Performance Archives — Page 108 of 132 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Get rhythm

September 30, 2008

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Perhaps because Marin County is the pasture to which many a semi-retired rock star got put out, the Mill Valley Film Festival has long emphasized music-related film and live performance. Now that the festival is officially over 30 (and hence untrustworthy according to ancient wisdom), MVFF ’08 will wave its vintage freak flag even harder than usual.

We have seen the future of retro-rockumentary here, and it is groovy, man. Nothing dials the lysergic clock to quarter-past-wow faster than a dose of tribal-love rock. Pola Rapaport’s Hair: Let the Sun Shine In (2007) memorializes the musical that brought counterculture sounds, politics, genitalia, and follicles to 1968 Broadway. Which it duly freaked out — becoming a worldwide cultural phenomenon and launching careers for performers including Melba Moore, Keith Carradine, Tim Curry, Ben Vereen, Diane Keaton, and Donna Summer. Those first four are interviewed alongside composer Galt MacDermot, director Tom O’Horgan, co-book author and lyricist James Rado (mercurial co-creator Gerome Ragni being a famous casualty), and collaborators on the 40th-anniversary Public Theatre production now headed to Broadway.

There’s no end of amusing, exciting, and tragic backstories around Hair — far more than this brisk documentary can encompass. But it still rewards, not least for original-cast performances on TV’s Smothers Brothers and Tonight Show that offer near-pure glimpses of O’Horgan’s joyous avant-garde staging.

Rock purists grew huffy about Hair (musical theatre = corny!) and commercial rock’s perceived inorganic nature, as flavored primarily by tasty processed studio additives rather than "pure" singer-songwriters whose bands (unlike original-sinners the Monkees) actually played on platter and tour. Denny Tedesco’s The Wrecking Crew (2007) pays homage to those older, jazz-trained virtuosos who really played on practically every 1960s pop record. They brought incalculable invention, but were almost never credited on hits by the Beach Boys and umpteen others. Now geezers, they (including solo-star breakout Glen Campbell) are a hoot; ditto the onetime beneficiaries of their craft who also appear in interviews, like Cher, Brian Wilson, and Herb Alpert.

At the time regarded as pure of saints and free of such creative taint, the Beatles remain so holy that no messing with the original script(ure) is allowed. MVFF documentary All Together Now — about the creation of Cirque du Soleil’s Vegas spectacular Love — fascinates mainly because it reveals what a ginormous ass-pain dealing with today’s legal guardians of Beatledom can be. As we see, the combined weight of fan fanaticism, $180 million in production costs, and "protective" input from widows Lennon and Harrison (George Harrison’s friendship with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte having inseminated Love) nearly crushes this project’s tortuous incubation. By contrast, a jovial Paul McCartney and dead-cool Ringo Starr blithely approve all messing with a catalog they deem solid and nostalgic, but hardly sacred.

Speaking of legends, Bill Graham is back and funny as hell in Last Days of the Fillmore, a once-ubiquitous (at weed-choked midnight and campus shows), long-inaccessible 1972 documentary newly restored for imminent DVD release. When this concert flick about the Fillmore West’s (temporary) closing came out, audiences lined up for the groovers, not the backstage shmoozers. Yet Graham’s fed-up phone rants now seem more engaging than the bloated blooze-rawk of Cold Blood, Hot Tuna, Elvin Bishop, and even Santana or the Grateful Dead.

Other movies likely to make you thrust your Bic high in triumph include Mika Kaurismaki’s Sonic Mirror (2007), a film about world-beat percussionist Billy Cobham. Annual vintage-clip presenter John Goddard’s "Hi De Ho Show" promises rockin’ archival moments from Tom Jones, Janis Joplin, and Bette Davis.

Having near-nuffin’ to do with rock is Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, his best movie since … ever? (‘Cuz the others were crap.) This one mercifully doesn’t involve his overbearing wife, hazy "philosophy," or the genre recyclage that made 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch smartie ADD quasi-classics. And Rene Villarreal’s Mexican Cumbia Connection is a sexy class-crossing triangle that almost entirely eschews dialogue, driven instead by the sinuous beats of cumbia music.

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

Oct 2–12, various Marin County venues

See film listings for ticket information and schedule

1-877-874-MVFF

www.mvff.com

Hang on

September 24, 2008

REVIEW Sometimes dance is so dense, so fast-paced, or so convoluted you can’t grasp what the heck the choreographer had in mind. So you throw in the towel and go along for the ride. Such was the case with the Sept. 18 performance by Robert Moses’ Kin at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The clearest of the three pieces on view, Approaching Thought, showcased most cogently why Moses’ reputation has been growing by leaps and bounds: he creates intriguing ensemble opportunities for individually strong performers. If steroid-pumped dancing shaped into formal cohesion is your cup of chai, Moses is your man. In Thought, Moses first introduced three couples individually, then let them loose into a hurricane of flips, kicks, hops, and rebounding meltdowns. They watched each other or provided backup as if in a ballet — or a rock concert. Newcomers Caitlin Kolb impressed with her integration of gymnastics into dance; Brendan Barthel, with his attack and the softest of feline jumps.

The world premiere, Toward September, could be considered the son of Thought. With nine dancers, volatile connections became more fleeting, but the web they spun was also messier. Circle, line, and star patterns periodically linked the dancers. In the second half, something like lyricism lit up a duet between Kolb and Barthel. But at a half-hour, September couldn’t sustain itself, not even with this talented group. Jokes Like That Can Get You Killed was too subtle for its own good. Dealing with the slippery topic of appropriate and inappropriate language — it’s a Stanford commission — the work was overloaded with visual, aural, and movement information. But Austin Forbord’s visuals — consisting of bobbing heads of every persuasion — were fun.

Moses collaged the program’s music primarily from online sources — which must have felt like browsing a candy shop. But the choreographer grabbed too much and made it into far too little.

Kim Gordon

September 23, 2008

PREVIEW Say it loud, say it proud: aeons after the year punk broke and Sonic Youth introduced their budding little-bro band Nirvana to their label, DGC, I’m still girl-crushed-out on SY’s Kim Gordon! Especially after finding out we’ve been reading the same book at just about the same time: Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (Atria), a possible inspiration for Gordon’s "Phantom Orchard" performance with avant harpist Zeena Parkins, DNA’s no-wave diva Ikue Mori, Boredoms drummer Yoshimi, and ex–Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn.

"Everyone said, ‘Ooh, it’s got to be really trashy,’" says Gordon from Northampton, Mass., where she, Thurston Moore, and their 14-year-old daughter, Coco, reside. "I started reading it and thought, you know, this is actually a pretty good, interesting, sociological overview of these women during that time in the early ’60s. So, I don’t know, maybe a theme might come out of that … I always wondered when [Sonic Youth] was on tour with Neil Young, what’s it like for someone like Joni Mitchell? I got a sense of the boys’ club." She emits a soft, low, self-deprecating chuckle, a recurring bass note in a conversation with Gordon, who often sounds more like a grave, thoughtful teenage girl than an underground rock icon.

A certain Kimly kismet is going down, for sure, and one hopes a similar synthesis will emerge from this week’s improvisations by Gordon, Parkins, Mori, Dunn, and Yoshimi. The latter most recently played on the raw ‘n’ lyrical Inherit (Ecstatic Peace), by the resuscitated Free Kitten, Gordon’s project with ex–Pussy Galore-ist Julie Cafritz. Everyone knows girls rock, but what continues to draw this archetypal post-punk woman, who has seen so many sides of rock’s boyzone, to work with other ladies? "Women communicate differently," she muses. "And, um, women communicate!"

For more of an interview with Kim Gordon, see Noise blog at www.sfbg.com.

KIM GORDON MEETS PHANTOM ORCHARD Fri/26, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$55. Montalvo Arts Center, Carriage House Theatre, 15400 Montalvo, Saratoga. (408) 961-5858, www.ticketmaster.com

Does Vampire Weekend suck?

September 17, 2008

In terms of the Internet music hype cycle, seven months is an eternity. So while last winter the controversy surrounding Vampire Weekend — four mild Columbia alums who make a crowd-pleasing brand of Afro-pop punk — threatened to hold the Web hostage, more recently the discussions of privilege and charges of cultural appropriation that marked the backlash have all but disappeared. The quartet of Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, Rostam Batmanglij, and Christopher Tomson had managed, albeit briefly and in coded terms, to get indie rockers talking about two subjects they, and Americans in general, tend to talk around: race and class. In anticipation of the group’s performance at Treasure Island, we wanted to recap some critics’ takes on the band’s approach, to get people thinking about the cultural roots of the recent Docksider resurgence.

"BLOOD SUCKING GEEKS" BY ROBERT CHRISTGAU IN ARTICLES BLOG

www.najp.org/articles/2008/02/blood-sucking-geeks

AFRO-POP CO-OPTERS? The dean of American rock critics — Xgau to you — is unusually crotchety here, drawing on his extensive knowledge of African music to take down every style writers link the band to.

IVY LEAGUERS? Xgau acknowledges it, sure, but he’s got a lot of misconceptions about Afro-pop to correct. He does, however, anticipate the "psychological mechanism" that underpins the whole backlash. Despite everything, Afro-pop sounds happy, and the young are predisposed against upbeat music for its perceived shallowness, whether it comes from the global south or is an effect of Ivy League privilege.

GRACELAND COMPARISON? He drops the G-bomb only to note its ubiquity, then goes on to point out that the South African mbaqanga the Paul Simon album draws on is "much heavier than anything in Vampire Weekend unless you count their punky stuff, which isn’t African at all."

THE JAMS? The piece is really more of a rockcrit corrective than a consideration of VW’s music itself — here and in his later Consumer Guide review of the combo’s debut, he lets Pitchfork‘s Scott Plagenhof fill us in: "off-kilter, upbeat guitar pop," with "not just the touches of African pop but the willingness to use space and let the songs breathe a bit" and "detail-heavy, expressive" lyrics.

"PLEASE IGNORE THIS BAND" BY JULIANNE SHEPHERD IN VILLAGE VOICE, JAN. 22

www.villagevoice.com/2008-01-22/music/please-ignore-this-band

AFRO-POP CO-OPTERS? J-Shep recognizes that the conventional critic’s wisdom on the band "focuses on blind Afro-pop jacking and sartorial missteps," but sees the band’s real fault as a kind of essential anal attention to detail, making their songs feel "claustrophobically ordered."

GRACELAND COMPARISON? Namedrops in passing "Graceland rhythms" when describing VW’s blog-breakthrough single, "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" — for Shepherd this affiliation is only slightly more consequential than their strong preference for Oxford shirts.

THE JAMS? The band so repeatedly work over their influences and presentation that eventually there’s "nothing left but space and simplicity and precious little conflict."

VAMPIRE WEEKEND REVIEW BY NITSUH ABEBE FOR PITCHFORK

www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/48053-vampire-weekend-vampire-weekend

AFRO-POP CO-OPTERS? Abebe sets us up with a series of African reference points: "Mansard Roof" ‘s keyboard tone recalls "old West-African pop," Koenig’s guitar has a "clean, natural tone you’d get on a record from Senegal or South Africa." He goes on to implicitly dismiss the idea of appropriation — the outfit plays those suggestive sounds "like indie kids on a college lawn, because they’re not hung up on Africa in the least."

IVY LEAGUERS? "Ivy League" makes a single appearance in the text, evoked as an easy target for haters, but considerations of VW’s education leave a stamp on Abebe’s thinking here: Abebe claims Koenig’s background allows him the insight to "summon up the atmosphere of kids whose parents use "summer" as a verb.

GRACELAND COMPARISON? According to Abebe, Simon "never sounded this exuberant."

THE JAMS? Despite listeners bringing their baggage to the band, it returns "nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious."

"VAMPIRE WEEKEND ‘CAPE COD KWASSA KWASSA’ " BY ERIC HARVEY IN HIS BLOG, MARATHONPACKS

www.marathonpacks.com/2007/11/vampire-weekend-cape-cod-kwassa-kwassa

AFRO-POP CO-OPTERS? This is Harvey’s focus, and he kills it with a supersophisticated reading that manages to reference the classic ethnographic text "The Masai on the Lawn." Ultimately, Harvey’s less worried about VW’s so-called "indie-style colonialism" — from his perspective, the band knows exactly what they’re doing by playing with such charged ideas — than he is about how intentional the provocation is.

IVY LEAGUERS? The blog post — dated a month after the release of the band’s debut single, "Mansard Roof" — makes one mention of this, a good indication of the extent to which the unit’s bio had saturated the blogosphere. Harvey, a graduate student, has the most nuanced understanding of how VW’s privilege inflects their coy performance of "clueless bougie cosmopolitanism."

GRACELAND COMPARISON? Harvey suggests that VW is canny enough not to make "sappy pap that’s impossible to fuck to in your parents’ beach house."

THE JAMS? Harvey’s approach implicitly rejects the blogospheric pressure to confuse what the music means socially with its sonic qualities.

Vampire Weekend plays 5:55 p.m., Sun/21, on the Bridge Stage at the Treasure Island Festival.

Seasonal cool

September 17, 2008

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Brian Blade will say he’s just the drummer in the band. But Blade isn’t just any player, having credits ranging from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell along with Joshua Redman and Wayne Shorter. His understatement neatly fits the carefully nuanced improvisation on his new record with the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes (Verve). Group founders-leaders Blade and pianist Jon Cowherd wrote all the material on the new record, which they’ll feature in performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival Sept. 21 and at Yoshi’s SF Sept. 22.

Season stresses the cool, cerebral resonance the ensemble has forged throughout their decade of playing together. "The core of the sound comes from Jon’s writing and his expression at the piano," Blade says by phone from Portland, Ore. Blade and Cowherd have been friends since meeting at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Somehow our songs fit together," Blade explains. "I think that has to do with our relationship and a bond we have that gives the music a cohesiveness as a listening experience."

Humility becomes Blade — and once again, he stresses that he’s simply the drummer with the Wayne Shorter Quartet. But that notion would minimize the amazing collective musicianship of the band led by the saxophonist-composer: It’s been together for eight years now with Danilo Pérez on piano and John Patitucci on bass. Shorter and the outfit make a series of rare club dates at Yoshi’s in Oakland beginning Sept. 30.

Blade seems to have struck the perfect balance between working with Shorter and finding his own voice within the composer’s music. "We want to be true to Wayne’s vision obviously," he observes, "and we try to submit to that. But he wants us to take our own way."

"’Take a chance’ is what he would say," Blade concludes. "It’s challenging to suddenly be thrown out there to walk the wire, so to speak, but we’ve grown into being each other’s safety net." 2

BRIAN BLADE AND THE FELLOWSHIP BAND

Mon/22, 8 and 10 p.m., $10–$16

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET

Sept. 30–Oct. 4, 8 and 10 p.m.; Oct. 5, 7 and 9 p.m., $40–$70

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

A Bay pas de deux

September 17, 2008

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REVIEW Coming right off the top of the new season, two local choreographers, Liss Fain and Erika Chong Shuch, have thrown a spotlight on the marvelous richness of Bay Area dance. These women couldn’t be more different from each other. One creates cool, intricately flowing balletic dances; the other, spunky and quixotic dance theater.

Fain is something of an outsider if for no other reason than that she choreographs to a different tune. No easy beats or slapped-together sound collages for her. Her most recent Liss Fain Dance performance included Bach, Reich, Messiaen, and Bartók. Fain’s is a refined though restricted sensibility, which manifests itself in carefully structured work that floats through time and stage space without establishing linear trajectories. Often the music gives the pieces something akin to a backbone. Her longtime collaborator, Matthew Antaky, envelopes her filigreed choreography with masterful light and scenic designs. Rarely has Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Novellum stage looked as good.

A world and a local premiere shared the evening with reprises of the courtly couple-dancing Crossing (2004) and the haunting The Line Between Night and Day (2005). Ejmaj Design’s punk leather and lace costumes for the new At the Time suggested theatrically pungent subject matter. But Fain’s slow romp of entangled limbs for Dexandro Montalvo and Bethany Mitchell remained pretty tame.

For the US debut of 2007’s elegant Looking, Looking, inspired by trips to Eastern Europe and Cambodia, Fain responded to Bartók’s folkloric echoes with couple dances and a sense of searching — in the air and on the ground. Full of lively arm gestures, some possibly inspired from Asian mudras, Looking‘s high point came with Montalvo’s partnering two of Fain’s most expressive dancers, fiery Kai Davis and lyrical Daphne Zneimer. Line, performed to parts of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, is a more angular work that, thankfully, avoided literal references to the music’s place of origin: a concentration camp. Somehow it managed to be both elegiac and hopeful.

Also at YBCA, in its Forum space, Erika Shuch Performance Project’s existential musing, After All, Part I, engaged with its excellent performers. The stage oozed with talent and energy, thanks to the eminent, wistful dancer Joe Goode, singer-composer Dwayne Calizo, charming teenage vocalist Gracie Solis, percussionist-actor Matthias Bossi, and actor Beth Wilmurt, not to mention a quartet of dancers and a motley movement chorus of 23.

Drawing from a number of writers, Chong Shuch fashioned dances, monologues, and songs into a circular structure about, well, the meaning of life — as seen mainly from the perspective of a goldfish. Shuch has gathered — and created — marvelous material but it needs to be more organically shaped.

Individual segments work well. Wilmurt inhabited Michelle Carter’s sparkling text as naturally as her pisca-sartorial accoutrements of sunglasses and form-hugging sequins. Though plagued with what appeared to be vocal difficulties, Calizo’s character of a hobo Santa Claus who carries everything with him was a fanciful creation. Bossi roared through Octavio Solis’ "Last Psalm" (an inversion of "The Lord Is My Shepherd") with a mixture of bravado and cynicism. Given the current political climate, he was as hilarious as he was chilling.

Still, what After needs is somebody — just as in the initial fable — to hold it up. As it was, it didn’t leave enough footprints in the sand.

No peace, so Justice

September 17, 2008

>>Justice for all? Read club snob Marke B.’s response to this essay here.

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Is it wrong to like Justice as much as you like your iPhone? Can a rocker adore Justice as much as they love AC/DC? What’s wrong with the fist-pumping, head-banging reaction the French duo inevitably pull when their pop bombast hits your brainwaves?

There’s no denying that the duo of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay go for the drama, even while piling on the classical melodicism, teasing with sonic textural interest and gently provoking with image and concept. In play are the detached yet still loaded signs and symbols of a de-centered, post-nationalist, millennial Europe — where the virtual village square, an imagined common ground, is littered with logos and branding detritus like corporate trademarks (à la their sparkling ’80s font-anime fete of a vid for “DNVO”) and crosses (a.k.a., the title of Justice’s 2007 Ed Banger/Vice/Downtown debut), the latter of which might be read at various points as a crucifix, a space-galleon, or a coffin with wings.

But perhaps that common ground is also the beat — a constant that shifts intriguingly. The beat doesn’t possess the primacy one would imagine from an outfit so associated with disco, the so-called nouveau French touch scene, or anything resembling dance music culture, if there was ever such an animal. Instead, Augé and de Rosnay are ciphers: the friendly, unobtrusive absence at the center of Justice, as identifier-free and countenanceless as they are in their Grammy-nominated “D.A.N.C.E” video. These children of Jean Baudrillard dare you to deny their ball-busting bounce, ear-bleed volume, and bloodless hooks, sans even the cartoon/anime-cool, featureless, anti-human “faces” of Daft Punk, or the too-cool-for-school ‘tude of, say, Death From Above 1979. As with their recently banned video for “Stress,” Justice are tinkering with pop violence, devoid of true gore, a.k.a. passion.

So is it wrong to think of Justice as a user-friendly lil’ post-modern contemporary performing unit (CPU), right there along with my favorite multi-tool and time-wasting-toy iPhone — generating content that doesn’t burden me with biography, calculated ways of winning my dollar, or even, despite the iconography, religion, politics, or deep thoughts designed to program or convert me. “Justice is music without a message and without politics,” de Rosnay told Pitchfork this year. “We don’t want to tell people what to think.” Regardless of whether I buy †‘s Christian allusions — “Genesis,” “Let There Be Light,” “Waters of Nazareth,” and even divinity or “DVNO,” I believe de Rosnay’s, ahem, sincere. Like any tool, the Net, or any number of platforms available online, Justice provides a blank for me to fill in like the animation-bedecked T-shirts of the “D.A.N.C.E.” video. “T,” here, stands for tabula rasa, ready to be doodled on, graffitied or defaced — even while cheekily offering, for one millisecond, “Internet Killed the Video Stars,” this gen’s knowing rejoinder to the first video aired on MTV.

And despite the adoring masses, Augé and de Rosnay came off as far from superstar DJs in their shadowy absence-presence at Coachella in April 2007, where I first, er, saw Justice deliver what they’ve described as their first live music performance, non-reliant on turntables or CD mixers. Chalk it up to the cool relief of the evening after the blistering heat of the day, the locale of the relatively chill dance tent at the far end of the festival grounds, the gorgeously retina-searing, candy-colored hot neon and cross-flashing light show, or the duo’s own excitement, but their set — epic, melodious, and full of those big, fat, dumb beats that detractors love to slam — turned out to be the sweet spot of the entire event. By comparison, the duo’s MySpace-sponsored turn at the SF Design Center this spring tapped a slightly menacing Nuremberg rally–style vibe with its impenetrable black wall of Marshall stacks centered on a crucifix, above which the duo worked like two hipster Ozs cloaked in darkness. Even without the pastel flash, the kids punched the air with joyful anguish up front as latecomers skipped toward the stage. Justicemania.

But as Chinua Achebe promised and Justice referenced in their party’s-over “We Are Your Friends” video, things fall apart. All five-alarm strings and raver-y emergency broadcast system wail, “Stress” was the least likely track Justice could have chosen. The vérité smash-up of La Haine (1995), Costa-Gavras dynamism (The clip’s director, Romain-Gavras, is his son), and the media-savvy Medium Cool revolves around a multiracial gang of Justice cross-jacketed toughs committing senseless acts of violence in a collision between the two Parises: an alienating, multicultural and cosmopolitan urban milieu, and the quintessentially old-world City of Light. Was this rough Justice? Mais non, considering the injection of irreverent wit when one gangbanger kicks out a car radio bleating “D.A.N.C.E.” Concluding with a fourth-wall-busting scene as the boom operator’s arm catches fire and the gang descends on the camera-wielder, the video appears to be literally turning the easy thrills of the soundtrack-sourcing music on its head.

“Stress” segues with this year’s DJ Mix Leur Selection (Tron) from Justice, which shows off the pair’s puckish humor by aligning Dario Argento collaborators Goblin along with their heroes Sparks, supposed rivals Daft Punk, SF metal abstractionists Fucking Champs, and — who said the French lack wit? — Frank Stallone. The DJ Mix‘s finale — Todd Rundgren’s “International Feel” — gives you a taste of what the twosome might have in mind to follow †‘s tonally varied orchestration of older tracks, dance pop, and more stately instrumentals — as Rundgren wails to his time-traveling synths, “And there is more / International feel … interplanetary deals … interstellar appeal … universal ideal.” After the tantalizing whirl of signs and symbols — hinting at everything and nothing — is there more to Justice than what dazzles the ear and eye?

Justice performs at 9:15 p.m., Sat/20, at the Bridge Stage.

Mugwumpin ‘n’ denial: it’s not just a river in Egypt

September 16, 2008

By Robert Avila

In October, local performance company mugwumpin – a kinetic and fervidly experimental ensemble that does not shy from being highly entertaining, too – travels to the massive Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre.

There it will represent the US with a newer, leaner version of its 2006 deconstruction of the American hero complex, super:anti:reluctant. Those who can’t afford the trip can catch this singular piece of post-abstract expressionist theater during a special three-show run at Noh Space this weekend, before it heads east.

super:anti:reluctant
Preview Fri/19, 8 p.m., $10; gala performance and artist reception Sat/20, 8 p.m., $25; final performance Sun/21, 8 p.m., $12-$20 sliding scale
NOHspace
2840 Mariposa, SF
(415) 621-7978

Up in smoke?

September 10, 2008

SPOILER-LADEN TV RANT What’s wrong with Weeds? The Showtime dramedy about a pot-dealing MILF is in its fourth season, and was recently renewed for two more — but who’s gonna keep watching? A few choice moments aside, the once-mighty Weeds has pretty much sucked this season. To recap: at the show’s start circa 2005, recently widowed suburbanite Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) "put the herb in suburb," per Showtime’s cheeky coinage, by dealing greenage to well-off clients, including her sleazy accountant, Doug (Kevin Nealon). With her ever-present iced coffee in hand, Prius-driving Nancy slurped her way into a new routine: keeping her two growing sons in line, butting heads with neighbor nemesis Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) and troublemaking brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk), doing business with local suppliers like no-nonsense Heylia (Tonye Patano), opening a bakery as a pot-shop front, and dating a single dad (Martin Donovan) who turned out to be a DEA agent.

Season two followed a similar shenanigans-amid-McMansions plot, throwing in a Snoop Dogg cameo and thickening tension surrounding Nancy’s DEA dude and her ever-growing (ha!) business. Season three teetered ever-more on the edge of believability, and Nancy’s cushy community was eventually consumed by a wildfire that could only have been the result of arson and a desperate push to give the show new life.

Weeds creator Jenji Kohan and company aimed for change by moving the Botwin clan south, from Los Angeles suburbia to a beachy town near the Mexican border. Fresh scenery has allowed the show to introduce new characters like Esteban (Demian Bichir) — the suave mayor of Tijuana who happens to be a drug kingpin running pot, weapons, heroin, and god knows what else through a hidden tunnel beneath Nancy’s strip-mall maternity store. (Naturally, Nancy begins sleeping with him almost instantly.) Some of Weeds‘ familiar touchstones remain, like Celia’s destructive presence and Doug’s sleaziness, but there’s a sadness to coke-sniffing Celia and a creepiness to Doug (now obsessed with a beautiful illegal immigrant) that’s become increasingly less fun to watch. The show’s quirkier moments — like the priceless season two episode when Andy explained to Nancy’s youngest son about the wonders of jerking off into a banana peel — have all but vanished. What’s it gonna take to bring Weeds back? Did the magic flame out when "Little Boxes" ceased to be the theme song and suburbia faded from view? And how does a show called Weeds get away with showing so little actual pot smoking? Parker’s oft-awarded performance is still the best thing about the show. Pretty soon, though, it’ll be the only good thing.

WEEDS airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.

Knuckleballin’

September 10, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW I don’t know if it helps to have a strategy at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The nature of this annual animal — the 17th installment opened Sept. 3 — resists forethought. You study the program, listen to the buzz while getting yours on in the Exit Theatre Café, read the audience reviews online, but in the end you never know what you’ll get. This year I led with my gut and — it being that kind of year — decided to go for all the dark stuff: the ugly, the brutal, the profane. So I started with clowns.

In truth, the choice to see physical comedy troupe Pi’s After-Party on opening night had less to do with anything inherently transgressive about clowns than with the juggling, which I’d glimpsed at the Fest’s Sneak Peak show last month, and which was great enough to merit a second viewing. I could watch those jugglers for hours: the courage, the concentration, the ingenuity, the balls. Also the bowling pins and knives. A glow-in-the-dark routine was nearly balletic; a bloody mishap with the blades, almost operatic — if in a jocular, low-key sort of way.

As it turned out, the rest of the troupe’s routines, while uneven — a few bits felt either too familiar or underdeveloped — offered fresh and fine moments, with antics delivered expertly by a youthful, progressively endearing ensemble. Themes touching my heart included varied use of a casket and several walk-on appearances by the Grim Reaper. The grand finale — an all-out bone-crushing melee done in slow-mo — could have gone all night judging by audience guffaws and my own joyful tears. These are serious clowns, and their work is extremely silly.

The evening only got better and darker as I headed into Knuckleball, a drama whose sophisticated, thematic blend of love and baseball begins, naturally enough, with a star-spangled blowjob. This excellent two-hander, produced by New York’s EndTimes in association with Mortals Theater, is the best dramatic work I’ve seen at any Fringe. It’s one uninterrupted, dynamic, wildly unpredictable conversation between Ross (Shawn Parsons) — a Midwestern welder whose former glory days of high school baseball are overshadowed by the loss of his teammate and best friend — and his high-class girlfriend Trish (Judy Merrick) — whose polyglot, jet-set life masks a sordid past Ross must unexpectedly confront. Sounding distant echoes of Tennessee Williams and maybe Richard Greenberg, William Whitehurst’s hard, unsparing, humorous, and humane play, sharply directed by Jeremy Pape, is lit up by two fine, gutsy, focused performances that grip from the first and don’t let go.

Next came My Friend Hitler, rounding out the evening with swastikas and a wicked little footnote to the history of the Third Reich. Yes, with friends like these, Ernst Röhm — the head of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary brownshirts, executed by Hitler’s minions in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives" purge — needed no enemies. But are we meant to feel sorry for Röhm? Hardly. Are we meant to sympathize with longtime friend Adolph’s tough choices? Nah. In this solo performance, inspired by Yukio Mishima’s play and delivered by Washington, DC performer Zehra Fazal in Hitler drag, there’s not much to latch onto beyond the (unconvincingly personalized) political machinations of a waxing tyrant. Larger themes remain indistinct in this set of one-sided conversations, which Fazal delivers with animated but histrionic conviction. Hard to believe Nazis could be so dull, but maybe there’s a political lesson in that somewhere.

The following night’s fare included two back-to-back solo shows by women travelers. With the sparest of stage properties and a cheery but overly static stage presence, Katherine Glover details adventures in Central America, Europe, and Africa in No Stranger Than Home. These rarely rose above what you might expect to hear from a 20-something, white, middle-class American woman, but to her credit Glover is not entirely unconscious of this, using it to advantage on occasion. My Camino, by Canadian Sue Kenney at least takes a stab at mise-en-scène by reutf8g the story of her 780-km trek across a medieval Spanish pilgrimage route while walking on a treadmill. Perhaps the most affecting aspect of Kenney’s natural delivery is her understated treatment of her private sorrows.

A trip to the Center for Sex and Culture ended night two with the lighthearted yet evangelical infomercial/tutorial/educational variety act, Peg-Ass-Us, a duet by a real-life couple exploring the joys of pegging (which Webster’s declines to define, but involves a woman with a strap-on and a receptive partner). Sporting Barney-esque songs, a little audience participation, and lots of lube, it actually lasts longer than sex, which may be a drawback.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sun/14

For the schedule and details, go to www.sffringe.org

Lose yourself

September 10, 2008

Every big city hosts its fair share of great bands that attract crowds with centrifugal force. While other performers flyer mercilessly only to play to the opening act and bartenders, some draw a crowd only money can buy. But money seems to have little to do with it — some acts are just really fucking good.

I sat down with Ty Segall in the Lower Haight last month to find out what he was putting in the water. "If I put out a hundred records in my life, I’ll die happy," Segall said after a good, hearty spiel praising Billy Childish.

Segall sets the scene physically. Onstage, the 21-year-old can be sighted in tight jeans and a striped T-shirt, crouched over a guitar in front of a bass drum with a tambourine duct-taped haphazardly to the front. The reverb is turned up so high you can hardly tell where the lyrics end and guitar begins. Then imagine it sounding great — almost like you’re listening to an old record. Every pause between songs is heavy with echo and the hiss of amplifiers. Suddenly you realize that punk’s not dead — we just weren’t doing it right.

"It’s all about the sound … the old, live rock thing," he explained. "Childish is famous for saying you don’t need more than a day to record something. That’s how I feel recording should be done. Quick, on the fly, fast — real."

The new sound is the old sound. In a media-saturated culture where you can listen to anything from GG Allin to the Shangri-las without having to have a cool older brother, the only place to turn is your roots.

"For me, there’s nothing better than oldies stations," Segall said. "All the girl groups and Buddy Holly — it’s real rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not even the song. It’s how it sounds. It’s got soul. The style of recording, the real, live sound, and the real feeling it portrays. You can feel the live, on-the-fly mentality."

Ask Segall about his influences, however, and you’ll get a lot more than Childish. You’ll get an array of genres and styles: surf music, glam, the Stooges, and local bands. Segall has basically jumped into a dream.

"I’m the luckiest person in the world," he said, referring to his upcoming US tour with indie greats Thee Oh Sees and the Sic Alps. "I’m touring with two of my favorite bands in the city. This is as far as I ever wanted to take this project, and I’m already there." And the man has gone even further: Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer is releasing Segall’s new self-titled album on his Castle Face imprint, though at this point he has released only one other recording — by his own band — on the label.

But then everyone gets carried away and forgets him or herself when they see Segall live. In fact, you almost forget to dance. His songs are so spot-on and inspired that you lose your focus on the surroundings. Instead you glue your eyes to his performance the same way you fix on a TV set when you’re hungover. People already consider Segall’s SoCal-ish lo-fi ballad "The Drag" a classic, and I have the hypnotic, Syd Barrett–inspired "Who Are You?" on every playlist on my iPod.

I mean, I don’t want to get all afterschool-special about it, but if you want to see something new and don’t want to waste an entire night, catch Segall the next chance you get. And you know what? If Segall puts out a hundred records in his life, I’ll die happy too.

TY SEGALL

With Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps

Thurs/11, call for time and price

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF

(415) 626-0880

Also with Master/Slave and Girls

Fri/12, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

Canadian shakin’

September 10, 2008

Every year, I run into someone at the Toronto International Film Festival who asks me, “How’s your festival going?” Your festival is an appropriate term, actually — the event is so huge you could probably pick out a dozen attendees who’ve seen none of the same films. As I write this, a little over halfway though this year’s visit, I haven’t yet had a defining Toronto fest moment. Sure, there was the moment I became aware of just how jaded I am — when I passed by a mob of gawkers and flashbulbs and realized I didn’t give a rat’s ass about which celebrity had incited such a tizzy. But so far, I haven’t seen a film that truly dazzled me.

In spite of this, I will admit that “my festival” has had some standout moments. Thrillers Vinyan and L’Empreinte de L’Ange (The Mark of an Angel) both pay tribute to the enduring love a parent feels for his or her child — a theme shared, in some ways, with Witch Hunt, a disturbing look at the rash of child-molestation cases (all eventually proved false) that plagued Bakersfield in the 1980s. Vinyan, helmed by noted mind-fucker Fabrice Du Welz (2004’s Calvaire), follows a Euro couple whose son was lost in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. When they begin to suspect (with precious little evidence) that he survived the wave but was kidnapped in the aftermath, they take an ill-advised plunge into the hostile jungle. L’Empreinte de L'<0x2009>Ange is one of those tense family dramas set in the comfortable world of lavish children’s birthday parties and ballet recitals; the less said about the twisty plot, the better. Intense stars Catherine Frot and Sandrine Bonnaire and a jarringly creepy soundtrack keep this one from Lifetime Network territory, though its mothers-in-crisis plot ain’t far from what you might find thereabouts.

The theme of family also finds its way into The Brothers Bloom, from Brick (2005) writer-director Rian Johnson, and Appaloosa, directed by its star, Ed Harris. Since the pairs of men in both films aren’t actually related, I’ll take this opportunity to declare that the bromance trend of 2008 (Pineapple Express is one example) is alive and well at TIFF. A determinedly whimsical tale of con men (Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody) who decide to relieve a kooky heiress (Rachel Weisz) of a few millions, Bloom has enough going for it that it’ll please, say, Wes Anderson fans. But Brick devotees (like me) might feel a bit cheated — an overdose of self-conscious cleverness can do that to a viewer. By contrast, Appaloosa is a bare-bones oater about a pair of gunslingers (Harris, Viggo Mortensen) hired to tidy up a town terrorized by the Wild West equivalent of a mob boss (Jeremy Irons). The particularly witty script is a nice surprise; as the stranger who blows into town with no purpose other than creating conflict, Renee Zellweger’s character becomes more tolerable when it’s revealed she’s not nearly as prim as she pretends to be.

For pure fun, I checked out American Swing, a jaunty doc about infamous New York City swingers’ club Plato’s Retreat — with its subject matter, colorful music and editing, and copious bare-butts-in-the-1970s footage, it’d make for a great double-feature with 2005’s Inside Deep Throat. And not to be missed — even though I thought it could have been a lot more awesome given its rich potential — was JCVD, billed as the comeback movie for Jean-Claude Van Damme. Playing himself, the Muscles from Brussels is unwittingly drawn into a bank robbery; delightfully, he can still kick a cigarette out of someone’s mouth — and, even better, has enough temerity to crack wise about Steven Seagal’s ponytail. (Cheryl Eddy)

For additional coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, visit www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

MO’ FROM TO

• Wendy and Lucy: Following the footsteps of Kelly Reichardt’s tender 2006 film Old Joy, this even smaller experience trails Wendy, a Midwestern girl (pricelessly played by Michelle Williams) driving across the country to start a new life in Alaska. This heartbreaking journey beautifully confronts the tiny issues that arise from being out of step with modern society and will be particularly celebrated by anyone who felt Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) was frustratingly misguided and overly romanticized

• Vinyan: When a rich Caucasian couple’s child goes missing, the parents make a trek through the tsunami-destroyed bowels of Thailand, searching all the way into Burma. The shrill sound design, claustrophobic camera work, and xenophobic storytelling perfectly punctuate the Harvey Keitel–ish hysterics unleashed by French heartthrob Emmanuelle Béart and UK toughie Rufus Sewell (who gave a similarly audacious performance in the overlooked Sundance gem Downloading Nancy). As the pair descend into utter madness, this hypnotic hybrid of The African Queen (1951) and Don’t Look Now (1973) could be read as a brutal attack on Western tourism. Throw in a hundred creepy jungle kids and some controversy about the filmmakers’ alleged insensitivity toward tsunami victims, and you’ve got a genuine cult classic in the making!

• JCVD Jean-Claude Van Damme decided to star as himself in Belgian director Mabrouk El Mechri’s deconstructive thriller (à la 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon). Van Damme gave up his control issues, allowing the director to expose his most intimate flaws (including a monologue given directly to the audience that jams a frog into the throat of even the most jaded, ironic hipster). The sold-out Midnight Madness audience was so completely stunned by Van Damme’s solid and moving performance, I hope the filmmaker gets some credit for creating a genuine tribute to this genuine genre actor.

More to come from the second half of the festival: Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, the Dardenne Brothers’ Le Silence de Lorna, and supposedly the most violent horror film ever made: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. (Jesse Hawthorne Ficks)

Moaning for Mon Cousin Belge

September 4, 2008

Dressy: A past Mon Cousin Belge performance

Mon Cousin Belge (with Girls, Bridez, and the Passionistas)
Aug. 28, Cafe du Nord

By Lauren Giniger

Man, that rare warm summer night we had last week really messed up my program. It took me forever to get out of the house, and it was all clothing-related indecision, and consequently I missed three groups of the fun four-band lineup at the world-famous-in-San Francisco performer Mon Cousin Belge’s record-release party.

Now it’s true, the hipsters left en masse (really, is there anything they don’t do en masse?) after Girls’ set, but that just left a very enthusiastic core of fans for Mon Cousin Belge’s turn. MCB, much like Obama, benefits from the “enthusiasm factor,” and MCB fans really, really, really love MCB. Emile is a compelling frontman, his theatrics propped on top of a set of powerful pipes, and the band’s music possesses a delicious, glammed-out sensibility.

MCB started their set with slow-burn cover of Roger Miller’s “The Crossing,” and reached a sort of rock fever pitch with “Ugly American” and “Tweaker Bitch.” Emile’s long-lost brother in botched plastic surgery sat in with some guest vocals, and both delivered drama of the hair-metal variety. So many of MCB songs are so great. They’re funny, edgy, and recognizable – who among us doesn’t know a tweaker bitch? While the guitar jangles and the keyboards hark to ’70s anthems, the drums carve out a stripped-down post-punk beat to counterpoint all that top-heavy glam.

Hipsters, next time stick around even if your friends don’t. San Francisco fags and those who love them elevate MCB to cult-band status. I don’t make history, but I dig it.

Ballin’

September 3, 2008

Best known for her career as a documentarian (she won an Oscar for 1997’s Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien), Jessica Yu makes her narrative feature debut with Ping Pong Playa, an often gut-busting sports fable about a wannabe NBA star who becomes the unlikely hero of his ping-pong-crazed family.

Lead actor Jimmy Tsai’s performance as Christopher "C-Dub" Wang is so dead-on hilarious, I assumed he was a stand-up comedian. Nope: "I met Jimmy because he was the production accountant at [Ping Pong Playa production company] Cherry Sky Films," Yu explains. "I went to a screening of short films where he showed these humorous spots he had made for an online clothing company. I remember thinking this was a great character to use for something. So when [Cherry Sky’s] Joan Huang and Jimmy approached me about working on [a comedy] together, my first thought was we have to put this character C-Dub in it."

The first-time thespian was already a naturally funny guy (he cowrote the film with Yu), but he trained for six months to get his skills in line with the film’s ping-pong storyline. "There’s something inherently funny about the sport," Yu says. "Not to take anything away from it, but no matter how hard you hit a ping-pong ball, it still makes that smack! So the idea of putting somebody who was kind of bombastic into that world was ripe for opportunity."

Yu says her background as a champion fencer influenced her desire to make a sports movie. "I think there were certainly discussions about the kind of sports that Asians are known for being good at — whether it’s diving, or ping-pong, or to some extent fencing. I just think it’s interesting that a character like C-Dub has no interest in excelling at what he sees as marginalized sports — but that tends to be where you see a lot of Asians on the podium."

As for Yu, "My game’s pretty terrible! We had a ping-pong table on set at all times — and if it’s sitting there long enough you’re gonna play. I’m still not good at it, but I enjoy it a little more now."

PING PONG PLAYA

Opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters

Curtain calls

August 27, 2008

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Fall arts resolution No. 1: have no faith in leaders. Obummer and McPain will only disappoint, or worse. (Probably worse.) If faith you must ooze, kindly direct it toward people who really care about you and have your interests at heart. Why did Gore Vidal write his play The Best Man (1960), for instance? Most likely it wasn’t to get elected (though he did try). And Frank Wedekind was even less enamored of the powers that be when he penned his way-pre-punk "tragedy of childhood," Spring Awakening, a late 19th-century cri de coeur against authority whose transition to Broadway and electric guitars has both an aptness and an irony going for it that might have amused old FW. As Tom Stoppard confirms, power is a compromised and compromising affair whatever side of history you happen to be on, but rock ‘n’ roll will save your soul. So will Teddy Pendergrass, for that matter, as soul-survivor and kinetic Philly memoirist Colman Domingo brilliantly attests. So this fall, remember who your real friends are. You can direct any remaining or follow-up questions to author-playwright Kobo Abe, as well as the other miscellaneous sage nonconformists referenced in the list below.

The Best Man A Broadway hit for Gore Vidal, this political comedy-drama remains fresh as a daisy, if such a sweet olfactory simile can apply to the mosh pit of electoral politics.

Now playing through Sept. 28. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival The mighty Exit Theatre turned 25 this year. The SF Fringe Festival, the annual small-theater smorgasbord the Exit serves up each fall, turns a sexy 17. Judging by this year’s lineup, that means stripped-down, butt-plugged, bare-bones, rock-hard, strap-on sexy.

Sept. 3–14. Various venues, including the Exit Theatres, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

A Boy and His Soul (Thick House) and A Bronx Tale (Golden Gate Theatre) If only it were a double bill. These two solo plays about growing up (in Philadelphia and the titular Bronx) take place on radically different Bay Area stages, and deal with radically different stages in the lives of what you might call radically different actors (Coleman Domingo and Chazz Palminteri, respectively). Both are masterful, and as long as you’re at it, throw in Carlo D’Amore’s own deft and hilarious family-centered solo, No Parole, coming to the Marsh in November (www.themarsh.org).

Sept. 3–14. Thick House, 1695 18th St., SF. www.thickhouse.org

Sept. 23–Oct. 19. Golden Gate Theatre, One Taylor, SF. www.shnsf.com

Spring Awakening Best of Broadway brings to town this rock musical makeover of Wedekind’s great drama.

Sept. 4–Oct. 12. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF. www.shnsf.com

Rock ‘N’ Roll Here comes Tom Stoppard’s character-concentrated take on Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, as well as on leftist politics across several decades of Cold War history. It’s a good play to argue about afterward, in your highest pinko dudgeon, over pinot and tartare de boeuf at the Grand Cafe.

Sept. 11–Oct. 12. American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

HyperReal Bay Area performance artist Sara Kraft’s low-key brilliance by now merits a neologism: krafty (with a k!). Krafty = shrewd, inventive, technically savvy, wry, playful, tuneful, eerie, unsettling, and, generally speaking, not to be missed.

Oct. 10–12. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/36251

War Peace: The One Drop Rule Living Word Festival 2008, titled "Race Is Fiction," features a new collaborative work by Youth Speaks alumni and Teen Poetry Slam champions Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, and Nico Cary. Directed by festival curator Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace imagines a drought-ravaged Bay Area as potential war zone.

Oct. 23–24. Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. www.youthspeaks.org

Angry Black White Boy Felonious’ Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd unveil a poetical rap-fused remix of Adam Mansbach’s satirical and incendiary novel about race and identity in the United States, adapted by Wolf.

Oct. 23–Nov. 16. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. www.theintersection.org

Continuous City Last year’s work-in-progress is this year’s full-fledged multimedia outing as New York City–based boundary pushers, the Builders Association, returns with a three-pronged narrative (incorporating much Bay Area–derived material) negotiating the ever-more permeable membrane between the global and the local, and our networked and unplugged experience.

Nov. 6–8. Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Friends Brava! For Women in the Arts’ new artistic director Raelle Myrick-Hodges carries forward the spirit of its founding mission with offerings eclectic and unexpected. The revival of Woman in the Dunes author Kobo Abe’s play Friends promises to be a timely and potent production, though Abe penned his scathing absurdist take on gentrification some four decades ago.

Nov. 6–17. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., SF. (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org

Diverse moments

August 27, 2008

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The sheer quantity of advance notices piling up over the summer could overwhelm even a committed dance observer. But then come the aha! moments where you grab your pencil to fill in one more slot on the calendar. The Bay Area is still an exceptional place to watch dance, whether you do it at the prestigious Zellerbach Hall or the Mission District’s humbler CounterPULSE. By including four local choreographers who have risen to the forefront in recent years, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’s Bay Area Now 5 (BAN5) series just may be the most noteworthy shows of the fall season. The works of the Erika Shuch Performance Project (After All, Part 1, Sept. 12–14), Robert Moses’ Kin (Toward September, Sept. 18–20), Dohee Lee (Flux, Oct. 16–18), and Keith Hennessy (Delinquent, Nov. 13–15) couldn’t be more different from one another. So these world premieres, supported and — at least partially — commissioned by the YBCA, are a vote of confidence in the health of local dance (check www.ybca.org for performance details). Read on for more notable dance dates.

Courage Group When longtime dancer and arts activist Todd Courage started his own company some six years ago, his work immediately stood for the breadth of its references and its theatrical savvy. Pinpoint, an evening of three world premieres, is his most ambitious endeavor yet.

Sept. 11–13, Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org

Shawl-Anderson 50th Anniversary Gala With dancers flying in from across the nation, this event is a huge celebration of the lives and works of Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson, who have run Shawl-Anderson Modern Dance Center — the Bay Area’s oldest dance studio — for the past five decades. The gala is preceded by two performance salons Sept. 19.

Sept. 20, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College, Berk.; www.shawl-anderson.org

Keyhole Dances Erin Mei-Stuart is a smart, witty, idiosyncratic choreographer. For this series of matinee performances, she takes her EmSpace ensemble to the third floor of a Victorian flat in the Fillmore neighborhood. Buy a ticket and find out location details.

Sept. 20–28. private home, SF. www.emspacedance.org/keyhole

Mark Morris Dance Group Romeo and Juliet without a balcony scene, but with a happy ending? If anyone can bring this off, MM can. His Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare, is based on the old standby’s recently discovered original libretto and score, and is said to reflect Prokofiev’s initial vision for the piece.

Sept. 25–28. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org

Chitresh Das Chitresh Das has managed to popularize Kathak, one of India’s most rhythmic dance forms. For these performances, Das and his musicians will challenge each other to ever-greater heights. It’s dance in which improvisation and structure go hand in hand.

Sept. 27–28. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.kathak.org

Nâ Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu Patrick Makuakane is master showman but also a deeply serious practitioner and student of hula. He has gorgeous dancers, and the "Hula Show 2008" promises to be spectacular, witty, and fun. Includes a family show on Sunday.

Oct. 11–19. Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF. www.cityboxoffice.com

Kirov Ballet A superb company (and orchestra) — but why such a conservative repertory for an ensemble that these days performs George Balanchine and William Forsythe in addition to the story ballets?

Oct. 14–19. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org

Merce Cunningham Dance Company This four-program series is superb overview of half a century of dancemaking by a giant of an artist. The Nov. 7 performance includes colloquia and a conversation with Cunningham.

Nov. 7–15. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org

Axis Dance Company Over the years Axis has redefined long-cherished ideas about who can and who cannot dance. They are true revolutionaries. This 20th anniversary concert includes works by Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Alex Ketley, and Kate Weare.

Nov. 14–16. Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice, Oakl. www.axisdance.org

Diablo Ballet With "An Evening on Broadway," featuring the work of George Balanchine, Lynn Taylor Corbett, and Christopher Stowell, Diablo takes a very welcome step away from in-house choreography.

Nov. 21–22. Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. www.diabloballet.org

‘Daughter’ goes to the opera

August 27, 2008

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The most successful Asian American novelist of her generation, Amy Tan tests her penmanship as an opera librettist this fall, when the San Francisco Opera presents the world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, the operatic adaptation of the Oakland native’s 2001 Putnam bestseller with a score composed by Stewart Wallace.

While holding the utmost respect for the polish and clarity of Tan’s voice as a novelist, I have always been a bit skeptical of her writings. These often read suspiciously close to the admonitions and remembrances of parents and elder Chinese relatives, repackaged with great skill for maximum melodramatic impact. Most Chinese children raised by parents who survived the Sino-Japanese wars and the Cultural Revolution will tell you that they are keenly familiar with the gestalt of these tales — carrying unspeakable tragedy and suffering — which the aforementioned aged deploy with a numbing frequency as a tool to awe, preach to, strike fear in, and taunt offspring.

Still, Tan is decidedly correct when she points out that, melodramatic or not, the unarticulated truth of these stories is intensely evident in the endemic presence of depression and the dysfunctional intergenerational relationships that afflict the transplanted expatriate Chinese community of the war generation. "There are lots of tragedies in people’s lives," observes the Sausalito resident by phone from New York City. "Especially in [those of] people who decided to leave their country behind."

Local audiences have been exposed to Wallace’s music — most notably when his opera, Harvey Milk, premiered locally with the SF Opera in 1996 — but for Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter commission provided her with an in-depth exposure to the creative process of an entirely new medium. "When I was asked to do this opera, I was happy to turn over the story," Tan says. "I wasn’t thinking that I would be committing myself to doing a libretto."

Initially intimidated by the technical aspects, she soon found herself immersed in the process. "It’s a very free form, as a matter of fact," she explains. "It wasn’t about cutting back the novel, but rather to find the heart of the story and recreate it all over again."

At its core, The Bonesetter’s Daughter is the story of three generations of Chinese women whose secrets and unspoken traumas are carried forth between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. In preparation for the work, Wallace and Tan traveled together to remote villages in China, attending religious ceremonies, and collecting inspiration in traditional folk music and rituals.

As a result, Wallace created a score — which will be conducted by Steven Sloane and performed by Zheng Cao, Ning Liang, Qian Yi, Hao Jiang Tian, Wu Tong, James Maddalena, and Catherine Cook — that is at times percussive and at other moments hauntingly lyrical, according to Tan. It also includes music written for the suona, a high-pitched, reedy Chinese oboe, as well as some fire-breathing drama. "We will see acrobatics," she adds. "In the beginning prologue there will be dragons: a water dragon and a fire dragon. I am a water dragon, and my mother is a fire dragon, and together we make steam." Far from the typical Chinatown parade dragons, "these will be beautiful, flying dragons made of light paper," she says, "and inside are these flying acrobats."

With martial arts and acrobatic elements integrated into the staging by director Chen Shi-Zheng, will Bonesetter carry close resemblance to a Chinese opera? "Not at all," Tan said. "There are parts of my life, which are based in China, that have been transformed into my American life. Stewart’s music includes, in the same way, those references. But they are part of Stewart’s voice now — and he has a very strong voice."

THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER

Sept. 13–Oct. 2, various times, $15–$290

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com

CHING CHANG’S TOP CLASSICAL AND OPERA PICKS

KATIA AND MARIELLE LABEQUE

Like Madonna, the Labeque sisters are past 50 now, and showing remarkable artistic longevity and re-invention. The virtuoso French pianists offer a rare performance of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos at the San Francisco Symphony’s season opener. Sept. 4–7. (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org

PYGMALION

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra opens its fall program with a gem of French baroque, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pygmalion. Paired on the program will be the Thomas Arne’s Comus, based on a masque by John Milton. Sept. 13–20. (415) 392-4400, www.philharmoniabaroque.org

ISABEL BAYRAKDARIAN AND THE MANITOBA CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

Overachiever Bayrakdarian has an engineering degree and speaks five languages, yet it is in singing that this freakishly talented young Canadian shines most brightly. The soprano perform works by Bartók, Ravel, Gideon Klein, Nikolaos Skalkottas, and Gomidas Vartabed. Oct. 4. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org

MARSALIS BRASILIANOS

Saxophone virtuoso Branford Marsalis’ love affair with Brazilian music shows no signs of waning. Here he forges a vibrant musical dialogue across the Americas, joined by members of Gil Jardim’s Philarmonia Brasileira to perform works by Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky, Bach, and Milhaud. Oct. 5. (650) 725-ARTS (2787), livelyarts.stanford.edu.

THE COAL-SELLER’S CONCERT

The Bay Area early music ensemble Musica Pacifica recreates a typical concert by coal-seller Thomas Britton, who presented the world’s first known public concert series in London around 1678. Oct. 31. (510) 528-1725, www.sfems.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Cinemania

August 27, 2008

› johnny@sfbg.com

Mock Up on Mu Craig Baldwin’s latest opus, on rocket science and Scientology in California, with the director in person.

Sept. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Obscene A new documentary about Evergreen Review and Grove Press publisher Barney Russet and his many battles on behalf of free speech and real art.

Sept. 5–11. Roxie Film Center

Lost Indulgence and In Love We Trust A pair of films by up-and-coming Chinese directors Zhang Yibai and Wang Xiaoshuai.

Sept. 6–20. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"History Stutters: Found Footage Films" Bruce Conner’s John F. Kennedy–assassination film Report (1965) and Ken Jacobs’ Malcolm X. assassination response Perfect Film (1984) is on the same bill; program also includes a movie with Ed Henderson.

Sept. 9. Pacific Film Archive

Leave Her to Heaven The 1947 Technicolor noir — and ultimate swimmer’s nightmare — returns with a demonstration of film restoration.

Sept. 12. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org

"MilkBar International Live Film Festival" Three days of experimental cinema, including more than 20 local short works.

Sept. 12–14. Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center, 1255 26th St. #207, Oakl. (510) 289-5188, www.milkbar.org

"Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke" At last, China’s vanguard contemporary filmmaker gets an extensive Bay Area retrospective.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Pacific Film Archive

"The People Behind the Screen" Local programmers contribute to "Bay Area Now": Jesse Hawthorne Ficks presents girl rock; Stephen Parr of Oddball Films shares a giddy taste of his mega-montage project Euphoria; and kino21 puts together performance cinema; Peaches Christ, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, and DocFest also have nights.

Sept. 13–Oct. 18. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Shatfest Thrillville’s tributes to the one and only William Shatner continue with his 1968 spaghetti western White Comanche.

Sept. 18. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

"Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground" The legendary wit Mead visit for screenings that showcase his best starring roles (1960’s The Flower Thief and 1967–68’s Lonesome Cowboys).

Sept. 18–21. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Forbidden Lies The Roxie is distributing this look at con artist Norma Khouri, which gets a theatrical run after a successful trip through the festival circuit.

Sept. 19. Roxie Film Center

MadCat Women’s International Film Festival Ariella Ben-Dov’s fest turns 12 with eight archival greats (including one by Samara Halperin) and silent films with live rock scores.

Sept. 19 and 23. Various venues. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

"Psychotic and Erotic: Rare Films by Tinto Brass" Ass-fixated erotica that includes talking animals and naked cannibals.

Sept. 24. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"How We Fight: Iraqi Short Films" Kino21 kicks off a series with Argentine director Mauro Andrizzi’s feature-length compilation of short videos shot by US or British soldiers, Iraqi militia members, and corporate workers.

Sept. 25. Artists’ Television Access

"James Dean Memorial Weekend" Come back to the five and dime, or failing that, the Castro, and be sure to wear your red windbreaker.

Sept. 26–28. Castro Theatre

Film in the Fog Gene Kelley is singing in the rain — and the Presidio fog.

Sept. 27. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

The World’s Largest Shopping Mall The debut or preview of a film by Sam Green and Carrie Lozano is at the heart of a program devoted to psychogeography.

Sept. 27. Other Cinema

Deathbowl to Downtown Coan Nichols’ and Rick Charnoski’s look at the history of NYC street skateboard culture, narrated by Chloë Sevigny.

Sept. 29. Castro Theatre

"Bette Davis Centennial" She’ll tease you, she’ll unease you — all the better just to please you.

Sept.–Oct. Castro Theatre

Dead Channels You can never get enough weird horror and fantasy.

Oct. 2–5. Roxie Film Center

Mill Valley Film Festival The major fall Bay Area festival turns 31.

Oct. 2–12. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Rosemary’s Baby and The Devils Double the demonic hysteria!

Oct. 3. Castro Theatre

"No Wave: The Cinema of Jean Eustache" The series includes 1965’s Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, his 215-minute masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), his hog-slaughtering documentary — shades of Georges Franju? — The Pig (1970), and a 1997 doc portrait of him.

Oct. 4–22. Pacific Film Archive

"Rediscovering the Fourth Generation" The post-Mao cinema that laid groundwork for directors such as Jia Zhangke gets a SF showcase.

Oct. 4–30. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wattis Theater, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Vertigo The greatest San Francisco movie ever — maybe greatest movie ever — gets the outdoor screening treatment from Film Night in the Park.

Oct. 4. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

"Spirit of ’68" and "Know Your Enemy" A pair of programs compiled by Jack Stevenson

Oct. 5. Oddball Films, 275 Capp, SF. (415) 558-8117, www.oddballfilm.com

Manhattan and Muppets Take Manhattan Mariel Hemingway, meet Miss Piggy.

Oct. 7–9. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994. www.redvicmoviehouse.com

"French Cinema Now" A new minifestival from the San Francisco Film Society.

Oct. 8–12. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of SF Amateur Sex Cinema from the ’60s" Stevenson looks at that time in SF when everyone would take off their clothes for a camera — with film in it.

Oct. 9–11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Midnites for Maniacs: Back to School … in the ’90s" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1991), Romeo and Juliet (1995), and Starship Troopers (1997).

Oct. 10. Castro Theatre

"Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" The expansive 16-film program extends across eight decades.

Oct. 10–30. Pacific Film Archive

"Protest-sploitation" A lecture-demo by Christian Divine looking at six "youth" films made in 1970, along with a screening of that year’s The People Next Door.

Oct. 11. Other Cinema

RR James Benning’s train film finally reaches a Bay Area destination.

Oct. 14. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival turns 12 this year.

Oct. 16–Nov. 4. Various venues. (415) 564-1100. www.aff.org

DocFest IndieFest’s doc extension turns seven this year with a slate of at least 60 films.

Oct. 17–Nov.6. Roxie Film Center and Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. (415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Leslie Thornton A three-program SF Cinematheque series devoted to the director behind Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985–present) and other experimental works, with Thornton in-person.

Oct. 19–26. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

United Nations Association Film Festival Environmentalism is the focus of the festival’s 11th year.

Oct. 19–26. Various venues. (650) 724-5544, www.unaff.org

"I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" Ning and her acclaimed Beijing trilogy — which spans from the Peking Opera to dogs, cops, and taxi drivers — visit the Bay, capping things a screening of her 2005 "Chinese Sex and the City" feature Perpetual Motion.

Oct. 23–27. Pacific Film Archive

The Werewolf of Washington The president’s speechwriter is a lycanthrope in this Nixon-era flick.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"The New Talkies: Bollywood Night" Kino21 presents six works of live narration to Bollywood film scenes.

Nov. 1. Artists’ Television Access

"Occult on Camera" Erik Davis charts out the Aleister Crowley–Kenneth Anger–Led Zeppelin triumvirate-of-evil — what does Jimmy Page’s appearance in the closing ceremony of the Olympics mean?

Nov. 1. Other Cinema

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine The SF premiere of a new documentary devoted to the sculptor.

Nov. 2–3. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Ghosts Nick Broomfield’s excellent first non-documentary feature, about the abuse of Chinese immigrants in the United Kingdom.

Nov. 7–13. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Festival The burgeoning fest and showcase turns three with a program that includes the Cannes favorite Waltz with Bashir.

Nov. 13–16. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

Luther Price New works by one of the more scathing and harrowing filmmakers on the planet, presented by SF Cinematheque.

Mid-November. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

New Italian Cinema Will it include Matteo Garrone’s Cannes critic’s fave Gomorra?

Nov. 16–23. Various venues. (415) 561-5000, www.sffs.org

"Films by Martha Colburn" A night of kinetic works by the collage creator, presented in conjunction with a show at Berkeley Art Museum.

Dec. 2. Pacific Film Archive

Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy Thrillville stuffs your stocking with a gem from 1957.

Dec. 11. El Cerrito Speakeasy Theater, 10070 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

James Hong A sneak peek at the local director’s expose on Japan’s rewriting of history, Lessons in the Blood.

Dec. 13. Other Cinema

"At Sea" Peter Hutton’s At Sea (2004-7), about the life and death of a colossal container ship, is the centerpiece of an oceanic SF Cinematheque program.

Dec. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS/OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Connect four

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August 26, 2008
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Photos by Jeffery Cross

GUILLERMO GÓMEZ PEÑA

SFBG Who is inspiring — or revolting — to you, in terms of art and performance, including political performance?

Guillermo Gómez-Peña The best and — most inspiring performance I’ve experienced took place in the Mexico City zocalo. A group of 100 indigenous men from the Coordinadora de los 400 pueblos, tired of waiting for the mayor to listen to their claims, decided to take off their clothes, each drink a liter of water, and pee in unison against the walls of the Palacio Nacional. The power of this action was not in the collective pissing ritual but rather in the exposure of the nude indigenous body, marked by the scars of hard labor and history. The image has been haunting me.

SFBG What do you hope will happen in the US presidential election?

GGP In the realm of symbolic politics, the best thing that can happen is for the United States to elect an articulate mulatto president, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, whose second name is Hussein. But in reality, it worries me that Obama’s project of hope sounds more and more like Hallmark humanism.

SFBG What is your favorite time of year in seasonless San Francisco?

GGP I love it when the sun comes out in earnest and tropicalism hits the streets for a few days. I love to bar hop in the Mission and watch the myriad subcultures show off their self-styled fashion, muscles, tattoos and nalgas palidas. But I also love certain neighborhoods under heavy fog. I feel I am walking in the middle of a British gothic novel. My worry is that this gorgeous city is slowly becoming a bohemian theme park.

I FEEL THAT I AM FREE BUT I KNOW I AM NOT

Oct. 2, 5–8 p.m.; Oct.11, 3–5 p.m.; and Oct. 21, 5–8 p.m.; free, $5

SF Camerawork

657 Mission (second floor), SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org

MAPA/CORPO 3

Oct. 23–25; times and prices TBD

Project Artaud Theater

450 Florida, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org

www.litquake.org

———-

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE

SFBG What are your plans for this fall?

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE I’m going on a crazy cross-country book tour, starting with the book launch Oct. 8 at City Lights — check my Web site (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) for details.

SFBG Your novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, is published by City Lights. A recent review in Publishers Weekly seems to think the book’s protagonist is a woman. What did you learn from that review?

MBS I learned most people are even more confused about gender than me. But guess what — the book is already available in Bay Area stores, so readers can rush to figure it out, just like the latest John Grisham.

SFBG So, are you allergic to oxygen?

MBS These days, who isn’t?

SFBG Where’s your favorite sex place in SF, or maybe better, where in SF needs to be turned into a sex spot?

MBS City Hall would be fun. So much elegance and charm, as long as they get rid of everyone who’s usually there. The 38 Geary would be perfect: I always get horny on that bus. Anywhere on my late-night walks — I usually walk up Leavenworth and Hyde from O’Farrell to Bush or so. Feel free to stalk me!

SFBG What do you want to happen in the presidential election?

MBS Do we still call that an election?

SFBG What is your favorite time of year in seasonless San Francisco?

MBS Anytime when the fog rolls in and I can breathe.

SO MANY WAYS TO SLEEP BADLY RELEASE PARTY

Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m.

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus, SF

(415) 362-8193

www.citylights.com

———–

JOANN SELISKER

SFBG Your new show, Off Leash: Who’s a Good Girl?, ponders the canine-human continuum. What have you learned?

JoAnn Selisker In terms of interspecies relationships, I find human behavior and motivation to be much more strange and unfathomable (and sometimes disturbing) than that of the canine. I speak human, so I ought to understand where humans are coming from. If dogs weren’t so helpless, misunderstood, disregarded, and maltreated, I would prefer to be a dog.

SFBG What do you think of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer?

JS I think he makes some nice dog beds. You can get anything he thinks your dog needs with his "brand" on it. You could call him the Martha Stewart of the dog world. She reaches us through Wal-Mart, and he reaches us through PETCO. They both give us simple how-to instructions and affordable, quality products. All we have to do is buy the videos, magazines, supplies, and accessories, follow step-by-step instructions, and … voilà! The perfect dinner party; the well-mannered pet.

SFBG In your earlier show, Begin with a Box, you put creative instructions by Twyla Tharp to the test. What did you discover?

JS Well, how interesting — Twyla Tharp is a lot like the Dog Whisperer and Martha Stewart! Each of these masters generously shares secrets to success, in simple, step-by-step format. We can all become Twyla Tharp, the Dog Whisperer and/or Martha Stewart.

I discovered that I will never become Twyla Tharp. I started the Begin with a Box project with a box, just like she says, and proceeded step-by-step to completion. I should now be a MacArthur genius, with name recognition and a project with Prince.

OFF LEASH: WHO’S A GOOD GIRL?

Oct. 8, 8 p.m.; Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m.; $15–$18

Project Theater Artaud

450 Florida, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org

www.litquake.org

———-

TIM SULLIVAN

SFBG What are your plans for this fall?

TIM SULLIVAN I traveled all summer, so I’m going to try my best to stay put. I have two shows opening this fall, one at SF Camerawork and one in Dallas. I’ll be teaching a class at San Francisco Art Institute and continuing to make things.

SFBG Your contribution to SF Camerawork’s fall exhibition, "I Feel I Am Free But I Know I Am Not," involves a rowboat. What should people expect if they step into the boat?

TS Everyone who gets into the boat will be instantly transformed into a movie star in a recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). I really need people to come out and participate to make this work.

SFBG You’ve collaborated with George Kuchar before. Do you have a favorite Kuchar quote, or Kuchar story?

TS A few years back I was in Kuchar’s class film, Kiss of Frankenstein. On the first day he handed us the script, I was rolling on the floor laughing. The entire script is hilarious and quote-worthy! It was definitely the best reading I did in graduate school. The last line (spoiler alert!) always gets me: "Kiss me sloppy."

SFBG What is your favorite time of year in seasonless San Francisco?

TS Fall is always my favorite season. In my home state of Wisconsin I love it because the leaves fall off the trees. Here in SF I love it because the tourists leave and the streets thin out.

I FEEL I AM FREE BUT I KNOW I AM NOT

Sept. 4, 5–8 p.m., free; Sept. 13 and 27, 2–5 p.m., $5

SF Camerawork

657 Mission (second floor), SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Fall Arts Preview 2008

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August 26, 2008
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> johnny@sfbg.com

I don’t know about you, but I hear something is happening in early November. Since I can’t quite identify exactly what it is, let’s focus on all the events around it this fall — especially the spaces on stages and screens and pages and in museum and gallery rooms.

A little birdie tells me this fall will be propagandized, rather than purely politicized, into infinity. In times like these, it helps to have art that finds a realm outside the false promises, a place from which to look back at our society — including the politicians who try to rule it — and say: you better perform!

That’s the case this week’s fab four cover stars, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, JoAnn Selisker, and Tim Sullivan. This quartet of singular creative forces is united in using imaginative performance to reject inhibiting norms.

Gómez Peña and his group La Pocha Nostra are bringing Mapa/Corpo 3 — an interactive ritual involving "political acupuncture" that was banned in the United States for three years — to Theater Artaud as part of Litquake and the Living Word Festival. At SF Camerawork, they’ll also be trying out what they call performance karaoke, which is sort of an aesthetic, political, and ethical update on the popular game Twister. There, they are part of "I Feel That I Am Free But I Know I Am Not," an extended exhibition (curated by Chuck Mobley) that also includes some live video by Sullivan, whose photographic and video work looks at everyday imagery and familiar pop iconography from new and sometimes hilarious angles.

New views of everyday pop banality are also JoAnn Selisker’s forte. Presented by Litquake and ODC, her latest piece, Off Leash: Who’s a Good Girl? uses text and dance to explore the relationship between dogs and their best frenemy, humans. Everything goes full circle with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore — you can see some of Gómez Peña’s flair for radical sexual and political performance in his past activism with Gay Shame, and like Sullivan and Selisker, his image doesn’t come from Macy’s. In his new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 256 pages, $15.95), he shows readers a San Francisco that Frommer’s doesn’t know about.
This fall, Gómez Peña, Bernstein Sycamore, Selisker, and Sullivan are just part of a blitz that’s bringing everything from multiple Chinese art exhibitions and film programs to the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Milk. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy season.

>>Connect four
Cover stars: A quartet of our favorite artists and performers sounds off

>>Diverse moments
Dance: Highlights run from modern to the Bard
By Rita Felciano

>>Curtain calls
Stage: Theater gets political, playful, potent
By Robert Avila

>>Vizzy with the possibilities
Visual Art: We scope out the promising shows
By Katie Kurtz, Kimberly Chun, and Johnny Ray Huston

>>Sino the times
Visual Art: Bay Area museums and galleries home in on Asia
By Glen Helfand

>>Olympic disc toss
Music: Will these new music releases go far or fall flat?
By Kimberly Chun and Johnny Ray Huston

>>Stage names
Concerts: Got live if you want it — and you do
Johnny Ray Huston and Kimberly Chun

>>“Daughter” goes to the opera
Classical: Amy Tan revamps her bestseller. Plus, more classical picks
By Ching Chang

>>Forecast: blackout
Clubs: The season’s prime parties offer plenty to fall down about
By Marke B.

>>Autumn reels
Film: 10 big-screen release dates to remember — for better and worse
By Cheryl Eddy

>>Cinemania
Film: 50 ways to rep film this fall
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Notes of a dirty old man
Lit: Or, a portion from a wine-stained notebook
By Charles Bukowski

>>FALL FAIRS AND FESTIVAL GUIDE
More festive events than you can shake a bare tree at
By Duncan Scott Davidson, Kat Renz, and Ian Ferguson

CONTRA-TIEMPO

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August 26, 2008
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PREVIEW For one reason or another, you still need to have a pipeline into the "ethnic" dance community to find Latino choreographers, and so far few contemporary choreographers have emerged from their midst. That said, the first San Francisco performance by Los Angeles–based CONTRA-TIEMPO, at the very least, promises a glance at how young Latinos see themselves in a contemporary urban context. Like her older counterpart Merian Soto on the East Coast, Ana Maria Alvarez is fascinated with salsa as an expression of Latino identity. A 2005 performance of the company’s signature piece Against the Times/CONTRA-TIEMPO, inspired by salsa’s inherent rhythmic contradictions, presented an ensemble in which the women were as likely to lead as the men. This signature piece is both an edgy examination of what Alvarez has called a look at "the complexity of resistance and struggle for Latinos in the United States" and a joyous celebration of community. Included in the sound score are voice-over quotes by the likes of César Chávez, Che Guevara, José Martí, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral. The show opens with CONTRA-TIEMPO’s newest company work, I Dream America (2007), a 40-minute "movement opera" inspired by Langston Hughes. The piece looks at tensions between African Americans and Latinos. Also included is a pure salsa piece, Alba Ache (2007), for two couples: one on screen, one on stage.

CONTRA-TIEMPO Fri/29–Sat/30, 8 p.m., $25. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. (415) 626-2060, www.counterpulse.org

Collage boys

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August 20, 2008
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

As we enter the intoxicatingly rich world of Zona, we encounter a deceptively simple melodrama. It unfolds in shadow play on a gold-hued screen fronting a kind of rectangular tent at the back of the stage. We see the silhouette of a mother cradling her newborn infant, swaddled in a blanket, as an old recording of an Italian operatic duet comes seeping through. The woman sets the baby down and briefly retires from the scene, giving opportunity to a snarling beast which promptly swoops in and snatches up the child. Returning to find the babe gone, she collapses in a fit of grief and anguish as the music swells to its climax, her gently unduutf8g hand rising from her swooning body in a kind of unconscious farewell.

This same gesture, delicate and precise, returns later as another woman, played by the same male actor (a deft Stephen Lawson, now out in front of the curtain in another of several consecutive female guises), finally greets the beast that has been pursuing her — a naked male figure with the head of a bear — with a frightened reflex that suddenly transforms into a come hither call.

In its straightforwardness, the shadow play at the start of Zona is anything but straight. It sets up a number of complex tensions that will wend their way through a layered 55-minute multimedia collage of drag performance, lip-synch, camp iconography, and dark revelry presented by Montreal cabaret performance duo 2boys.tv (Lawson and Aaron Pollard). These tensions include the art form itself, as Zona recycles the tropes of queer cabaret in a focused reclamation of an intensely dark strain in midcentury American film and theater brooding on madness, desire, and loss.

Not that Zona isn’t also immediately rewarding and funny. A scene in which Lawson repeatedly mimes a looped sample of Elizabeth Taylor’s screams in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) is as hysterical as it is, frankly, hysterical. But it’s less an excuse for knowing camp humor than part of an attempt to push the queer cabaret form in a more dramatically serious direction, while allowing it more self-reflexivity than ever. Enveloped in an often breathtaking series of video-based images and a haunting soundscape, Zona traces a somber, troubled mood throughout, while eschewing any easy resolution of its themes.

Although originally created for a 2006 theater festival in Calgary, Canada, rather than a bar or cabaret, Zona‘s design stays true to its roots in underground queer theater, and is so intimate and compact it almost makes the modest stage at New Conservatory Theatre Center look overly roomy. At the same time, Pollard’s video and audio direction add greatly to the show’s ingenious layering of textures, cultural references, and associations. In one achingly lovely movement, a reclining Lawson, as the actress whose love has led her to the brink of madness, opens a large book toward the audience from the lip of the stage. On its blank pages appear two small video projections: one of the naked beast with bear’s head, and the other of the actress’ character herself, both dynamic images subtitled in halting phrases of pain, regret, and remembered passion. Lawson’s mesmerizing performance, meanwhile, strikes an eerie balance between human emotion and jagged masquerade.

Zona marks the West Coast debut for the Canadian duo, with thanks due to NCTC’s artistic director Ed Decker for bringing the denizens of Montreal’s vibrant scene out to the Bay Area. Here’s looking forward to the next time the boys are back in town.

ZONA

Wed–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m., $22–$34

New Conservatory Theatre Center

25 Van Ness, SF

(415) 861-8972

www.nctcsf.org

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