the program with a tribute to 1950s-style Hollywood bathing beauties and cowboy singers. Toy horses encircled a round swimming pool in which Lawton, encased in a demure Esther Williams swim suit and aqua cap, paddled, floated, and dreamed as she listened and responded to lyrics about an old house and a boy and his horse. So simple, so evocative, so delicious.

Horsethief Lake is a state park in South Dakota. I am not sure if and how Lawton’s eponymous piece for a quartet (Michael Armstrong, Jerry Lin, Jill Randall, and Chantal Sampogna) related to that piece of geography. The work explored memory, less as never-never land than as something grounded in muscles, to be passed from one body to another. Over the course of its three sections, Horsethief ultimately lost some focus and began to needlessly meander. But it demonstrated how, in skilled hands, simple gestures — wafting arms, and grabbing at one’s chest — can undergo eloquent mutations. The piece also introduced Lin, who is potentially a spectacular dancer, if he doesn’t allow himself to descend into mannerism.

Continuity is not what choreographer Jia Wu seems after, at least not within anything resembling linear logic. Yet the five sections of Between You and Me II, a highly imagistic quintet (Jackie Angelo, Lin, Marissa Pfaff, Vera Schwegler, and Hailey Yaffee), rubbed against each other to arrive at a jumbled but real coherence. The piece’s attempts at absurdity, however, did not completely convince.

Going from Ukrainian folk music to Satie and Portuguese fado, Between started out looking like mourning ritual. The dancers were clad in black from head to toe, but as their outstretched arms and formal pacing disintegrated into spastic shakes and hops, tragedy was turned inside out. In other sections, the doll-like dancers wore tutus that were color-coordinated with balloons, while Lin streaked in as an impostor. They looked like cartoon figures. The audience loved the humor; I thought some it sophomoric.

The evening closed with Lawton’s other premiere, Inside. Though it took on one of dance’s oldest clichés — the travails of one-to-one relationships — her take on it was fresh and rich and rang true. It opened with Armstrong and Jennifer Smith in what might have been a wedding dance. As they performed in silence, their bodies seemed to melt into one. Then wave after wave of rejection and reconciliation enmeshed the couple in an ongoing turbulence. Anything — a touch, a glance, an imitative gesture — could provoke an explosion from one or the other, yet this stormy affair was also mitigated by moments of tenderness and calm. As Michelle Beauchesne on cello and Sean McCue on guitar provided sensitive musical commentary, the piece presented one surprise after another — you never knew who was going to do what to whom.

Leap into fall

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Leap into fall

Looking over the fall dance schedule, two ingredients jump out: celebration and experimentation. Given the depressed economy and vacuous political conversations, this optimism comes as a welcome surprise. But then dancers are a resilient lot; they are used to rock bottom or nonexistent budgets and functioning below the radar screen of the pundits who try to tell us which way the culture is tilting. They simply go about doing what they sense needs to be done and put their own stamp on the social ecology. Here is a glimpse at what you can expect until Nutcracker time. 

Flyaway Productions Jo Kreiter’s troupe of strong female warriors — one of our more innovative equipment-based ensembles — is taking to the air to celebrate the Women’s Building’s centennial. They have an open rehearsal Aug. 26 at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 10–18, Women’s Building; www.flyawayproductions.com.

Central Market Arts This is a truly exciting initiative by four Mid-Market Street arts organizations: Alonzo King’s LINES Dance Center, The Garage, Kunst-Stoff Arts and Project Bandaloop. Billed as “24 Days of Art, Music, Dance & Theater,” it presents art in the places where it is made. One idea is to show that the “theater district” exists on the streets. It kicks off with free performances by a who’s who of talents at the Mint Plaza by Fifth and Martet. Kunst-Stoff, LEVYdance, and Robert Moses Kin are the among those doing the honors. Sept. 24–Oct. 17, Market St. corridor; www.jonsimsctr.org.

San Francisco Hip-Hop Dancefest Taking its cue from the jam-packed auditions for the San Francisco Ethnic Festival, the San Francisco Hip-Hop Dance Fest is opening its local company auditions to the public. There are so many applicants, it had to create two separate Sept. 12 sessions at Cowell Theater: one from 11 a.m–2: 30 p.m. and another from 3:30 p.m. –7 p.m. (Out-of-town groups undergo separate evaluations.) This all-day event offers a fabulous opportunity to sample Bay Area hip-hop dance and should whet the appetite for the big event in November. Nov. 19–21, Palace of Fine Arts; www.sfhiphopdancefest.com.

West Wave Dance West Wave is back for its 19th season, this time structured as a monthly series falling on usually dance-free Sunday and Monday nights. Each program features five choreographers. Including a night devoted to dance on film, this is a must for anyone wanting a perspective on Bay Area dance. Sept.20–Dec. 13, Cowell Theater; www.westwavedancefestival.org.

Mark Morris Dance Company The much-welcome perennial returns with three West Coast premieres: this year’s Socrates, about dying; 2007’s Looky, about gallery-hopping; and 1990’s Behemoth, which has been described as “cold, abstract, and silent.” Doesn’t sound much like MM, does it? Sept. 30–Oct. 2, Zellerbach Hall, Berk; www.calperformances.org.

“Traditions Engaged: Dance, Drama, Rhythm” To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Chitresh Das Dance Company follows its 2006 “Kathak at the Crossroads” — which brought together an amazing assembly of dancers, teachers, scholars, and aficionados — with a performance that expands to other classical Indian dance forms: bharata natyam, kathakali, kuchipudi. and odissi. Oct. 1–3, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.kathak.org.

Smuin Ballet Try McIntyre has made himself a reputation for skillful, congenial, and exuberantly danceable choreography. So his Smuin Ballet world premiere — set to indie rock by the Shins — is a good match for the company’s fine crop of dancers. It joins Michael Smuin’s Blue Grass/Slide (which involves pole dancing), and Brahms/Haydn Variation, one of Smuin’s more refined essays on a gorgeous piece of music. Oct. 1–19, Palace of Fine Arts; www.smuinballet.org.

ODC Theater (Oct. 1–3, ODC Theater, SF) is opening its new facilities with a firework of performances. First in line is the world premiere of Brenda Way’s “Architecture of Light”, then comes “JumpstART” (Oct. 16), a daylong celebration of dance, music, and theater, to be followed throughout the fall by a series of commissions, the first one for Kunst-Stoff and LEVYdance (Oct.21–28).

Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu Happy 25th birthday to Patrick Makuakane’s company. If you have seen these remarkable hula dancers, you know that every concert by them is a celebration of contemporary and old-style Hawaiian culture. You can expect a cross-section of their repertoire as well as a special one-hour family matinee on closing day. Oct. 16–24, Palace of Fine Arts; www.naleihulu.org.

Scheherazade Today the Orientalism and racism of Mikhael Fokine’s 1910 extravaganza Scheherazade make the work just about unperformable. Not so, says Alonzo King of LINES Ballet Company, who accepted a commission from the Monaco Dance Forum to rethink the tale. Zakir Hussein does the honors for the Rimsky-Korsakov score. This is the U.S. premiere. Oct. 14–24, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

“Harvest: The Fall 2010 Choreographers Showcase” Dance Mission Theater’s fall showcase rides in on an unlikely premise. Unjuried and programmed on a first-come, first-serve basis, it includes beginners and experienced artists. The results should be surprising, and are frequently satisfying. Oct. 22–23, Dance Mission Theater; www.dancemission.com.

Sankai Juku For sheer elegance of presentation of a very demanding dance style, the 35-year-old Sankai Juku has few equals. It is bringing 2002’s mesmerizing Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away to San Francisco. If you want to see a newer work, head for Stanford, where it presents Tobari (As If In an Inexhaustible Flux), from 2008. Nov. 9, Memorial Auditorium, Stanford; www.livelyarts.stanford.edu. Nov. 11–13, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.ybca.org.

West Coast represents

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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West Coast represents

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Dance is inherently sexy. The millions of devoted fans obsessed with shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars certainly think so. But why, when so many people love watching dance, does the general public still place modern dance on an out-of-reach pedestal? Maybe the overly general words “modern dance” scare people away. Whatever the aversion, the question still remains: why is it so difficult to get people to go see something they’ll ultimately love?

ODC’s fourth annual “Summer Sampler,” held July 30-31, proved that ODC/Dance artistic directors and choreographers Brenda Way and KT Nelson not only know how to get people to see dance, they know how to create works that keep people coming back for more. “Summer Sampler” offered pre-performance wine and snacks, an early enough showtime (6:30 p.m.) to allow a Friday and Saturday night out, and most important, an hour of breathtaking dance.

The show opened with the epitome of dance-y dance, Nelson’s Stomp a Waltz (2006). Continually in motion, the dancers ran across the stage, threw each other into the air, and incorporated their entire bodies in fast-paced, rhythmically complex gestures. The ODC dancers possess great athleticism. and Friday night was no exception. Eating up the space around them, they took Nelson’s already daring choreography to the edge. I’ve seen these dancers command the large stage at Yerba Buena’s Novellus Theater, but watching them perform in the ODC Dance Commons — a space so intimate I could hear their breath and see their sweat — was an entirely new and exciting experience.

While Nelson’s very technical Stomp a Waltz was visually exhilarating, there was more to the piece than pretty tricks and leaps. A sense of raw emotion underlies Nelson’s abstract choreography. With the eye of an architect and spirit of a musician, she layered movement phrases that paired perfectly with Marcelo Zarvo’s rhythmically driving, highly emotional music.

Following Nelson’s piece, Way’s newest work Waving Not Drowning: (A Guide to Elegance) demonstrated that dance can be as tongue-in-check and cerebral as it is aesthetic. Inspired by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux’s 1963 A Guide to Elegance, the piece used playful humor and inventive movement to articulate the absurdity of gender norms. A commissioned score by Pamela Z looped text from Dariaux’s original guide, snippets of fashion advice, and a list of “important” feminine concerns like “adaptability, age, weddings, and Xmas” to confront everything from femininity and grace to sex and submission. The dancers — moving through doll-like movements, a sexy hip-swaying waltz, sexually-charged duets, and silly facial expressions — owned Way’s playful yet profound choreography with sassy elegance and bold maturity.

Though ODC is known as one of the nation’s top contemporary dance companies, it hasn’t lost sight of the importance of a local dance community. As a state of the art dance facility — housing a dance company, a pre-professional training school, recreational dance classes, a dancers’ clinic open to the public, and a performance space upstairs — the ODC Dance Commons is making dance accessible for Bay Area residents and visitors. A new ODC Theater is set to open at the end of September, making ODC’s 36,000-square-foot, two building campus the largest, most comprehensive dance facility on the West Coast.

State of interdependence

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
State of interdependence

DANCE There’s no question that dance and music live and breathe together. Anyone who has been moved to motion by a rhythmic beat or catchy melody can attest to that. Yet where the two art forms intersect and drive each others’ creative process is often harder to pin down, for they exist both independently and interdependently.

Like their respective art forms, choreographer Kara Davis and composer Sarah Jo Zaharako of Gojogo inspire and influence each other. Part of Dance Mission Theater’s Down and Dirty series, their recent performance “Symbiosis: An Evening of Music & Dance” (July 11) not only marked five years of collaboration and creative dialogue, but proved to be a stunning display of talented dancers and musicians.

The first half of the evening featured Davis’ dance company project agora, opening with Davis’ 2009 piece A Softened Law. It began with a line of dancers walking away from and yet always returning to a bright light in front of them, as if in prayer. When one dancer broke away from the repetitive and confined ebb and flow of the group, her series of expansive steps summoned a sense of freedom emerging from confinement. Under beams of gold light, the dancers — dressed in desert-toned hues — ran, leapt, and fell to the floor with passionate intensity and athletic agility. Ethereal yet grounded, Davis’ choreography flowed like a cool stream through a desert.

Because every step seamlessly initiated the next, Davis’ movement style never felt forced. This was particularly true in One Tuesday Afternoon (2008), where the dancers entered and exited the stage in interweaving duets. While the project agora dancers embody the spirit of Davis’ choreography, there is something extra special about watching Davis perform her own work. In the romantic duet Exit Wound (2006) — the first piece Davis and Zaharako created together — she and Nol Simonse graced the stage with captivating rapport. Whether swaying through simple waltz-like steps or intricate entangled arms, they never lost sight of each other. Zaharako and bassist Eric Perney were equally involved in the intimate duet. The warm violin parts of Zaharako’s composition fueled the couple’s dancing as much as their dancing seemed to fuel the music.

It was fitting that Davis ended the dancing part of the evening with the world premiere of her most recent collaboration with Zaharako, Symbiosis. Dancing with an awareness of Zaharako and her ensemble and incorporating elements of improvisation, Davis made the solo feel more like an exploration than a formulation. Each of her gestures, whether slowly moving her hand to her chin or stretching her white shirt overhead like a veil, implied a weighty yet inexplicable significance. Through their navigation of the parameters of dance and music, Davis and Zaharako brought the potential beauty of symbiosis to life.

Minty fresh

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Minty fresh

DANCE/THEATER After rapidly selling out its two-week premiere in May 2009, the Joe Goode Performance Group returns to San Francisco’s lavish Old Mint for a luxurious one-month run of Traveling Light. JGPG’s haunted tour of SF’s oldest stone building, a monument to money power, unfolds as a series of made-up but history-laden vignettes scattered throughout the edifice, adding up to an inspired meditation on greed and desire, success and failure, the material and immaterial. On the eve of opening night, acclaimed Bay Area–based director-choreographer Joe Goode — who says the piece has changed only slightly since last year (“We’re filling up the space better and perhaps telling the story more clearly”) — spoke to SFBG from his East Bay home.

SFBG In addition to Traveling Light, you premiered another site-specific work last year, Fall Within, at the Ann Hamilton Tower in Geyserville. What’s the appeal with site-specific work? Do you approach such pieces very differently?

Joe Goode You have to in a way because there’s no front. People can see things from many different vantage points. Also some theatrical illusions are taken away from you. On the other hand, you have the personality, character, and history of the site, which is contributing enormous amounts of information to the moment. That is really exciting and delicious, and there’s a lot that you can do with it.

The way I work with performers—the way I elicit material from them so that it feels personal to them—[remains] similar. I’m interested in an intimate, close-up glimpse of a real human experience. Many site artists get involved with the contours of the architecture, the aural properties of the site. I’m interested in all that, too, but retain my interest in that personal narrative.

SFBG That personal aspect, though, intersects with the Mint , an edifice reverberating very strongly with a larger social crisis, namely the enormous, growing disparities in wealth.

JG That’s ultimately what the piece is all about. There’s a kind of grandeur to some of the interiors of the building, which is just a disgraceful, ostentatious display of wealth. You can’t help but feel it when you walk in there. This is the disparity that’s been present in this city since 1850! I tend to think of San Franciscans as this very egalitarian, alternative, radical, and thoughtful group of people, when in fact there’s an underpinning of those who have and those who don’t. Those who have make a lot of decisions about what happens in this city. Those who don’t, don’t have a voice particularly. [The Mint] reflects that for me.

SFBG How is that relation between social systems and personal narratives worked out in creating the performances?

JG A lot of it comes from my imagination. I spent a lot of time in those rooms. Some of the narratives don’t have anything particular to do with the history of the building, but there’s a gilded balcony or a particular corner that makes me think of a narrative—a particular time, a person, what they might have been going through. Then I begin to weave the characters, again working very intimately with the performers, asking them their stories and how they felt about this issue, what it brought to mind for them. And I go off and write it. That’s how it works.

SFBG You’ve used the term “felt performance” in referring to your work and your teaching method. Can you explain that term?

JG My theory is that I can’t make a resonant, rich, performative moment on onstage, or in a site, unless I’m having that experience. I can’t just package it. Really the job for the performer is constructing a road map, or an obstacle course even. You’re not working to create an experience for someone else; you’re working to create an experience for yourself. Human beings can share that. We have a very good authenticity meter in our hearts and minds. We [the audience] can get on the boat with you. But you have to be taking the ride as a performer; that’s what’s essential. If you’re not taking the ride, there’s no way we’re going to take it.

SFBG In your approach, dance-theater it’s sometimes called, you’ve been synthesizing forms, dialogue, movement, text, music, for over 30 years …

JG And I’m only 40! How does that work?

SFBG It’s a precocious body of work. But there must have been dance purists and theater purists who balked at the synthesis …

JG Well, there still are. Don’t suffer the illusion that those people have gone away. There are people who look at my work and say it’s not dance. There are certainly people who look at my work and say it’s not theater. It falls between the cracks; they’re unsettled by it and they don’t want any part of it. I think the contemporary viewer — I mean, we’re so much about the mashup; we’re so much about computer animation infiltrating live action. All these collisions are happening in media. For a younger audience to see dancers speak? They don’t care. “That’s cool, whatever, why wouldn’t they?” And that’s how I always felt.

There’s another element there too. When I started making this kind of work: I wanted to have some frank expression of myself as a gay man. Not in a silver jock strap waving a rainbow flag, but as a fully- dimensional human being. Not hiding that very essential part of my identity, but somehow bringing it in. I felt I needed my voice to do that. My body was going to get to an essential part of that, but there was another whole part that needed to be addressed. And pretty much from the beginning, there was a huge audience for it. I feel like I’ve definitely found my place with it. I don’t feel like there’s any going back, that’s for sure.

Free as the breeze?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Free as the breeze?

arts@sfbg.com

>>Read Robert Avila’s interview with Joe Goode here

DANCE/THEATER Walking behind the tour guide who led us through the old San Francisco Mint’s elegant rooms for the Joe Goode Performance Group’s striking Traveling Light, I kept thinking of the Medicis and the Ming Dynasty. For their own selfish purposes, these corrupt supercapitalists commandeered and bought great beauty, of which we are the beneficiaries. On a more modest scale, the Mint, as so accurately described by Goode, was a temple of money. It was also a splendidly designed locus of hope for ordinary Joes and Janes who placed their trust, and their cash, in a place that promised the security that an expanding, institution-building nation could provide.

That’s why the Mint’s exquisite architecture speaks loudest in the basement. Jack Carpenter’s magisterial lighting creates shrines to the ordinary citizens on whose shoulders the Mint — and the country — was built. Carpenter ignores the presence of chandeliers — in a basement of all places! — and places red spots along the brick walls, transforming the hallway into a gallery.

Deep inside the safes — protected by exquisitely crafted steel doors — Goode places his works of art: a woman knitting, another in a bathtub, a perhaps homeless couple, and a tea-drinking Victorian lady tied down by propriety. Masterfully, Carpenter’s murky lighting transforms them into silent witnesses of a problematic past. Yet the atmosphere feels like one of your favorite watering holes on a Friday night.

Upstairs, Goode moves his seven dancers, supplemented by eight additional ones, through the Mint’s ostentatious public rooms and stark courtyard. For the next hour, they bring to life finely designed mini-dramas that possess a diorama-like quality. Watched over by a splendidly uniformed Fire Marshall who is quite at home in the building’s opulence, Traveling Light becomes an elaborately designed machine with interlocking gears that shuttle witnesses from one station to another.

I happened to be with the people who first see wealthy and bored Damara Vita Ganley abandon her “exalted” position to mingle with the groundlings. Here, worldly goods mean clean water. At least, the thinking went, these folks have each other. Out of robust duets and trios two men peel off, sent into a better future. Noble sentiment, terrible dramatic ending.

In the courtyard, which suggests a prison yard thanks to Carpenter’s lighting and Goode’s omnipotent voice from above, Filipe Barrueto-Cabello struggles as a poor working man. Haunted and perhaps supported by female spirits, he is barricaded against the elements, but longs for beauty. Andrew Ward and Alexander Zendzian are marvelous as W.C. Fields-like storytellers. The courtyard yields one of the evening’s most poignant moments: Barrueto-Cabello hugging and losing some cabbages as a solo clarinet wails. (Jay Cloidt’s score is first rate and invaluable throughout.)

In one of the inside rooms, Carpenter covers the chandeliers and hangs empty picture frames to better facilitate a detailed trip down memory lane. Jessica Swanson, a proper middle class lady, muses about a summertime affair with a young man (Melecio Estrella) whose calloused hands linger on in her mind. Their stiff-limbed yet passionate struggle doesn’t need words to be eloquently rendered. Elsewhere, in a Virginia Woolf-like touch, Patricia West searches desperately for a quiet place to get her life on track. Buffeted by intruders, she is caught in a turmoil that has more than a current of violence. It leaves her wan, alone, with only the echoes of her own words.

The carefully-honed Traveling is a very special vehicle for Goode’s excellent dancers-actors-singers, who are well supported by the additional cast. At one point Cloidt gives a quartet a four-part a cappella harmony, and they sail through it with ease. Goode badly wants the world to be a better place, but that’s not why we keep watching him and listening to him. We go back because his work sings, dances, and speaks with rare eloquence. I think what we want — and get — is what Barrueto-Cabello hungered for: beauty.

TRAVELING LIGHT

Wed-Sun, 8 p.m. (also Fri.–Sat., 10 p.m.), through Aug. 1, $29–$44

The Old Mint Building

88 Fifth St., SF

(415) 561-6565

www.joegoode.org

 

Peripheral vision

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Peripheral vision

DANCE Liss Fain has been choreographing in San Francisco for the last 20 years. Her work has remained on the periphery, probably because it doesn’t sync up with trends or the tenor of the times. Fain choreographs highly structured, emotionally cool works in which she shapes and shifts a ballet-based modern dance vocabulary as if to see where she can take it. This type of approach and Fain’s type of craft are rare today. It’s a pleasure to see an active intelligence engaged in such full-bodied work.

Fain also chooses high-quality collaborators. Her company’s costumes — designed by Mary Domenicko and James Meyer this season — are elegant and finely detailed. Fain has worked with the excellent Matthew Antaky for years. His visual and lighting concepts place her dances into richly evocative environments.

Last weekend (June 17-19) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Liss Fain Dance presented two premieres, How it Ends and Speak of Familiar Things. Both were excellently performed by a sextet of new and veteran Fain dancers: Brendan Barthel, Mira Cook, Jennifer Beamer Fernandez, Shannon Kurashige, Alec Lytton, and Bethany Mitchell.

For How it Ends, Fain chose fierce percussion by Iannis Xenakis, a shimmering instrumental score by Marcos Balter, and a choral hallelujah by John Tavener. The piece showcased sharp shifts of energy within a single phrase. Fain also used strong gestural language to flatten or cleave space. A face-caressing gesture was as intriguing as it was repetitious.

Proceeding at an even pace, the piece developed a slight trajectory. Initially it elaborated on unisons, most interestingly when a trio for women stepped in and out of commonality. In the more lyrical middle section, two athletic duets for very different dancers took center stage. Barthel and Kurashige shaped each other in precisely calibrated interactions where Kurashige often appeared to take initiative. Lytton and Mitchell’s mutual lifts and floats picked up speed until they found themselves — in a delicious moment — frozen side-by-side in a tiny plié. In the work’s third and most affecting section, the dancers became hesitant. Before leaving the stage, they walked and stopped, as if waiting for something to happen.

A similar instant occurred in the somewhat loquacious Speak of Familiar Things: after his partner walked away, Barthel stood watching a female duet defined by parallel moves. Overall, the piece presented a stream of variably captivating solos and duets. A strong, compact dancer, Kurashige was commanding. Throughout, Beamer Fernandez impressed with her upper-body work, and Mitchell with her speed and power.

Love streams

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Love streams

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Dance Continuum SF’s artistic directors José Ivan Ibarra and Peter Litwinowicz danced and studied with Bay Area José Limón disciples Gary Masters and Cheryl Chaddick. Though they are their own men, the lineage shows. Limón’s weighted yet luminously airy style and his taking on of momentous topics without a whiff of irony is not much in fashion these days. So the old man would have approved when the four year-old company called its June 11-13 concert “Life, Love and Rituals.”

To a contemporary viewer, the ability to translate emotionally resonant material into movement language that communicates clearly and simply is refreshing. No wonder Continuum has attracted a group of beautifully trained dancers who seem to thrive in this capacious environment. They are, in addition to the choreographers: Blane Ashby, Kyla Farrow, Heather Glabe, Lindsay Shapiro, and Jennifer Wright.

The ambitious program featured five world premieres. Of the two choreographers, Ibarra has the more theatrical bent. Sometimes his movement language can look a little facile, but it doesn’t unduly undermine his expressive intent; Ibarra creates solid dramatic structures. With the dark Picasso Blue, he turns commedia dell’arte inside out. Starting out lightheartedly, he tightens the screws until Harlequin’s (Ibarra) heart is broken; Columbina has gone mad; and Pantalone (Ashby), the old fool, turns out to be a devilish manipulator. The puppetry’s mechanism is awkwardly conceived and the double duets looked unbalanced. Still, despite the oddly chosen Brahms quartet, my heart wound up in my throat.

In the trio Love Shirley, Ibarra’s lover/pimp character gets his comeuppance from Farrow and Glabe’s entertainers/hookers. The piece’s ambivalent relationships strike a note of disease. But even as you root for the women, it’s disconcerting to watch how Ibarra evokes the insidiousness of shifts in power. It makes you sit up.

Perhaps the lyrics in the finely crafted Café o Canela anchor its three sections too literally, but the piece plausibly portrays a disintegrating relationship. Listening to Ashby’s icy self involvement, after having watched Farrow’s plangently but strongly danced solo about marital loneliness, is chilling. The two call up the memory of a perfect love (Ibarra and Glabe in Mexican costumes) observed on their honeymoon. The lovey-dovey duet looks charming, but also like a saccharine projection of “native” life. In the climactic tango-inspired duet, Ashby and Farrow elastically drift and float until they finally cut the thread.

Litwinowicz’ two premieres, Rituals and Lonely, but not always alone make their own statements about what it means to be alive. In the simple but pristine Rituals (Farrow, Glabe, and Shapiro) different-colored scarves suggest the time passing of time and changed circumstances. Their fluid usage also evoke continuity within familiarity. Making excellent use of stage space, the dancers’ dissolving and reconfigured unisons, gentle canons and the periodic solos flow on top of a bed of constancy of, at the very least, purpose.

Lonely is one of the best dance/video works I can remember. The two media interlock tightly yet with flourish. Dancers on stage lusciously express — and sometimes shape — the thoughts and dreams of their video counterparts until Glabe reverses direction. Individually, in its distinct episodes and as an accumulation, Lonely convinces because it is smart, funny, and poignant.

Global movement

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Global movement

Albert Einstein said that “dancers are the athletes of God.” He didn’t say which god he had in mind, nor has the quote made all that much sense. What’s so hot about being in sports? Martha Graham tried to explain it by saying dancers achieved that exalted status through the practice and discipline of their daily work. But couldn’t that be said for any artist? Still, looking at the lineup of dancers at this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival makes me think Einstein had a point after all.

Dancers are a breed not quite of this world. They certainly are among the most unpractical people roaming this wobbly universe. What they make doesn’t last. It can’t be bought, pawned, hung on the wall, or reproduced to bring in royalties. Their careers are short. Except for the very few, they can’t support themselves with their work, and every time they practice their craft they risk one limb or another. Fortunately for the rest of us, they know what they are in for, and they learn to live on air and love. What dancers also appreciate is a good floor — no splinters, not too slippery, not too sticky. And, yes please, some decent lights.

That — and the till — is what the San Francisco International Arts Festival can offer its dancers, who come from as far away as Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo; Vevey, Switzerland; and Berlin. They also come from Boston, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area. Additionally, the festival, now in its seventh year and still a shoestring operation, assists with the intricacies of individual fundraising — and acquiring visas — but the responsibility for production costs and traveling remains up to the invited artists. This is not the way it’s supposed to work. Whoever said that the biggest supporters of the arts are the artists hit it closer than Einstein did.

But in these parlous times, we take what we can get. The offerings this year certainly look intriguing. What’s not to like in these double bills and single program evenings?

Dana Lawton Dances with Studio Rue Dance For Who is She?, Lawton and three colleagues choreograph famous women on each other; Lawton will be Marilyn Monroe, by Jia Wu — who had previously never heard of the blond bombshell. Perception also shaped Studio Rue Dance’s Byb Chanel Bibene’s solo, Clinic. On leaving the Congo, he had to learn the hard way that whatever he did, he was first seen as “black” and only then as a “man.”

Christian Burns and Anthony Discenza with Company Prototype Status Rarely do visuals and dance support each other as effectively as in the Burns/Discenza Beneath Your Sheltering Hand which looks at how the media messes with our psyche. The Swiss Company Prototype’s Marvin — watch an android come to life — will also be performed (with two other solos) on their own individual program.

Erica Essner Performance Co-op with Gretchen Garnett and Dancers Ten years ago the Erica Essner Performance Co-op moved to New York. Now they are back because Essner wants us to see “her astounding dancers” in two recent pieces. Last year Gretchen Garnett and Dancers performed as part of SFIAF’s Mash — wild, wooly, and worthwhile — Union Square series. This year they have an indoor spot.

Single slots are taken by Amy Seiwert/im’ijre and motion sensor wizard Frieder Weiss‘ world premiere, White Noise, a collaboration Seiwert loved because it pushed her outside her comfort zone. Boston’s Collage will bring East European music and dance. The Bay Area’s The Foundry isn’t asking you to come to see its Please Love Me in a theater. They’ll come to you, perhaps in a bar, park, or parking lot. 

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 19–31

Various venues, most shows $25

1-800-838-3006

www.sfiaf.org

Human, nature

David Talbot
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0
Human, nature

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE If Deborah Slater had not grown up into an artist, she might have tried her hand at science. She bases her dance theater pieces on extensive studies of physical reality. Her inspiration can come from concrete objects like furniture (Hotel of Memories) and paintings (The Desire Line) or less tangible phenomena like sleep (The Sleepwatchers), perception (Passing as … The Mathematics of Being), and death (A Hole in the World). Accessing Slater’s works can take patience, but her creations stay with you because they are formally inventive, finely crafted, and engage the mind and heart long after you leave the theater. But rarely have the many strands she weaves together resulted in a piece as sprawling, ambitious, and poetic as her 20th anniversary premiere Men Think They Are Better than Grass.

Seen at a preview performance, Men — the title is not anti-male, but refers to humankind — takes on nothing less than the destruction of the environment that started probably as soon as humans were given "dominion" over the earth. Instead of reiterating well-rehearsed arguments, evidence, and position papers, Slater and codirector/dramaturge Jayne Wenger went to poet W.S. Merwin. Excerpts of his writings provide the backbone and scenario for this evocative, richly textured canvas of sound, color, language, and movement. The poetry, heard on tape and — helpfully — reprinted in the program, was recorded by a number of well-known Bay Area artists.

Men explores human alienation from nature in a series of imagistic episodes that, though loosely structured, build momentum. They are dark (dancers rushing about in increasing desperation), funny (Justin Flores transforming himself into a man made of briefcases), and dreamy (people trying to dig up the firm ground of history that proves to be unexpectedly porous). Perhaps most remarkable was the way Men deepened its sense of entropy, barely alleviated at the end by something, at least, suggesting a way out. As the piece darkened, the confrontations between the dancers, who had stripped off their business black to reveal battle fatigue greens, became increasingly agitated. They intensified to the point where they had a Lord of the Flies aspect to them. You also wanted to gasp for air every time the dancers crushed themselves into an ever-smaller piece of terrain.

Still, at this point, the choreography worked best in the small units: Travis Rowland heaving one woman after another, Private Freeman on a "war path" to protect his potted plant, and the fierce Kerry Mehling in anything she lent her regal body to. Some of the ensemble sections, particularly the unisons, needed more of a profile; they sometimes looked tense and rushed beyond what I think the intention was. All the dancers — Natalie Green, Kelly Kemp, Wendy Rein, Breton Tyner-Bryan, Shaunna Vella, and the others already mentioned — contributed to the choreography.

Men was a collaborative enterprise in other ways as well. Thom Blum and Floor Vahn’s soundscape of natural and animal sounds beautifully evoked the natural world, so increasingly absent in the lives of these depraved-deprived people. Elaine Buckholtz’ videography added its own poetry. Allen Willner designed the dramatic lighting, Laura Hazlett the fine costumes. What did not work was Mikiko Uesugi’s metaphoric use of plastic sheets for chopped-down trees. *

MEN THINK THEY ARE BETTER THAN GRASS

Thurs/6-Sat/8, 8 p.m.; Sun/9, 5 p.m., $25

Z Space at Theater Artaud

450 Florida, SF

www.deborahslater.org

Tropic of dancer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Tropic of dancer

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Judging from the packed salsa classes he’s been teaching at Dance Mission Theater for 12 years, Ramón Ramos Alayo is correct: the Bay Area is a hotbed for Cuban-Caribbean culture. But even he underestimated its pull. When I spoke to him on a recent balmy spring evening, he was expecting that night’s attendance to drop. “It’s light and warm, so people like to spend their free time outside,” he explained before heading for class. Wrong. If more aficionados had shown up, they would have had to move the furniture.

In addition to being a highly sought-after instructor — he also teaches modern dance at ODC — Ramos Alayo is a dancer, musician, choreographer, and the director of the annual CubaCaribe Festival (this year’s installment takes place at Dance Mission Theater April 16-May 2). Multitasking may be in his blood, but it’s also something he was trained for.

At the Havana National School of Art, where Ramos Alayo enrolled at age 11, every student had to study ballet, folklórico, and modern dance. “If you didn’t pass the grade in each genre on every level, you were out,” he remembered. After getting his master’s, he had the choice of joining either a modern or traditional company: he went with two modern groups. But when he founded his own Alayo Dance Company in San Francisco in 2002, he made its mission inclusive, fusing Afro-Cuban, modern, traditional folkloric, and popular Cuban dance styles. Although for some fusion suggests loss of identity, to Ramos Alayo it indicates creating something new from what exists.

As a choreographer and performer, Ramos Alayo is as at home in dances based on the Yoruban Orisha myths performed at the Ethnic Dance Festival as he is in original works inspired by political history and personal experience. His 10 dancers have to be able to do it all. Blood + Sugar is a raw dancer theater work about slavery; La Madre takes an intimate look at family. One of his earliest pieces, Wrong Way, is an athletic yet poignant duet for two men. He doesn’t recall the details of the recent Grace Notes, a free-flowing improvisation with bass player Jeff Chambers, but he does remember how good it felt to be performing it. “We had never rehearsed. We just looked at the score, and I had some spatial cues.”

Ramos Alayo’s wide-open approach to what it means to be contemporary artist living in the diaspora also shapes his curating of CubaCaribe, now in its sixth year. Under the overall banner of “From Katrina to Port-au-Prince,” this year’s festival honors the survivors of recent catastrophes. The first weekend will present Haitian and Haitian-rooted ensembles. New York’s Adia Whitaker is a modern, Haitian trained dancer-choreograher; Afoutayi recently relocated from Haiti to San Francisco; and Kumbuka is a New Orleans-based Haitian-Carnival ensemble. Afoutayi and Kumbuka make their San Francisco debuts.

The second weekend traditionally showcases local artists. Liberation Dance Theater’s current work is based on modern dance and reggaeton — a mix of Caribbean-based music styles. Alfafia is a collectively-run Haitian group from San Francisco City College. In the past, Paco Gomes has elegantly fused Afro-Brazilian with modern dance.

On first glance, Los Lupenos de San Jose, a group known for its rendition of regional Mexican dances, is not a natural for CubaCaribe. What got them an invitation was Salón Mexico, Susan Cashion’s choreography of social dances like el danzón and the mambo. They originated in Cuba but started their worldwide journey by way of Mexico.

Ramos Alayo’s new hour-long Migrations was inspired by New York subway performers. Joining his own ten dancers for the third weekend will be a hip-hop artist, a tap dancer, and a steel-drum musician.

CUBACARIBE FESTIVAL OF DANCE AND MUSIC

Through May 2, Fri–Sat, 8 p.m.;

Sun, 7 p.m.; April 25, 3 p.m., $12–$22

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

www.cubacaribe.org

Bright futures

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Bright futures

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This past weekend, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes and José Navarrete with Violeta Luna — CounterPULSE’s winter artists-in-residence — showed what artists can do, given time and space to work. Both tackled complex issues that extract high human costs. For Barnes it was imprisonment; for the Navarrete-Luna team, water. Both half-hour pieces will benefit from some refinement and rethinking.

Barnes calls her Home Is That Way? a work in progress, so one can hope it will return in a modified form. Home doesn’t even to attempt to untangle the morass surrounding the justice system, instead trying to shed light on the personal cost for prisoners and their families. Intimate yet far-reaching, Home has strong bones; they need to be fleshed out. Seen through Shelley Davis’ chain-link fence, Barnes, Clairemonica Figueroa, Kayos Makaya, and Travis Rowland are four automaton prisoners who do their own version of walking the walk. When Figueroa puts a slight drag into her step, she fills it with the weight in her soul.

The often haunting Home reworks all-too-familiar images well. The dancers spread-eagle themselves against the wall, and you don’t know whether there is guard behind them or whether they are trying to push the stones down. A lineup turns into a row boat with a futile dream of getting away. In a prison yard, the men work at bodybuilding, the women at connecting with each other. When Home attempts to recall a time of innocence, it runs into a common theatrical conundrum. It’s almost impossible for adults to slip into the skin of children. So these games of pattycake, kick the ball, and hopscotch look imposed instead of embodied. The piece’s un-credited writing, though undoubtedly heartfelt, also has a stiff earnestness to it that undercuts its emotional thrust. Davis’ set, including what looks a place for dreaming, needs better lighting.

At the end of another work in progress, New Rituals for a Desperate Era, Navarrete invites the audience to fill out a petition to Congress to recognize water as a human right. He explains that he wants the audience to go away having done something hopeful. Audiences will also take something good with them if a piece is rounded off successfully. He and Luna might try to do that in addition to the political gesture. Luna is a performance artist from Mexico whose finely tuned theatrical skills complement Navarrete’s more exuberant antics. Together they have created a wild ride that starts cosmically and ends in a carnivalesque phantasmagoria. Major credit has to go to long-time Bay Area designer Lauren Elder’s stunning set and costumes, the key to which are that detritus of modern society: the plastic water bottle.

Rituals is divided into distinct episodes, with Luna taking the lead in evoking a holistic perspective of nature with slow-paced but tightly controlled images of birthing and growth through sacred practices. Navarrete is a motor-mouthed huckster of “agua mágica” — the product of multinational greed — that promises to heal everything from asthma to sexual dysfunction. He also beautifully segues into a transformation from an oil-slicked subhuman into a dying fish who dreams of clean water. The final image of the transformation of the gods takes too long, though it’s worth the wait.

Last but not least

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Last but not least

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Looking at the last piece by the greatest choreographer of the second half of the 20th century seemed a daunting prospect. What if it was less than good? Could I see it as something that stood on its own terms regardless of the context?

My concerns evaporated the minute the curtain opened on Merce Cunningham’s Nearly 90(2), the traveling version of Nearly Ninety, which premiered on Cunningham’s 90th birthday, on April 19, 2009. (The superscript for the road show is surely a final twinkle from those pale blue Cunningham eyes.) The elaborate set is gone; the musicians (John King and Takeshisa Kusogi), performing former Led Zeppelin bass player John Paul Jones’s score, are now in the pit. What remains the same, one has to assume, is the choreography, still performed by a cast trained by Cunningham himself. Nearly 90(2) is an exquisite piece of and about dance making; it is perhaps the most intimate work of his extraordinary career.

Throughout his life, Cunningham resisted narrative readings, but in Nearly 90(2) I couldn’t help feeling the choreographer’s presence; he seemed to be looking at the dancers one by one as they walked in from opposite sides of the wings, as if on call. He paired this one with that one, tried to see what could be done with trios, and finally took a close look at some individuals. Watching the piece felt like observing the process of shape-giving.

The pacing was slow and deliberate; the clarity with which each torque, each angled limb, and each crossover step was given time to reach the fullness of its expression encouraged close watching. But it was not just the audience that was seeing through Cunningham’s eyes: the dancers, too, participated in this process of looking. They’d finish a phrase and then sit to see where the section would spin to with someone else. At one point, a trio — looking uncannily like a Henry Moore sculpture — implacably watched another trio and then returned to its own work.

With its multiple points of view, Cunningham’s choreography often looks structurally unfocused. Nearly 90(2) was formally transparent. The choreographer, one more time, contemplated a set of questions and, here, set them out in front of us like a diorama of possibilities. What could be done with, let’s say, that most basic of building stones, the duet? Are two dancers, physically apart, a duet? At what point do two duets become a quartet or four soloists? But Cunningham doesn’t care about the answers; he is interested in the questions.

When Andrea Weber and Rashaun Mitchell, the first of five couples, stretched, cantilevered, and folded their limbs, they were off-balance yet in equilibrium with each other. When all five duets engaged in similar encounters, you couldn’t miss the individuality of the combinations. No wonder fleet-footed Julie Cunningham and newcomer Jamie Scott smiled at each other in passing.

Before looking at each dancer individually, Cunningham explored trios that were more grounded than the often precarious duets, supported on two legs while the other two had landed somewhere in space. Here Cunningham’s dancers explored volume and weight. They first grew and contracted like a bellows, never letting go of each other even as Weber pulled herself across the stage like a plow horse. Later, the partners were knitted together through small, intricate exchanges, but they didn’t touch.

The solos finally looked like little bouquets that Cunningham wanted to pass to individual dancers: John Hinrichs’s push-up flipped open like a book, Melissa Toogood shone in sparkling footwork, and Mitchell’s hip rotations on top of a deep plié rolled across the stage like an earthquake.

So you think you can choreograph?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
So you think you can choreograph?

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE On March 11, at the eighth Dance Discourse Project — an ongoing series of artist-driven discussions sponsored by CounterPULSE and Dancers’ Group — the topic was “Dance in Pop Culture.” Reality shows like So You Think You Can Dance? and Dancing With the Stars have raised questions about their effect on theater-based dance. Most participants agreed that these media-driven programs have created at least one beneficial change. For reasons cultural and historic, large sections of the population still think of dance as something unknown and unfamiliar. The popularity of these programs — controversial as they are in terms of artistic quality — have made dance more accessible and democratized the art.

The night after that discussion, democratization of a different type took place in the Mission. It was time for another entry in Dance Mission Theater’s long-running “Choreographer’s Showcase” series. Twice a year a cattle call goes out to dancers in the Bay Area. It’s not for a chance to audition or submit a proposal to be considered by experts. Rather, it’s a wide-open process: you have something you want to show, let ’em know — first come, first served.

The result is a freewheeling two hours of dance, with usually about 12 soloists and groups. They range from the barely competent to the highly professional. The house is packed with family and friends who come to cheer their favorites and are exposed to a wide spectrum of theatrical dance. This latest show was no different.

Three soloists stood out. Herve Kayos Makaya’s La Lutte Continue, performed by the choreographer, showed a superb dancer dragging two heavy burlap bags before bursting into an explosive African and Western vocabulary mix of leaping feet and racing arms. Currently a work in progress, the finished Lutte is something to look forward to at the CubaCaribe Festival in late April. First Creation had choreographer-dancer Alison Hammond scoot around the floor, shaking a tambourine. Kneeling on the floor, flowing hair obscuring her head, she deployed neck muscles the size of a prizefighter into a rollicking earthquake before sending her long legs into crotch-exposing propeller rotations. Surely this was one of the oddest performances seen on that stage. Liz Brent’s masked that person you meet was so short it was over before you noticed it. Though tentative, the idea of using hands as a primary expressive tool warrants further exploration.

I have a soft spot for the large Strong Pulse Crew, Kirstin E. Williams’ hip-hop student group from City College. For some of the dancers, it’s a chance to shine; for others, it’s a chance to try, and there is room here for all. Bringin’ It Back Remix featured a welcome dream section in which the dancers choreographed their own parts. Meanwhile, Kimberly B. Valmore teaches college students using a ballet-based eclectic vocabulary. The imagistic Answer the Call, with a central couple surrounded by an ensemble moved with a pulsating febrile intensity, nicely balanced stasis against full-force propulsion. Some of Valmore’s dancers have professional potential. Silvana Sousa’s samba choreography for Syncope of Brazil highlighted the difference between dancers and performers. Except for the three soloists, these samba dancers were too self-consciously awkward to bring to their performance that all-important ingredient called projection.

Two companies managed to create compelling emotional atmospheres. Lee Parmino and Janey Madamba’s Awakening made good use of a small corps in a piece that suggested disruption and healing of a relationship. There was something vaguely ominous in Hilary Palanza’s bent-over and head-butting duets A Perplexing and Brief Study of My Loss. She was shattered by more the score’s sounds of breaking glass.

Creativity continuum

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Creativity continuum

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Conceptual art and minimalism are not usually associated with dance. Yet the terms frequently swam into consciousness at last weekend’s three choreographers program at Theater Artaud. Spare, rigorously crafted works by Hope Mohr, Molissa Fenley, and Yvonne Rainer made for an unusually satisfying evening of mostly pure dance. Mohr presented the program in the context of her company’s "third home season: three generations."

Rainer’s 1966 Trio A is a legendary work, originally performed by three dancers as part of Judson Church Dance’s revolutionary rethinking of the art form. It consists of a single, intricately structured, four-and-a-half minute dance phrase, presented impersonally and as evenly on keel as possible. As performed — out of sync — by Mohr and Robbie Cook, Trio A offered different perspectives on the same material. Watching it felt like observing two Rubik’s cubes in action, and it was totally involving.

In the second version, Trio A Pressured, Cook assumed the role of an obstacle trying to push Mohr, who was repeating the phrase, out of her single-minded commitment. He hopped in front of her, mirrored her movements, and acted like a mechanized clown. Although not that interesting in itself, it turned Mohr into something akin to a sleepwalker.

Hope turned the middle part of this so-very-welcome program over to Fenley, who has been making pristine, tightly built solos for more than 30 years. Mass Balance is her latest piece, designed for herself and a very long white pole.

Fenley moved little — a couple of pawing step here, slight turns of positions there. Most noticeable were her hands: they are gnarled but strong, with fingers that curl like roots that have grown around a foreign object. By the end of Mass, the pole was no longer a stranger. As she quietly held it with an outstretched arm, it became an extension of her body even as she got ready — but didn’t — to let it go.

In her gray tunic and pants, Fenley had something of a priestess about her. Yet that thing in her hands talked a lot. It became a ballet barre, an oar, an offering, something that welcomed a caress, a challenge to be controlled, perhaps even wings. Even if you were not imagistically inclined, the beauty of Fenley’s reserve and her mastery over time and space were enough. I’m not even sure she needed Cenk Ergun’s electronic score.

Mohr named her new Far From Perfect accurately. This quintet is not perfect, but it’s very good — her best work yet. Most satisfying was to see how carefully she shifted gears and opened the complex subject about the nature, and process, of making art into a contemplation of the pain human beings inflict on each other. These two subjects do not naturally go together, but Mohr made sense of the connection.

The first part, with its shifting relationships in which dancers constantly reconfigure space, was pure dance — economical, linear, fluid. But small inconsistencies crept in. They were like the first raindrops you aren’t quite sure you felt. When Emily Hite quit the stage, we were left with two couples, and lightning struck. They kicked, threw, and imprisoned each other, tearing apart connections but also hugging until the tempest passed and one woman was left weeping.

The dancers (Hite, Laura Blakely, Derek Harris, Cameron Growden, and Tegan Schwab), the collaged music, and the text — a compilation of Mohr’s writing and a poem by Brenda Hillman — were excellent. At 50 minutes, Far can be tightened; it should be seen again.

Connecting flights

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Connecting flights

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The buzz surrounding the Akram Khan Company’s second Bay Area visit — they first appeared in 2003 as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival — proved that sometimes pre-performance excitement is not the result of marketing hype. A copresentation by San Francisco Performances and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Khan’s bahok (2008), a 75-minute evocation of displacement in a world constantly on the move, proved witty, humane, and haunting, despite its sentimental ending.

Though bahok (“carrier” in Bengali) is set for an international cast of eight, this was of less interest than the way Khan peeled away each dancer’s anonymity. The piece showed individuals who tease, love, fight, and ultimately find commonality despite linguistic and cultural differences. Each, some more clearly than others, was a “carrier” of the cultural forces that shaped them. But that’s not all they were.

Tall Taiwanese ballerina Cheng-Fang Wu’s character was an image-obsessed show-off. Her duet with the much shorter Indian Saju was pure Marx Brothers. Seoul-born Young-Jin Kim appears hopelessly lost in an interview with an immigration official but becames a determined peacemaker when breaking up a fistfight. And what about the neurotically self-possessed Spaniard Eulalia Ayguade Farro? She’s the one who breaks the ice by picking up a bag dropped by the catatonically staring Sung-Hoon Kim.

bahok is set in a place of transit, an airport, a bus station — but also, perhaps, a center for processing migrants. In Fabiana Piccioli’s somber lighting, the sense of nowhere numbs spirits as well as limbs, as those assembled wait for their numbers to come up. From anonymity and suffocating stasis, Khan built bahok into something like a community of hope — still waiting, but bathed in what looked suspiciously like a sunrise.

With an immaculate sense of timing, Khan layers individual dramatic episodes with fiercely physical dancing that rebounds from the floor even as it gives into it. The work started slowly with tiny movements from the seated dancers. A leg opens; an arm drops; papers are rustled. The immobile Sung-Hoon Kim seemed planted in front of a babbling electronic message-board, yet he had the first big solo, in which he sliced space with fractured fury only to melt into the ground. Then, one by one, the dancers opened themselves.

Among the most complex characters was a gymnastically flipping Farro, who raced around like an errant firecracker and turned into an attack dog when somebody dared to touch her precious papers. She just about ate the glued-to-his cell phone Saju when he didn’t seem to know all that much about Indian mythology. The dynamic Saju, who has a flair for the deadpan, later defended himself in a hilarious, but matter-of-factly delivered, pan-Asian solo.

Khan doesn’t shy away from metaphors; he slips them unobtrusively into his physical language. South African dancer Shanell Winlock, who tried to facilitate the interview with the non-English-speaking Young-Jin Kim, tells the invisible interrogator that she carries her father’s shoes in her bag. Later, having donned a man’s jacket, she stepped into them and haltingly performed a half-remembered version of an over-boot dance invented by South African miners.

One of bahok‘s wonderfully humorous duets showed Slovak Andrej Petrovic trying to wake up his floppy-doll Korean girlfriend, Set-Byeol Kim. Her resistance drives him to distraction, but they make a go of it, her still-sleeping form sitting on top of him as they try to find a common rhythm for their competing arms. Their bumbling was touching, funny, and all too believable.

I just wish Khan’s ending had not literally spelled out bahok‘s meaning on that otherwise well-used message-board. There was no need for that. We got it just fine.

The heart of art

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The heart of art

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE In 1960, San Francisco City Hall’s glorious staircase became infamous when police turned fire hoses on protesters at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Fifty years later, these same stairs will become the stage for a very different event: Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project’s Love Everywhere, a celebration of love and marriage equality.

Chong Shuch had never heard of the protest incident when Dancers’ Group commissioned her as part of its ONSITE initiative — free performances in public spaces that offer artists the opportunity to create something otherwise not possible (Joanna Haigood, Patrick Makuakane, and Anna Halprin are previous participants; Benjamin Levy is next). When Chong Shuch received the grant, she was asked to consider the Civic Center area as a possible site.

She first looked at the San Francisco Public Library, but upon walking into City Hall she was struck “by the beauty of the architecture of this public space that belongs to everybody living here.” She knew she wanted to make a work about “love and joy and the big things in my life as opposed to the difficulties.” Deciding on a Valentine’s Day piece, she was reminded that Feb. 12 is the sixth anniversary of when the city started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. That sealed the deal.

“I remembered how incredibly joyous it was to be in that City Hall space at the time, and I was inspired to try to generate that kind of joy,” she recalls.

You certainly couldn’t miss the love and joy in the couple dances, spiraling chains, and whirling circles practiced at a recent rehearsal in the Margaret Jenkins Performance Lab. Fifty or so performers (“At this point, I am not sure myself of how many,” she says) answered Chong Shuch’s call for volunteers to join her octet of professional dancers. These folks — primarily young, but with a gray head or two — were having the time of their lives.

Two also had a surprise awaiting them. In addition to calling for volunteers, Chong Shuch sent out a request for marriage vows that people had written for each other. She received around 30, ranging from “African ceremonial” to “quirky and artsy” and “formal, God-ly.” These vows form the texts for Love. One became the basis for a call-and-response: “I promise to pay close attention; I promise to listen.” But one couple recognized lyrics from a Daveen DiGiacomo song composed for the piece — because they had selected them for their wedding. “It’s a lovely way for this couple to have their own vows reflected back to them,” Chong Shuch says.

Using amateur performers — “I don’t like to call them that, I prefer to simply call them people” Chong Shuch says — seems to be something of a trend among Bay Area choreographers. Joe Goode, Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, and Chong Shuch in her 2008 After All have done it successfully. It’s a way to fill large spaces where the added numbers often serve as choruses, but it’s also a sign of what might be called an attempt to “democratize” dance.

For Chong Shuch, this means thinking differently about her own role as choreographer. Just as she increasingly seeks her professional dancers’ input, she also thinks that “regardless of their training or lack thereof, individual expressions are still of value and of worth” — and, therefore, have a place on stage.

LOVE EVERYWHERE

Fri/12, noon–1 p.m., free

San Francisco City Hall Rotunda

One Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

Sat/13, performances TBA (check Web site for updates)

Sun/14, 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., free

Glide Memorial Church

330 Ellis, SF

www.dancersgroup.com, www.erikachongshuch.org

Queer and present

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Queer and present

DANCE In the middle of Keith Hennessy’s “A Queer 20th Anniversary” performances — which end this weekend with the Bay Area premiere of his 2008 Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal, or trauma …) — the reprise of his two-part How to Die (2006) nearly filled Dance Mission Theatre. At the end of the evening, he asked for donations to help him defray a looming $5,000 deficit. Just about everyone gave.

Perhaps Hennessy didn’t mind begging. Stepping out of a persona and addressing the audience directly, after all, is part of his artistic make-up. Still, I winced. After two decades of investigating theater as a locus for truth-seeking, of innovating formal structures, of honing performance skills and creating work that is serious and thought-provoking, an artist deserves better.

Although Hennessy has a sizable, loyal audience, primarily in the queer community, his theatrically pungent work rattles everyone’s cage; injustice, poverty, violence, and hypocrisy set him off. Broadway it ain’t. Compelling — and sometimes uncomfortable — dance theater it is. You don’t have to agree with Hennessy’s perspective on sex’s redemptive power to appreciate the richness of his references, the skill with which he translates ideas to the stage, and the force of his commitment to what he does.

Hennessy is a stripper, not because he often performs in the nude, but because he tears off the blinders that protect him and us from what we don’t want to see. The question, of course, is what remains. Vulnerability for sure. But perhaps Hennessy is also a romantic, hoping to find something pure underneath all the garbage we accumulate.

In Homeless USA, part one of How to Die, he makes us look at the homeless in front of our noses. In part two, American Tweaker, he conjures up the drug-addled sexual abandon of the early 1980s. Even on second viewing, neither work was easy to watch. There is something of the fleshy rawness of a Francis Bacon canvas about them. But Hennessy also pushes theatrical verisimilitude to the point of absurdity, which allows an audience to step back from the emotional onslaught.

Homeless USA was derived from research on homeless men — many of them veterans — who commit suicide by being decapitated by passing trains. Hennessy started out gently, with Jules Beckman as a pugnacious sidekick, but turned up the heat by “masturbating” on the train tracks, and stumbling over the list of reasons to commit suicide. While “drowning” himself in a bucket, he became his own lighting designer. Attached to a string threaded through his nose, he recalled a delicate Petrouchka. In these scenes, Hennessy’s intensity — he often approaches a kind of religious fervor in his performances — was riveting.

At the core of the manic American Tweaker, a train-wreck evocation of a sex-obsessed disco and bathhouse scene, was a prolonged, extremely violent (though simulated) scene of anal intercourse. It ended with Hennessy whimpering on the floor. Addressing the audience, he confessed that at this point “I usually don’t know what to say.” Neither did I. The final healing ritual had Hennessy hanging upside down, Seth Eisen as an apparition from A Thousand and One Nights, and Beckman’s wondrous music. Rituals necessitate a community of believers. I wish I could have been one of them.

In Crotch, Hennessy draws props from his performance theory studies and (as the piece’s full title suggests) the work of the late German artist and philosopher Joseph Beuys. Among the most clearly referential are a tub of lard and a piece of felt: Beuys claimed after his Luftwaffe plane crashed on the Crimean Front in 1944, Tatar tribes people saved his life by wrapping him in lard and felt. The way Hennessy uses the lard is simultaneously freaky and profound.

CROTCH (ALL THE JOSEPH BEUYS REFERENCES IN THE WORLD CANNOT HEAL THE PAIN, CONFUSION, REGRET, CRUELTY, BETRAYAL, OR TRAUMA …)

Fri/29–Sun/31, 8 p.m., $15–$25

Dance Mission Theatre

3316 24th St, SF

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/82278

Swans, symmetry, and sensations

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Swans, symmetry, and sensations

DANCE Looking back over a year’s dance performances feels like reading a horoscope backward. Were there surprises, disappointments, new loves, emerging trends, familiar encounters, and reasons for hope and despair? Of course. Perhaps the best part of this yearly exercise is that it allows works to bubble up that for one reason or another — quality, daring, perspective, innovation — stuck in the mind. You want to see them again. Some, you actually will. As for the not-that-again, forget-it, or please-don’t pieces, they already have sunk into the grand pool of oblivion. The following is a baker’s dozen of top picks, chosen roughly in the order in which they were seen.

Sean Dorsey’s dance-theater piece Lou, based on the writings of transgender pioneer Lou Sullivan and danced by Dorsey, Brian Fisher, Juan de la Rosa, and Nol Simonse, was a penetrating portrait of one man’s courage and lust for life. It also highlighted Dorsey’s increasingly fluid skill in fusing language and dance.

San Francisco Ballet’s most recent Swan Lake (to be reprised in January 2010) is an odd mix of traditional (the choreography) and edgy (the production). By using the bold design of a ballet neophyte, Broadway-credited Jonathan Fensom, Helgi Tomasson took a huge risk in offending traditionalists who like their swans pure. Danced fabulously well, this is a Swan Lake for our own time.

Pichet Klunchun and Myself was just a one-night stand, but what a night it was. To watch French super-theorist Jérôme Bel and classical Thai dancer Klunchun play their intellectual ping pong game about life, dance, culture, and everything in between was to watch two master performers at work.

The big deal about Jess Curtis/Gravity’s brainy and sensuous The Symmetry Project was not that Curtis and Maria Francesca Scaroni performed nude, but that they embodied the idea of relationships — physical, intellectual, emotional, erotic — as being constantly in play.

Presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with their exhibit on William Kentridge, The Return of Ulysses was Kentridge’s translation of Monteverdi’s jewel into puppet theater. The multiple perspectives on time and place and the exquisite cooperation between puppets and singers were awe-inspiring.

ODC/Dance — just because of who they are. Sometimes we tend to take established hometown companies for granted. Yet these dancers have never looked better. Additionally, both Brenda Way’s In the Memory of the Forest and KT Nelson’s Grassland overflowed with commanding and beautifully shaped ideas.

We know Heidi Schweiker best as an interpreter of other people’s choreography. That’s why it was so gratifying to see her first full evening of work. Dreams of Speaking showed a choreographer of intelligence, imagination, and a fine sense of craft.

Ramón Ramos Alayo’s fifth annual Cuba Caribe Festival packed them in. It’s SoMa’s own ethnic dance festival sporting a highly partisan and knowledgeable audience and performers who compete — in a friendly way. High points were the sassy female Las Que Son Son and Alayo dancing up a storm with Silfredo La O Vigo.

Seen in a drizzly rain on a preview performance, Spirit of Place (to be reprised this spring), Anna Halprin’s tribute to husband Lawrence Halprin’s reimagined Stern Grove Theater, was a gorgeous response to a space where nature and art collaborate. The dancers looked like spirits emanating from this magisterial grass and granite environment.

Togetherness suits artistic and life partners Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. For their second collaboration, The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories (which returns in January 2010), they worked with two groups of completely different dancers. The result was mysterious, mesmerizing, and surprisingly fresh.

The big surprise at the San Francisco International Arts Festival was the extraordinarily skilled and theatrically vibrant The Angel and the Woodcutter, South Korea’s Cho-In Theatre’s eloquent retelling in movement of a popular Korean fairy tale. It deserved a larger audience.

Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s lecture-demonstration, The Balanchine Couple, served as a vivid reminder that Balanchine never ran out of ideas for pas de deux. The nine on this program could not have been more different — all of them first-rate. The program also brought home the painful truth that such finely detailed and musically phrased Balanchine interpretations are a rarity.

Sometimes it helps to look beyond the hook. The big deal about South African dancer Gregory Maqoma’s Beautiful Me was that he used material from three other (cooperating) artists for his own choreography. Fair enough, but what left this audience member speechless was the grace, virility, and technical and emotional virtuosity with which Maqoma realized this portrayal of self.

Finally, the Performing Diaspora Festival was an ambitious project “featuring traditional forms as a basis for experimentation and innovation.” It boasted an elaborate support structure of studio time, blogs, workshops, and symposia. In the two programs I saw, the work ranged from first rate to mediocre. Fortunately, this is a two-year project — so let’s toast to 2010.

Keefer of the flame

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Keefer of the flame

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Next year it will be 30 years since choreographer and dance maven Krissy Keefer cofounded the radical feminist Wallflower Collective in Oregon, and 25 years since she relocated her social activist Dance Brigade Company to San Francisco. Perhaps those upcoming anniversaries naturally suggested a time for taking stock. Or perhaps it’s that Keefer’s 17-year-old daughter Fredrika (remember the little girl who couldn’t get admitted to the San Francisco Ballet School because she had "the wrong body"?) now dances with the company invited a look at the future — both Keefer’s and the country’s.

The new, full-evening The Great Liberation upon Hearing, Keefer’s largest work in years, is based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead; it runs Nov. 13-22 at Laney College in Oakland. For Keefer, this meant revisiting material she had already worked with in the 1995 Ballet of the Banshees. But her perspective has changed.

"I have been making issue-oriented work for over 20 years," she explains at her home base, Dance Mission Theater. "None of it has actually improved the social environment. The international trafficking of women is worse; the prison system is worse; the abuse of children and women is worse. And the polar cap, something I have made work about for years, is melting. That is no joke."

She admits having been skeptical about the new administration, yet jumped on the Obama bandwagon because "I did not want to be a party pooper." Now she is developing serious doubts. "What will happen in 2012? What if our puffed-up idea of hope doesn’t work out? What do we have left then?"

Strong-willed with a powerful voice and as articulate as she is opinionated, Keefer also has a sense of humor. Describing herself as "a little bit of Paul Revere because I always want to shout ‘wake up, wake up, wake up’!" she figured that theater-based information about that universal leveler — death and dying — might actually be useful in these troubled times.

"Useful" has been a key component in all of Keefer’s work. As an agent for social change in life and art, she may not have seen the hoped-for results. Nevertheless, she still believes that art can become a catalyst for people to "look deeper into our community structures or dig into our own personal hopes, joys, and oppression."

She can also point to at least one area of success where she has made important contributions: "Women’s music and culture have given rise to a whole generation of women who seem themselves reflected in it." Integral to Dance Brigade activities is its all-female taiko group; Grrrl Brigade, a junior ensemble for girls 9-18; and women-focused festivals such as the annual "SkyDancers: Women who Fly Through the Air." So perhaps taking on the taboo of death is just another way to accomplish Keefer’s dual goals of making good art and good social road maps. "We all have to die, and I find the Buddhist way actually liberating. It takes the fear of death away."

Her involvement with the Tibetan way of dying is also deeply personal. "When Nina [Fichter, Keefer’s friend and cofounder of Dance Brigade] died, I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead for 49 days." Thematically, Liberation is probably as big and ambitious a project as she has undertaken.

In a run-through at the company’s Dance Mission Theater, two weeks prior to the premiere, Liberation looked like a pretty straightforward dance theater realization of the process — in Tibetan Buddhist belief — that happens from the moment of death until reincarnation into a new life. Unusual for Dance Brigade, the cast includes a number of men: newcomer Clint Calimlim, the very experienced Jose Navarrete, and the magisterial Ramon Ramos Alayo.

The book is written in the form of a guide talking to the deceased to make the journey as peaceful as possible. The direct speech lends itself to the kind of dramatic dance theater Keefer often embraces. Here her voice weaves in and out of dance passages and speaks as much to the audience ("this is what will happen to you") as to the dead woman (portrayed by Lena Gatchalian).

The gorgeously intertwined Ramos Alayo and Tina Banchero represent the Samantabhadra, the Primordial Buddha who appears to the lucky ones at the moment of death. Recognizing the blinding light of ultimate reality, they enter nirvana. ("They are off the wheel," Keefer laconically observes.) Like most mortals, Gatchalian’s character has to go through "bardo" (transitional states) before being reincarnated. On her journey, she encounters the five Buddha families — in both their supportive and wrathful manifestations. Since they are danced by stylistically very different dancers, Keefer encouraged them to choreograph their own characters. The remaining choreography is by Keefer with contributions by Sara Shelton Mann. *

THE GREAT LIBERATION UPON HEARING

Nov. 13–22

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun, 7 p.m., $23

Laney College Theater

900 Fallon, Oakl.

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com

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