PREVIEW Hope you’re hungry to see a big show, because for this concert you need an appetite for the unruly, the new, and the short. Collaboration! Dance & Music started 10 years ago in Marin County as the brainchild of Dance Outré’s Lorien Fenton, who wanted to showcase new work primarily by Marin artists. But the event took off and several years ago it traveled from the tiny Marin Center Showcase Theater across the Golden Gate Bridge to the 437-seat Cowell Theater in Fort Mason. In the past the pieces have come in all shades and colors, from jazz to Kathak to modern to Butoh. Part of the fun is seeing which choreographers hitch up with which composers. In dance, collaborating with musicians has long been a storied tradition, even back when Tchaikovsky’s colleagues thought that working with such intellectually inferior arts as Marius Petipa’s ballets was below the composer’s dignity. Yet Stravinsky’s most-frequently played scores are the ones he wrote for Balanchine. And it was through Martha Graham that Aaron Copeland’s most popular piece got its name, "Appalachian Spring." It’s unlikely a masterpiece will emerge from the 10-minute collaborations by this year’s 10 choreographer/composer couples. Still, the principle stands: two artists from different disciplines putting their heart and soul into a work can come up with some amazing stuff.
COLLABORATION! DANCE & MUSIC 2008 Fri/12–Sat/13, 8 p.m.; Sun/14, 2 p.m. Cowell Theater, Marina and Buchanan, SF. $17–$20. (415) 345-7575.