Dance Archives — Page 8 of 12 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Nol Simonse

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November 4, 2009

arts@sfbg.com

Nol Simonse has no preconceptions about what he wants in a boyfriend, except one. "He has to be able to cut and color a mohawk," the 36-year-old dancer explains before a rehearsal at Dance Mission Theater. His own have ranged from huge to skull-hugging and have tapped into all the colors of the rainbow.

His hair might be the first thing you notice about the tall, reed-thin, and (currently) blond Simonse. But it’s not what you remember once you’ve seen him on stage, with or without an adorned head. He can melt to the floor and give the impression he’s spilling out of his skin; the next moment, he might be caressing some invisible tendril and reaching for the sun. No wonder he is ubiquitous in San Francisco dance.

Simonse has been dancing for major companies like Janice Garrett and Dancers and Stephen Pelton Dance Theater since 2002. Garrett calls him "an amazingly soulful" artist; Pelton admires him because he is always "fully present within the movement." Simonse was a founding member of Kunst-Stoff, was part of Dandelion Dance Theater’s Undressed Project, and has been dancing with choreographers as different as Sue Roginski, Christy Funsch, Heidi Schweiker, Kara Davis, and Sean Dorsey. Filmmaker Greta Schoenberg shot 2006’s Hopscotch with him. When ACT approached him about working with a group of SF Ballet dancers for their The Tosca Project, his response was "why not?" His appetite for dance is insatiable. Simonse needs a database to track his schedule. Instead he writes himself notes "on little sheets of paper — I don’t do computers."

All this activity is not what Simonse expected when he moved to the Bay Area from Virginia, having dropped out of college because he "couldn’t dance 12 hours a day and party all night." He was living in a Tenderloin hotel when he met Tomi Paasonen, cofounder with Yannis Adoniou of Kunst-Stoff. "I hadn’t been dancing for a while, but Tomi told me all I had to do was shake around and be weird." That gig yielded him his first paying job: "I was a pig — a very big pig."

Shortly after that momentous debut, Simonse met ballet teacher Augusta Moore, who encouraged him to seriously pursue his training. His last piece with Kunst-Stoff was Less Sylphides, Adoniou’s deconstruction of one of the great classical ballets. Simonse hasn’t stopped dancing since. Except — ah, yes — he now also choreographs.

>>GOLDIES 2009: The 21st Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, honoring the Bay’s best in arts

Global informing

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October 28, 2009

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arts@sfbg.com

DANCE For too many years ethnic dance, traditional dance, folk dance, culturally-specific dance — whatever label you stick on it — has been a stepchild on American stages. Considered of little interest to observers beyond the cultural groups in which its practitioners were based, general audiences admired its colorfulness and derided its lack of innovation. Yet with increased exposure, traditional dance forms have become more respected and have done their part to make the world more of a global village.

With the art form less under siege, stirrings have been coming from within the genre by dancers pushing at the traditions’ parameters. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. In the mid-1990s flamenco dancer Joaquín Cortés bared his chest and started performing to pop and jazz. Purists shuddered when Kathak dancer Akram Khan started to integrate modern dance practices into his performances. At the SF Ethnic Dance Festival this year, winds of change can also be felt at the venerable Ethnic Dance Festival. This year Los Lupeños de San José, one of the Bay Area’s oldest Mexican companies, performed a hot mambo with the women in anything but long flouncy skirts, and Indonesian dancer Sri Susilowati’s mourning dance was full of contemporary accents.

Traditional dancers who want to rethink conventions often feel homeless because they don’t fit into any established performance categories. That’s where Performing Diaspora steps in. CounterPULSE’s two-year initiative culminates in three weeks of performances starting November 5.

Debbie Smith, cultural program coordinator at the Arab Cultural and Community Center, is one of the three curators who chose 13 artists from the more than 60 who applied from throughout California. As "a little white girl from Texas" (as she calls herself) who speaks Arabic and is trained in Egyptian folk dance, she has learned to live with the sensitivities that surround fears about dilution of content and about perceptions of being less than respectful to well-defined art forms.

Since Performing Diaspora is the first festival of its kind, the curators had to feel their way into this new arena. It was a delicate process because "the need for support in dance is so great," Smith explains. "We did not know what we would get, though we were looking for artists who served traditions without wanting to be confined by them."

What the Festival got were artists like Charlotte Moraga, the primary dancer of the Chitresh Das Dance Company. Twenty years ago at San Francisco State University, the jazz dancer from Florida stumbled into her first Kathak class when the jazz class she wanted was full. The festival also got Devendra Sharma from Fresno, who learned Nautanki, a traditional folk music theater style from northern India, from his father.

At a recent work-in-progress showing, Moraga’s A Conference in Nine, based on a Sufi poem, A Conference of Birds, was performed with jazz, North Indian, and South Indian musicians. It looked as traditional and contemporary as you would want. The same was true for Sharma’s Mission Suhani, a reinterpretation of one spunky woman’s refusal to be cheated out of her dowry.

Almost half Performing Diaspora’s lineup hails from beyond the Bay Area, with artists who have made rethinking traditions a core element of their work, and those who only recently entered this wobbly territory. But the most unexpected participant in Performance Diaspora is a local: Kunst-Stoff’s Yannis Adoniou, best known for his ballet-based postmodernism. He will present Rembetiko, a work-in-progress based on the underground culture of Greeks who returned from abroad at the turn of the 20th century. "My uncle was a rembetiko musician", Adoniou says. "I used to dance to his music when I was five."

Performing Diaspora

Nov 5-22 (Thurs-Sat, 8 p.m.), $15–$25

CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060, www.counterpulse.org

Stayin’ alive

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October 20, 2009

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DANCE Oakland Ballet Company refuses to die. Its latest resurrection happened Oct. 16-17, after Ronn Guidi’s abrupt resignation in April had issued what used to be a thriving East Bay institution’s most recent death certificate. But some people can’t take no for an answer, and we all should be grateful to them. In this particular case, it’s the dancers — some veterans of the Oakland troupe, some freelancers but also members of Ballet San Jose and Smuin Ballet — who stepped into the breach. The choreographers donated their works. All but one of the pieces, Amy Seiwert’s Revealing the Bridge, had been performed by Oakland Ballet before. These works offered a glimpse of why the company has been such a vital part of Bay Area dance. It may have made a reputation for itself with the Diaghilev repertoire, but it was equally important in fostering contemporary ballet choreography, much of it locally grown.

The company, under the temporary leadership of Oakland veterans Michael Lowe and Jenna McClintock, has much going for itself: some money in the bank, a wealth of talent, and the good will of its audiences. Performing at Holy Names College — where the old company performed when money was really tight — brought in a crowd of young people, some of whom seemed new to ballet.

Book-ending three pas de deux with two ensemble pieces made for a varied, agreeably pleasing program that showcased ballet-speak in any number of dialects. Alonzo King’s 1990 Love Dogs showed him in much a less angular mood than his later works; Carlos Carvajal’s "Wedding Pas de Deux" from Crystal Slippers enlivened a grand tradition with young love; Seiwert’s Bridge smoothly stretched space. Val Caniparoli’s congenial and rhythmically smart Street Songs opened the evening; Lowe’s Double Happiness closed it with excellent duet work, but rather bumpy ensemble dancing.

Partly cloudy

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September 30, 2009

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DANCE REVIEW In December 2007, a preview of the first section of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s Other Suns (a Trilogy) raised high hopes. Unfortunately, the 80-minute triptych, which premiered Sept, 24-26 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is scheduled for a four-city national tour, did not quite fulfill them.

Jenkins paired her own company of eight with six dancers from China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company. She also invited guest artists Amy Foley and Norma Fong from Robert Moses’ Kin Dance Company. To work with so many magnificent dancers and strong personalities must have been glorious and grueling, even for a choreographer as experienced as Jenkins. For the audience, much of it was pure bliss, particularly once the Chinese dancers came more fully into their own.

Jenkins slightly revised part of the piece, with Foley taking over from Melanie Elms the role as the instigator. Gone also is Alex V. Nichols’ mysterious pool but the seas of low-hanging lights stayed. Suns encountered its major stumbling block in the second movement for which Jenkins — whose dancers always collaborate on the choreography — deployed the elegantly pliant Guangdong dancers in canons and unisons. Visually and kinetically weak, it undermined Suns‘ trajectory; the third movement should have been a culmination of what preceded. Instead, despite recurring movement motives, it looked tagged on. Paul Dresher’s minimalist rehash did not help.

At its best, Suns suggested a sense of scintilutf8g vibrancy and aliveness coming from the unexpected. Gestures evoked responses from two feet away or all the way across the stage. Darting breaks redefined unisons. Joseph Copley and Li Pianpian’s delicious partnering was both fleeting and predestined. Foley and Lu Yahui solos ran on parallel yet differently grounded tracks. And how about Tan Yuanho’s balletic athleticism and Steffany Ferroni’s fierce physicality, or Margaret Cromwell, who flung herself like a shooting star? Suns may not be perfect, but the dancers come pretty damned close.

Mark of quality

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September 23, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DANCE REVIEW The Mark Morris Dance Group’s regular visits to the Bay Area have assured it a faithful and knowledgeable audience. Yet rarely has it received the kind of enthusiastic applause that greeted its West Coast premieres of Visitation and Empire Garden, and the magisterial V (2001), at Cal Performances. Morris is that rarest of contemporary artists — a great entertainer and a great humanist.

In the history of Western art, the Visitation refers to paintings that depict the pregnant virgin meeting her cousin, Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. They illustrate a tender relationship between two mothers-to-be. It’s doubtful Morris had this kind of religious iconography in mind when he set his lovely Visitation to Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 in C, although the work did suggest the intimacy of old friends. The outstretched hand became the central gesture for convivial meetings and partings that were as public and private as the ongoing "conversation" between the piano and the cello. You found yourself looking in on an elegant salon that — after all, this is Mark Morris — was also a playground of rabbits hopping and toy soldiers stomping. Maile Okamura was the butterfly looking for a place to light.

The other new work, Empire Garden, supposedly took its name from a Chinese restaurant; it’s a much darker affair. I can’t pretend to have penetrated Charles Ives’ gnarly Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, best known for threading Americana music into its central scherzo section. Morris responded by densely layering kaleidoscopically-changing images that tumbled on top of each other. He packed a pulsating stage space with prayer meetings, hunting scenes, ballroom couples in rigor mortis, robotic escorts, human pyramids, and pontificating leaders. But he also gave his dancers tiny wistful gestures for the hands or a foot. The whole Brueghelian canvas had a slightly deranged energy from which emerged a rather foreboding dance of death finale. Julie Worden, magnificent in the grandeur with which she enlivened her singular role, stood out from an ensemble that has never looked better.

V, to Schumann’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, resonated with particular poignancy at its local premier in October 2001, three weeks after 9/11. That reference — which Morris always resisted — has faded. What remains is a dance that is powered by the rigors of formal design. The dancers were divided into two groups of seven, dressed in either off-white pants or blue skirts (by Martin Pakledinaz). The choreography stuck closely to the music — sometimes almost mockingly so — and much of it had a swingy pliancy to it. Large arm gestures also suggested a ceremonial quality. Somewhat mysteriously, a duet called up an unsustained echo from the wings.

But V‘s most remarkable section starts in the central Largo, for which Morris uses the simplest of human movements. One group walks, the other crawls, out of the wings. The drama happens when the vertical and horizontal lines intersect — basic geometry. The piece has two endings: an orgy of embracing, and a V-shaped military phalanx moving downstage. Take your pick.

Fall into dance

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August 26, 2009

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Recession or not, dancers gotta do what they gotta do. Here are 10 performances that will reward your time and dollars.

Capacitor It’s been a decade since Jodi Lomax brought her (at the time) odd mix of science, dance, and circus arts to the Bay Area. Previous works have been inspired by astrophysics, plate tectonics, and forest systems. The new The Perfect Flower promises a more intimate experience. Sept. 18-19, Cowell Theater; www.capacitor.org.

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company If you saw the gorgeous first section of Margaret Jenkins’ Other Suns at Theater Artaud, you don’t want miss the now finished piece, created and performed with China’s renowned Guangdong Modern Dance Company. Sept. 24-26, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; www.mjdc.org.

Contemporary dance from Africa French-born Maimouna Couliblay (Sept 25-27, Dance Mission Theater; www.dancemission.com) found her artistic voice in Mali; her Hééé Mariamou is inspired by growing up in the ‘hood, Parisian style. Soweto’s Gregory Maqoma (Nov. 4-7, YBCA; www.ybca.org) brings solos inspired by Akram Khan, Faustin Linyekula, and Vincent Mantsoe.

Suzanne Farrell Ballet Farrell, the high priestess of the Balanchine legacy, programmed and narrates an intriguing selection of the master’s pas de deux’ and solos. Should be a treat for all Balanchine lovers. Oct. 24-25, Zellerbach Hall; www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

Trey McIntyre Project McIntyre has done well as freelancer of fast-paced, musical, and accessible ballet choreography. His brand-new company includes, among others, former Lines Ballet dancer John Michael Schert. Oct. 30, Jewish Community Center for San Francisco; www.jccsf.org.

Monique Jenkinson As ODC residency artist, this dancer/performer and fashion maven — best known for impersonating a man impersonating a woman — has been hard at work on Luxury, which extols the guilty pleasures of life. Nov. 7-8, ODC Theater; www.odcdance.org.

DV8 Physical Theatre Choreographer Lloyd Newson is the John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) of dance. He’s tough, and he hits hard. In To Be Straight with You he takes on religion, sexuality, and prejudice. Nov. 12-14, YBCA; dv8.co.uk.

Performing Diaspora This event rethinks culturally specific dance such as Haitian, Cambodian, or Kathak. The three weekends showcase artists who love the genres they were raised in but want to put their own 21st century stamp on them. Nov. 5-22, CounterPULSE; www.counterpulse.org.

San Francisco HipHop Dance Fest The combination of kids, adult aficionados and professional hip-hoppers make this one of the fall season’s juiciest festivals. What started as a local blast has also turned into a global encounter. Nov. 20-21, Palace of Fine Arts; www.sfhiphopdancefest.com.

Flyaway Productions

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July 14, 2009

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PREVIEW Imagine what it would be like to be working on the new span of the Bay Bridge — perilously dangling in the wind, high above freezing waters, would be just another day on the job. Inspired by the female ironworkers, laborers, crane operators, and other brave souls who’ve helped create and tend to local bridges since the 1970s, Jo Kreiter’s Flyaway Productions presents The Ballad of Polly Ann (named for the badass wife name-checked in "The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer"). Like all of Kreiter’s creations, Polly Ann is an "apparatus-based" performance; appropriately, the dancers will move about a bridge replica inspired by the suspension system used for the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge, which spans the Carquinez Strait. The Flyaway crew is used to being graceful in unlikely places (fire escapes, rooftops) and have no fear of heights (past pieces have hoisted dancers up to 100 feet over audiences) — so they’re the ideal company to mount this unique tribute. Polly Ann was created with help from labor historian Harvey Schwartz and musician Pamela Z, who weaves real-life bridgeworker tales into her accompanying soundscape.

Flyaway Productions Through July 25 Tues–Sat, 8 p.m., $25. Somarts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF.

1-800-838-3006, www.flyawayproductions.com

WestWave Dance Festival

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July 7, 2009

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PREVIEW The WestWave Dance Festival has been limping along for the last few years, but for most of its past, it has been a much-welcome venue for new and little-heard voices of Bay Area dance. For many artists, the opportunity to show that one new piece for which they have managed to scratch the money together, and to do so in a professional environment, has proved essential to keep going. WestWave now seems to be in a holding pattern, engaged in the process of rethinking itself — no mean endeavor considering the evaporation of funding sources. So the 2009 WestWave is about as small as it can get: a one-night stand. However, it boasts a good, fresh lineup that showcases quality artists who represent the richness that is Bay Area dance. Including world premieres by experienced artists is always a good programming decision, and these are judiciously chosen. The four new works will be by hula master Patrick Makuakane, ballet choreographer Amy Seiwert, modern dance collaborator Manuelito Biag (with Kara Davis and Alex Ketley), and dance theater artist Kim Epifano in a song cycle about her recent travels. The evening also includes film and live work by the excellent Benjamin Levy and Katie Faulkner. One-nighters can be a lot of fun and leave sweet memories. This one looks promising.

WESTWAVE DANCE FESTIVAL Sun/12, 8 p.m., $18–$25. Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, SF.

(415) 345-7575, www.westwavedancefestival.org

“SCUBA Two”

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June 23, 2009

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PREVIEW If you are a fan of the unknown, follow SCUBA, the six-year-old brainchild of small-budget presenters in Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and (since 2005) Philadelphia. This consortium of astute dance observers became acutely aware of the difficulties that not-yet-established artists face when trying to show their work beyond their immediate home base. So they made a deal: each could suggest local works they respect, and in turn program from the pool what they thought would be of interest to their audiences. This is how Shinichi-Iova Koga went to Philadelphia and San Francisco and saw Seattle’s wacky Salt Sea Horse company. The big unknown for the last of this year’s SCUBA programs is Minneapolis’ Chris Schlichting. When in 2008 he premiered the five-person love things, even longtime Minneapolis observers were surprised, having known Schlichting primarily as a performer. The work has been praised as a "gender-messing choreographic fantasy built and deconstructed from 1970s Americana." Schlichting will be paired with not-well-enough known San Francisco choreographer, Katie Faulkner. Also a gifted filmmaker, Faulkner draws on intense observations of the everyday and then spins them into tightly woven structures in which people, sometimes suffocatingly so, seem glued to each other. For this show she’ll restage The Road Ahead, which looks at a dying man’s relationship to his daughters. Also on the program will be Smoke and Orbit, a duet with frequent Faulkner collaborator Private Freeman.

SCUBA TWO Sat/27, 8 p.m.; Sun/28, 7 p.m., $15–$18. ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF. (415) 863-9834. www.odcdance.org

Planetary Dance

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June 16, 2009

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PREVIEW By now the Planetary Dance, Marin County’s annual solstice celebration, has become a joyous, all-day event that starts at sunrise — for early trekkers — on top of Mount Tamalpais and ends, after the main event at Santos Meadow in Mount Tamalpais State Park, at a sunset fire at Muir Beach. The idea is to use communal dance as way of healing the earth, a concept and practice as old as humankind. Some hardy souls, event instigator Anna Halprin among them, have been participating since the beginning, 29 years ago. They are now bringing their children and grandchildren. Others drop in for a few years, then drift away. It’s worthwhile remembering that the event came out of a tragedy when, in the late ’70s, Mount Tam had to be closed because of ongoing murders of young women. Halprin and some friends wanted to take back the park and walked the very trails where the crimes had been committed. A few days later, the perp was caught. Coincidence — or did those simple meditative gestures result in healing the place? Either way, the event developed out of those tragedies by Halprin, its shaman, is inviting, simple, powerful, and beautiful. At the heart lies the three-part "Earth Run," which has been (accurately) described as a "moving mandala." No dance experience is required, and you can come and go as you like.

PLANETARY DANCE Sat/20, 11 a.m. $10–$20 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds).

Santos Meadow, Mount Tamalpais State Park, Mill Valley. www.planetarydance.org

India Jones

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June 10, 2009

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Small may be beautiful, but so is big — especially if it is spelled "Bolshoi," Russian for big. The Moscow company’s current production, La Bayadère, a tale of love and revenge, is set in an India whose Orientalism will make politically correct viewers shudder but that called up paroxysms of delight from the balletomanes who packed the Bolshoi Ballet’s recent performances at Zellerbach Hall.

As a huge unwieldy spectacle, this Bayadère is a hoot and a wonder. Some of it — the flailing fakirs; the high-leaping "Indians" — could have come straight out of a Cecil B. DeMille movie. Everything is huge, from the extensions and leaps to the speed and elevations. The excess is impressive and fun to watch, although the show does drag.

In the wedding scene, divertissements spilled over each other: a fan dance, a children’s dance, a parrot dance, the water jug "Manu" (a sprightly Chinara Alizade), and a "Golden Idol" (Ivan Vasiliev) who sits in the air like Buddha. The packed stage left little room for the royal couple’s pas de deux except to dance in parallel — which they do. For the finale, the bride (Maria Alexandrva) topped off a pyramid of adoring bodies.

This Bayadère is probably the only ballet in which two ballerinas try to kill each other by launching themselves as missiles in grand jeté. The duel between the strong-willed Gamzatti (Alexandrova) and Nikiya (Svetlana Zakharova) injected a much-welcome sense of drama. The man they fight over is Solor (Nikolay Tsiskaridze), an Indian noble. Tsiskaridze is a little self-involved but a spectacular dancer in terms of speed, elevation, and ballon.

With beautiful comportment, Alexandrova’s nuanced Gamzatti evolves from young girl to a revengeful wife. With her arms interwined and her liquid torso, Zakharova’s Nikiya looked like a fragile flame. But there is steel in that spine and those feet. But Bayadère‘s heart beats in the 32 women in tutus who make their way down a ramp in long arabesques. Zellerbach’s stage was too shallow to carry it off, and the overlapping lines didn’t coalesce. But when, as if by magic, they melted into a block of shimmering white, it was heart-stopping.

im’ij-re

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But Anna felt that the human body, in addition to the human spirit, needed to make its imprint on the park. She calls Stern Grove "the most secret place" in San Francisco; though it attracts thousands for its concerts, she finds it "magical" during the week when "neighborhood people walk their dogs, a man tries to exercise his belly off, and lovers make out." To honor this treasure, she wanted to bring the internal and external and private and public worlds together.

As in many of her previous projects, Halprin worked with like-minded people who "could make their own prayer." A call went out for volunteers from which she assembled a group of 60 participants: professional dancers, community people, students, and members of the long-running Sea Ranch Collective. Since Stern Grove does not allow amplification, the use of music would be limited. "It doesn’t matter," she explains. "We’ll make our own sounds."

"EVE’S ELIXIR: EYES OF EVE"

Fri/10-Sat/11, 7 p.m., $25

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 345-7575, www.eveselixir.net

Move(men)t: A Men’s Dance Festival

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April 7, 2009

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PREVIEW In the history of dance, the male of the species occupies a curious position. In some cultures only men were allowed to dance in public. In Western aristocratic education, dancing was a requirement for a future courtier. But until fairly recently, ballet choreographers consistently undervalued male dancers, and it was women who pioneered modern dance. In the 1930s, however, Ted Shawn’s all-male ensemble did much to break down the prejudice against men in dance. In the Bay Area, every decade or so brings about a refocusing on masculine performances. There is an energy — both virile and tender — to these presentations that, in the past at least, made them very special experiences for men and women alike. Some of that, unquestionably, had to do with the testosterone that just bounced off the walls. Even so, to see so many guys cooperating with each other is still not something we are accustomed to seeing on stage. The latest incarnation of all-male dancing, "Move(men)t: A Men’s Dance Festival," now in its second year, includes Mark Foehringer, who has long choreographed for men; Folawole Oyinlola, of Nigerian descent, who excels in improvisation; Kegan Marling, perhaps best known in his partnership with Jane Schnorrenberg; and Joe Landini’s new San Francisco Moving Men. Ten choreographers in all will show their chops in the tiny but hopping Garage performance space.

MOVE(MEN)T: A MEN’S DANCE FESTIVAL Fri/10–Sat/11, 8 p.m., $10-$20. The Garage, 975 Howard, SF. (415) 885-4006. www.brownpapertickets.com