Rita Felciano

Revisiting the classics

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Revisiting the classics

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This past weekend two master choreographers, each with more than 30 years experience, still managed to surprise us with fresh goods in their dance bags.

Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company has a well-deserved reputation for physically lush though highly disciplined choreography. Again presented by San Francisco Performances, Batsheva brought the 2007 Max, whose name may be derived from Naharin’s pseudonym of "Maxin Waratt" as the work’s composer — or simply is an abbreviation of "maximum."

What packed in the audience, which included many dancers, was the Bay Area’s first public opportunity to observe "Gaga" in action. Naharin developed this dance technique in the 1990s while recovering from a back injury. Influenced by yoga and improvisation, this new road to expressive potential has developed an almost cult-like following, in part perhaps because it can only be learned from those accredited for teaching it. At the very least, that is new in contemporary dance.

Max, though fabulously performed by an ensemble of five men and five women, looked only partially successful. Naharin’s coupling of explosive individuality with strict unisons works as well ever. But this piece’s primary satisfaction came from watching individual dancers so clearly listening to themselves and each other, and then translating the resulting sensations into unadorned and spare movement. Even at their most flailing and angular, they proposed stillness and vulnerability. The jerkiness and matter-of-factness in much of the choreography suggested avoidance of transitions, which might be partially responsible for the impressive clarity of Max‘s intent.

The regimentation of Naharin’s unisons, while implying a sense of community, often looked disturbingly forceful. Max had plenty of those. The family portraits made you want to become a hermit. In its more percussive moments, Naharin’s score of chanting, babbling in made-up languages, and falling water sounded too much like strict commands. But it was in its overall trajectory that Max fell short. The emphasis on stasis within the dance itself — despite its vigorous individuality and countdown of accretions in its latter part — did not sufficiently take into account theatrical time.

Early in his career, Bill T. Jones, and his late partner Arnie Zane, pioneered the use of text in dance. At the time, they shocked some, delighted others. Jones has ever since worked to find structural formats with which to employ both of these languages. In his latest endeavor, Story/Time, he has created one of his most delightful pieces yet. In this delicious though quite serious 70-minute entertainment, Jones talks, the dancers dance. Both do it well.

Acknowledging a debt to John Cage, who used a similar format in his 1958 Indeterminacy — stringing together randomly-chosen, one-minute stories — Jones assembled a collection of anecdotes, many of them (no surprise from this artist) autobiographical. Then he and his company developed the choreography that stormed, slithered, and leapt around him as he sat center stage, the fulcrum of the action.

With his massive legs bracing a simple table, Jones looked like one of Michelangelo’s prophets. Employing his beautifully modulated and rich voice to marvelous effect, he carefully controlled the timing with pauses, silences, accelerations, and suspensions. Here, the choreographer was also a first-rate musician.

Jones’ words originated in real-life observations, musings, opportunities for name-dropping, family history, and, perhaps an urban myth or two. Into the core of these often humorous accounts, Jones also placed a dark, dramatic meditation on death. The tales occasionally left the audience hanging with unanswered questions. Some, probably too many, depended on a punch line to make their point.

Story kept viewers on their toes, trying to figure out whether the detailed, chock-full-of-ideas choreography swirled by independently, was engaged in a conversation with Jones’s text, or was acting out a narrative. What was certain: the work got its power from affirming life in all its messiness. It was in the text, the individual dances, the communal lines, and even the double roundelays that opened and closed these well-told tales.

In the now

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In the now

DANCE On the opening night of its eighth year, the three-weekend “Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now” deserved its name. The quality of the choreography and the confident performances more than confirmed that BCF is a celebration of excellent contemporary African American choreography. Four out of the five works starred as fine world premieres by local artists. They were stylistically about as diverse as you would want, but this was an evening to rejoice. The Feb. 10 audience at Oakland’s Laney College more than agreed.

Reginald Ray-Savage’s Savage Jazz Dance Company looked better than it has in a long time. For Friday, February 10 he reached for an idiosyncratic collage of scores. Except for the finale, there seemed to be little jazz; still, the selections made sense, starting with a passage of pizzicato violins that played as Lavante Cervantes ceremoniously walked across the stage. But almost immediately, that calm exploded into intense, relentlessly shifting encounters among six dancers.

Though tightly choreographed individually, the passages followed each other without internal logic. Transitions were sublimated into the commitment and clarity of individual moments — fierce turns, huge extensions, and traveling leaps. Every phrase had to stand on its own.

One of Ray-Savage’s gifts is setting in relief individual talents: Melissa Schumann’s tearing into space, Jarrod Mayo’s floating elevations and whiplash turns. Two duets showcased the magisterial Alison Hurley. With Evan Kharazzi, Hurley assertively reversed dance’s traditional male-female relationships; her dramatic-lyrical encounter with Mayo brought out a quasi-maternal quality. Friday‘s only misstep was to bring on Suman Wilson at the very end. Why, if at all, only then?

With a largely changed cast and on a different stage, Robert Moses’ 2008 Approaching Thought looked like new. The current crop of dancers performed the whirlwind choreography clearly and assertively. To see Katherine Wells and Crystaldawn Bell — both of them reed-thin, long-limbed and fierce — next to each other was breathtaking. I still don’t know what the title means, but Moses must have had something in mind along the lines of contrarian relationships, since he built the work around duets.

Approaching is packed with movement ideas — unisons that splinter, duets that evaporate; a hip-hop gesture here, a ballet turn there. People send each other packing, and they embrace. Norma Fong was a one-woman threat to anything in her way; no wonder she sent a cowering Wells into the wings.

Susana Arenas Pedroso’s new version of Yemaya, Ocean Mother, with live music, including her as the lead singer, evoked the give and take of the ocean with mesmerizing intensity. Supported by seven fellow dancers, Regina Tolbert’s Yemaya rolled her shoulders and swayed her skirts, gathering and releasing energy. Playful one moment and ferocious the next, she kept joining a larger whole but also metamorphosed out of it.

Kendra Kimbrough Barnes showed an excerpt of In the meantime. Performed by six women, of divergent physical make-ups and approaches to dance, the work appeared to be the next step in what Barnes has explored in earlier pieces: the internal and external life of African American woman, and by extension other wives, mothers, matriarchs, and burden-carriers. She has a special ability to combine text that speaks softly about momentous issues and pair it with choreography that expands on the language. The complete work will premiere this fall.

The enthusiastically received Ndozi: Ancient Truths Revealed paired Congolese drummer Kazi Malonga and longtime Dimensions Dancer Theater performer Latanya d. Tigner in a coming-of-age story. The overly long opening, with blackouts and too-somber lighting, was awkward as it introduced us to either a dream or the resurrection of a young girl who has to find herself. But to watch Tigner, guided by Malonga, being initiated into the all-male drum ensemble was seeing transformation in action. Tigner was magnificent as she first found her feet and then her rhythm.

For the next two weekends, BCF will be at Dance Mission Theater with new programs, including special performances of Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Becomes Flesh.

 

BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL: HERE AND NOW 2012

Fri/17-Sat/18 and Feb. 24-25, 8 p.m.; Sun/19, 4 p.m.; Feb. 26, 7 p.m., $10-$25

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF www.bcfhereandnow.com

First Lady blues

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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First Lady blues

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Randee Paufve’s voice is quiet. But once you have heard her speak through her dances, you are unlikely to forget the strength of what she has to say. Her craft is impressive, her topics are many-layered, and the resulting choreography is pared down to its essence. Sometimes, I have even wished for a little more looseness just so I could catch my breath.

So I Married Abraham Lincoln takes on the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife and widow of a President, a life-long Washington outsider, the target of vicious gossip, a spiritualist, perhaps mentally unstable, and a mother of four sons — only one of whom outlived her. In this hour-long work, set on seven primary and nine additional dancers, Paufve examines the sense of restriction — personal, social, political — with which this Kentucky-born outcast, a free spirit at one time, had to cope.

>>View our slideshow of Paufve Dance’s So I Married Abraham Lincoln

Though Married starts with the figure of Todd Lincoln, it opens up to include all the First Ladies whose identities disappeared into their positions. In the work’s main section, in a take-off on beauty pageants, they parade down a runway cooing their first names. Taking a broader perspective, Paufve also addresses the toll taken when anyone — one of the wives is danced by a man — is forced into a role and is not allowed to be him or herself.

Married is structured in the now-fashionable installation format, in which the audience travels through a series of episodes. At its premiere at Dance Mission Theater, it opened with an informal lobby overture of short individualized solos that were probably meant to highlight each dancer’s uniqueness (sight lines were difficult). Then Paufve moved the show down a narrow hallway, segueing through several studios and ending in the theater proper. The idea, again, was clearly to focus on one woman and then widen the lens. Theoretically, the format looked good, but the logistics of having to squeeze all the audience members (the show was more than sold out) through narrow doorways, and then cram them into places to sit, stand, or lean, impeded the piece’s flow.

Todd Lincoln first appears on a throne-like chair at the end of the hallway, contemplating her life and people’s expectations and misperceptions of her. Her words echo back to her as from another world. A couple of scenes later, we find ourselves around a low table outlined with burning tea lights. Two women in white shifts (costumes by Keriann Egeland) anxiously crowd into a corner. Perhaps they are ghosts, perhaps they are mourners. The real action, however, happens above the table where — in a stroke of genius — designer Jack Carpenter suspended linked teacups over the candles. The rising heat makes the cups tinkle, and they gently dance.

Though it has its moments of levity and softness, Married aims for a stark, uncompromising perspective, with choreography that is linear, pattern-oriented, and rigorous. It’s powerful in the way it suggests a sense of objectification. You sense an invisibly controlling hand as women are moved around like figures on a chessboard. In the last scene, they parade, they strut, they primp, and they pose. When the bugle calls, off they march. You watch Todd Lincoln awkwardly trying to weave gaudy flowers into her hair, and you hear a voice cry out against “that ugly home,” presumably the White House. Several times in the middle of scurrying activity, like a photo you can’t forget, you see identical images of a body being mourned. Lincoln? His sons? Soldiers, then and now?

At the same time, Heather Heise’s lovely songs recall wistful folk traditions and suggest the possibility of a communal purpose. Beginning with a single voice, the music opens into rich harmonies. One of tunes starts with “Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.” And as the piece comes to a quiet ending, the women sing “Oh where are our dear mothers?/They are gone to heaven a’shouting/Day is a’breaking/In my soul.”

 

In the realms of the unreal

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In the realms of the unreal

FILM/DANCE Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. Avatar (2009) certainly didn’t convince me that 3D was the answer.

However, improved technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming.

Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator whose thinking was crucially shaped by her work in the 1960s with Antony Tudor and the team of Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo.

Wenders’ great accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy.

Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. There is something absurd about the way her dancers never tire of being curious, silly, cruel, childish, hysterical, loving, and angry. The nobility and desperation comes from not giving up.

By taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people (subjects of all of Bausch’s work), where there is room for a man with rabbit ears to ride public transportation and couples make love at intersections.

In Bausch’s work, sets — deluges, walls that crumble, hippos, mountains, floors made from dirt, grass, and carnations — are the obstacles that challenge and dwarf the dancer. Wenders chose his outside “sets” brilliantly to similar effect. Many locations are huge: gyms, factories, convention halls, and quarries — and the performers are clearly strangers.

The 3D technology Wenders uses rarely jumps out at the viewer. Instead, his space has a sheen and glassy quality that is non-realistic; it seems to pervade the whole film even in its more conventionally-shot sequences. While it’s good to see dance’s physical multidimensionality, perhaps even more satisfying is Wenders’s juxtaposing of different senses of dimensionality into a coherent whole that I suspect Bausch would have approved of. It’s the artifice and not the realism that makes Pina the fine work it is.

Before her death, Bausch had chosen four choreographies as the film’s core material. They were excellent picks, though it’s curious that three of them are quite early while Vollmond is her last complete work, more in the genre of her later “travel-inspired” pieces. Perhaps she meant to tell us something. Café Mueller shows a young Bausch in a dreamy, nightmarish labyrinthine environment; The Rite of Spring starts her investigation of male-female struggles; and Kontakthof is a work about the eternal mating frenzy as danced by her own company, a group of seniors, and an ensemble of teenagers.

Not pre-planned, however, was Wenders’ brilliant decision to include “interviews” with the dancers. They silently look at the camera but their grief-stricken faces speak of loss, loneliness, and a sense of abandonment. They were thinking about Bausch’s death, but perhaps also about her work. *

PINA opens Fri/20 in San Francisco.

Top flight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Top flight

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN DANCE If you are a trend spotter, you will have noticed two changes within the local dance ecology that probably will influence how we see dance in the foreseeable future.

First, not only have dancers been foregoing the proscenium theater — after all, there aren’t that many around here — but they’ve also been sidestepping theaters altogether. They find spaces in museums, bars, parks, and streets, even former newspaper offices. Or they perform in studios which become informal community gatherings where audiences, in addition to seeing work, get a sense of participating in something being created. Dancers’ Group and CounterPULSE’s “2nd Sundays,” the RAWDance’s “CONCEPT Series,” and Kunst-Stoff Arts are among the most prominent examples of this.

The second change relates to funding. No need to spell out how dire the financial picture has become for big organizations that have infrastructures to support. But for the small and medium-sized companies, it’s been just about catastrophic. So how to get the cash to put on a show or take advantage of a touring opportunity? In the commercial world it’s called “direct marketing.” Dancers are nothing if not entrepreneurial. They are taking to the internet, asking for small donations and keeping people informed about the progress of the “campaign.”

Trying to rethink the past 12 months of dance viewing is mind-boggling; coming up with a “best-of list” is no less so. Take the following ten as one observer’s bouquet to all the dancers who have enriched our lives in 2011. They are listed chronologically by the date of when they were seen.

In its third program (Feb. 24, War Memorial Opera House), San Francisco Ballet showcased the classical language as infinitely pliable and capable of contemporary expressiveness. Yet Yuri Possokhov and William Forsythe could not have done it more differently. Possokhov’s 2010 small-scaled Classical Symphony — three couples and a corps of eight — seduced with its speed, wit, and exuberance. Forsythe’s 1984 tour de force Artifact Suite challenged a huge ensemble with gale-force attacks, imploding unisons, and ever-changing designs. In this context even Helgi Tomasson’s 1993 Nanna’s Lied looked decent.

Spanning 55 years of work, the Merce Cunningham Company (Feb. 3, Cal Performances/Zellerbach Hall) bid its farewell with three pieces that beautifully showcased the late choreographer’s extraordinary range. Antic Meet (1958) showed him young and clever; in the lyrical Pond Way (1998) we saw Cunningham’s affinity for the natural world, and in Sounddance (1975) the backdrop swallowed his dancers one by one. It was a good-bye from artist who had the guts to pull the curtain on himself.

Zaccho Dance Theatre‘s The Monkey and the Devil (April 17, Novellus Theater) didn’t pull any punches about the persistence of racism. A tough show to watch, it was low on “entertainment” values but chock-full of convincingly painful confrontations in which two couples, one white, one black, mirrored each others’ anguish and anger.

In 1979, audiences were taken aback by Lucinda Childs‘ Dance (April 28, San Francisco Performances/Novellus Theater) which incorporated a film by Sol LeWitt and a score by Philip Glass. Its rigor, aesthetic purity, and pedestrian vocabulary alienated many. Yet Dance is a gorgeous piece of choreographic architecture. How fun it was to watch, in 2011, dancers doing the exact same steps so differently as those caught on the film more than 30 years ago.

The Polish Teatr Zar‘s stunningly original and impeccably realized The Gospels of Childhood Triptych, (May 25, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church and Potrero Hill Neighborhood House) is one of the reasons that the San Francisco International Arts Festival has to exist. With its ritualistic pacing and its fusion of music, movement, and language (“Zar” means “funeral song”), Gospels attempted to suggest something approaching the divine and the restrictions of the self.

Pooling resources is today’s mantra. But few go to the depth of intellectual and emotional sharing that Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton do. They co-choreographed the exhilarating The Experience of Flight in Dreams (June 9, ODC Theater) and came up with a soloists-ensemble format rarely seen in modern dance. To have such a unified and well-realized perspective from such different artists was thrilling.

Science, or writers such Maxine Hong Kingston or Gary Snyder, often inspire Kathryn Roszak‘s work. The reprise of the fine Pensive Spring (Sept. 25, Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley), based on the works by Emily Dickinson, proved to be a thoroughly intelligent and finely crafted dance theater piece that illuminated a great creative mind through music, dance, and language.

AXIS Dance Company (Oct. 7, Malonga Casquelourd Theater) commissioned the Australian choreographer Marc Brew to give the company its first story-ballet. Taking a bow to dance history and soap operas, Brew’s slyly voyeuristic Full of Words moved through knotted entanglements with insight, humor, and compassion. It was a fine vehicle for the company and should be around for a long time.

José Limón is a giant of early modern dance, yet few practitioners have ever seen his work live. So for tiny San Jose’s sjDANCEco (Oct. 15, California Theatre, San Jose) to attempt Missa Brevis, a major Limon choreography, just about amounted to hubris. But former Limón dancer and sjDANCEco’s artistic director, Gary Masters, scoured the community and trained the dancers — some of them college and high school students — in the requisite combination of strength and restraint. The performance of this jewel of modernism became a minor miracle.

Finally, Deborah Slater and Julie Hébert‘s Night Falls (Oct. 21, ODC Theater) looked at the process of aging from a “three ages of man” perspective, except that this was a woman’s life crisis. Most intriguing was the way language and dance — much of it gestural — bounced off each other, creating the vibrant environment in which the performers could fully extend themselves.

Swing, shift

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Swing, shift

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Have you ever climbed a steep mountain but were unsure that your lungs or legs would hold up to get you to the top? Or felt a relationship slip through your fingers before you were barely aware of what happened? How about feeling your feet firmly planted, only to land suddenly on your behind? The performers in Stacey Printz’s new Hover Space, her most ambitious project yet, are finding out that their dance floor is putting the lie to such basic concepts as grounding, balance, gravity, or momentum. The space moves up and down and tilts at precarious angles, and yet the dancers appear to have the times of their lives.

At a late rehearsal in Z Space at Theater Artaud for the upcoming Hover Space, they giggle and struggle, accommodate and resist the demands of this unstable environment. The 75-minute work may be physically challenging, but thematically Printz believes that it rests on a solid, if volatile, base.

“How do long-term relationships sustain themselves?” the dancer, choreographer, wife, and mother asked herself. “What does it look like in a place of contentment when you have peace and support, though you have learned to listen and compromise?” For Printz it means being feeling grounded, and therefore being secure enough to take larger risks, “do crazier things” and expand into more new worlds. For some people that solidity comes through relationships, she says; others find it in themselves though “this space cannot be static because the moment you lose the ebb and flow, it’s dead.”

It’s good reasoning from a dancer-choreographer who has always refused to be pinned down. Still an awesomely strong performer, Printz draws on jazz, modern, some ethnic forms, and hip-hop, disciplines in which she has both trained and performed. If the term “fusion” didn’t suggest borrowing, perhaps even an essential lack of artistic independence, she wouldn’t mind the description. “But this is who I am,” she says. “This is how I push myself the most.”

Having a foot in several worlds has given Printz access to a creative freedom that informs the choreography for her own company but which is most strongly seen in her own dancing. For instance, last October’s WestWave Dance Festival piece If You Knew — a duet with beatboxer-musician Tommy Shepherd — was a fulminating explosion of rhythm and motion, with the two of them challenging each other to an ever-higher degree of virtuosity. But she has also challenged her own (and other) dancers to step beyond their own comfort levels. In the 2009 spitfire Cross Talk, the members of the National Folk Theatre of Ireland loosened up their torsos while Printz’s barefoot dancers shone in pristinely precise footwork.

In addition to choreographing for her own 11-year old company, Printz regularly collaborates with Marc Bamuthi Joseph on his multi-genre theater pieces. “I have known him for a long time, and I know how his body moves, so I can give him what he needs within a specific context,” she explains. But working with Bamuthi gives Printz what few choreographers working on someone else’s show get: time and respect. “He is brilliant and has the resources and a big umbrella under which we all can work together for months,” she says.

She also learned that “if you bring in collaborators, let them do what they do best.” Bamuthi lets her make her own gifts to his projects.

Printz’s primary collaborators for Hover Space are her 12 dancers, the largest group she has ever worked with locally. The choreography of a dozen or so distinct episodes includes looks at the relationships of three very different couples. While she often uses pre-recorded music, for her first evening-length piece Printz has invited DJ-composer Kraddy (a.k.a. Matthew Kratz) to join the team. Designer Sean Riley suspended the 12×15 movable platform from Z Space’s ceiling. David Szlaza created the lights; Catherine Myre signed on for the costumes.

HOVER SPACE

Wed/30-Sat/3, 8 p.m., $22–<\d>$25

Z Space at Theater Artaud

450 Florida, SF www.brownpapertickets.com

Standing room only

Andrew Lam
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Standing room only

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE We go to dance performances to be entranced, or at least intrigued, by well-physicalized movement ideas. But it helps if choreographers work with collaborators who not only enhance basic concepts but also bring their own perspectives to the dance-making process. Two programs last weekend, Liss Fain Dance’s playfully evocative The False and True Are One and LEVYdance’s delicious ROMP, showed just how successful the result of that kind of cooperation can be. Interestingly, Liss Fain and Benjamin Levy also contributed to the recent trend of abandoning the proscenium theater — too expensive? Too hierarchical? Too restrictive? — in favor of “installations” in which audiences move around the performance space.

Choreographers seem to feel that nudging audiences out of their seats will engage them more actively because they can choose when they want to focus on something. Personally, I am not convinced that this process involves a viewer more intently. However, the format’s informality, its sense of being invited in, suggests a welcoming atmosphere that can make dance watching, at least for a time, a lot of fun.

Perhaps the greatest gain that the installation format offers is the closeness it offers between audience and dancers. To observe muscles stretching less than a foot away, to hear the breathing that accompanies a strenuous lift, and to see a tiny adjustment to balance and gravity that a dancer makes is a gift that a traditional theater cannot provide. What you loose in overall perspective is compensated for by the intimacy between observer and performer.

For that to happen, choreographers need designers who can create the appropriate environment. False and True‘s Matthew Antaky and ROMP‘s Jack Beuttler chose the square as a basic format. Both modulated the idea to support the choreography to excellent effect.

Antaky’s transparent fiberglass panels made for muted perspectives on the four squares within the bigger square that the dancers inhabited. The design looked a little like a board game and was airy enough to allow for a number of pathways for the dancers. Into the absolute center he placed a slightly raised podium — suggesting a private writing and thinking space — for narrator Nancy Shelby, whose reading of Lydia Davis’ musings set False and True‘s tone. Fain’s controlled yet free-flowing choreography for nine dancers — the uneven number was most refreshing given Antaky’s strict geometry — constantly shifted between all the available spaces and groupings. Dancers picked up and modified sequences in a game of unstated rules, but they also became part of the audience, watching their colleagues or listening intently to Shelby.

Beuttler’s square for the rambunctious ROMP at first suggested a town plaza in which people, i.e. the audience, had pulled chairs around into an informal café setting. In the latter part of the work, tables around the periphery reseated the audience banquet-style; they both framed a central performing area and then became the platform for a moving menu of passing delicacies as dancers slithered, cavorted, and leapt in close-up. The audience ate it up, laughing, talking, and taking pictures. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had tried tip the artists.

Levy’s fast-paced and exuberant choreography for himself, Mélodie Casta, and Scott Marlowe pulled in a group of nine auxiliary dancers — some of them still students — who raced and dove between the seated audience without a single misstep. Their energy was that of kids released at the end of the school year, but their discipline and exactitude was that of professionals. An intricately structured trio for Levy’s own dancers highlighted their eccentric individuality but gradually deepened into cheek-to-cheek slow dancing.

As for that audience participation that both choreographers wanted, Levy’s public lustily participated. But a funny thing happened during False and True. Despite the exhortation to move around, the audience mostly stood and sat. Seeing those dancers be so vigorous and intent and yet so quiet — Dan Wool’s score was a modicum of discreteness — cast a spell that you didn’t want to break.

Her way

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Her way

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Early in the 20th century, Ezra Pound declared “the artist is the antenna of the race.” True or false? Do artists have the ability to predict the future, or are they stuck in the present?

Krissy Keefer, artistic director of Dance Brigade and Dance Mission Theater, tends to side with Pound. While she wouldn’t go as far as writer-performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who considers the artist a shaman, she does think that “there is something about the artistic process that opens your brain to see into the future, to see things happening before they actually happen.”

This weekend Keefer and her troupe are celebrating the 35th anniversary of Dance Brigade and its antecedents the Wallflower Order. The performances, all with free admission, include a retrospective of works spanning the last three decades, plus the 2009 Great Liberation Upon Hearing, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Keefer created the work after losing two close friends within the same year.

Women taking charge of their own fate may not be news today, but in 1975, Wallflower’s five female warriors were pioneers. The turmoil of the post-Vietnam era and the rise of feminism had created a climate in which audiences hungered for dance that spoke to their lives. Many of them were women. The company was made up of contentious women, strong dancers, committed activists. They were not about to be stopped, much like their “grandmothers” Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham or, in terms of politics, the characters in 1964 Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women.

Most remarkably, Keefer’s commitment to make art addressing issues that matter has not waned — she’s as ready as ever to mount the barricades and make her voice heard through art. In retrospect, it is surprising how much of her past work was highly prescient.

She recently called my attention to my reservations about her having drenched one section of the 2002 Cave Women in images of extreme destruction and war. (At the time, the bloodiness seemed over the top). Almost immediately, all hell broke loose in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie, a huge success from 1987-1997, features one-percenters the McGreed family, an abused undocumented servant in Clara, and a homeless Sugar Plum Fairy. Issues that were under the radar at the time have become headlines.

Appearing in Nutcracker — with an excellent, Tchaikovsky-based score by jazz composer Mary Watson — were then-little-known artists like Axis Dance Company and aerial dance pioneer Terry Sendgraff; Keith Hennessy played the McGreed’s renegade son.

For all her predilection for “making art that includes themes of social responsibility and dealing with real situations with real people,” Keefer is also very much a creature of the theater. The work has to stand on its artistic feet, perhaps not surprising for a woman who trained as dancer at age six — long before she knew what she wanted to dance about.

The 2005 Dry/Ice, a look at the effects of global warming, for instance, was a commission from the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Now who else, except someone who besotted by the stage, would lug a cast-iron bathtub, weighing over 300 pounds, into Theater Artaud for two performances? “I just wanted to do something about the environment,” she recalls. (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out the next year.)

In the 2004 Spell, a collaboration with Hennessy, Keefer became a raging goddess-witch figure doing an exorcism for peace and economic justice. It was a power performance that, given the lives many people have today, probably would play well in the suburbs.

Keefer also takes her social activism outside the theater. In 2000, when she felt that the criteria for acceptance to the San Francisco Ballet School were unjustifiable — based on the experiences of her daughter, eight years old at the time — she complained loud and clear. It started discussions about the female dancer’s body at the time when academics had barely touched the subject. In 2006, she was so furious about the country’s priorities that she ran for Congress. Of course, she knew that she wouldn’t win — but she wanted to take a stand. Even her parents encouraged her to do so. “I can’t believe that I ran against Nancy Pelosi when she was poised to become Speaker of the House,” she laughs today.

Meditation has helped Keefer step away from anger, what she called her “habitual response” to injustice. The resolve was shaken, however, this past summer, when — coming back from a successful East Coast and Caribbean tour with Liberation — all the costumes (transported via Greyhound, the only shipping the company could afford) were stolen. “What can you do?” she shrugs. This Mother Courage of dance will just put her shoulder to the wheel a little harder. 

 

“FROM WALLFLOWER ORDER TO DANCE BRIGADE: A 35-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE CELEBRATION”

Fri/18-Sat/19, 8 p.m.; Sun/20, 2 p.m., free

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF www.dancebrigade.org

“MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS:” LOCAL ARTS LUMINARIES TOAST DANCE BRIGADE

 

DANCE From Brady Street to Dance Mission and beyond, Krissy [Keefer] has been one of the true champions of our dance community, in no small part due to her own artistry. The spirit of her work is visually and musically rich, fundamentally diverse, and deeply committed to social relevance — attributes she’s manifested on so many levels in a long and vital career. Rob Bailis, Former Artistic Director, ODC Theater

In the dance ecology of the Bay Area, Dance Brigade, and especially Krissy Keefer, play such vital role. I can’t think of anyone else as fierce about what she believes in, what she cares about, and how she creates work to reflect those beliefs. In many ways she is our conscience when we might waver in the face of budget cuts and the endless struggle to get money to do work. Because she is so strong about this herself, I really count on her to keep us honest around our vision and our integrity of purpose. Kenneth J. Foster, Executive Director, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Krissy Keefer’s life energy is totally invested in professional, community-based, inclusive, and affordable feminist art. She has consistently supported women artists for over 30 years. It is no easy task to maintain an artistic vision and a financially secure organization, and to be able to deal with the high volume of traffic that is required to run a studio anywhere, much less in the most expensive city in the U.S. That piece of real estate at 24th and Mission has always been a port in the storm for the dance community. Mary Alice Fry, Artistic Director, Footloose Dance Company and Shotwell Studios

What makes Dance Brigade’s work special and important is how they take on the big issues facing the world and then find a way to make us laugh. Krissy Keefer is the Jon Stewart of the dance world! Krissy’s perspective, passion and tenacity are testament to the company’s longevity; that a Dance Brigade show dealing with war, greed, or even addressing violence towards women, can be entertaining is powerful. Krissy, in her wonderfully brash and focused manner, has the ability to remind us that we are citizen-dancers, that we need to participate, and that big messages, abstract dance and the hope for social change can happily co-exist on stage. Wayne Hazzard, Executive Director, Dancers’ Group

Dance Brigade’s legacy in the Bay Area is huge. By not allowing their company to become mainstream, they paved the way for alternate companies to see that there is a place at the table for work that is not shiny, slick and influenced by institutional homogenization. Dance Brigade has demonstrated by example that contemporary dance can be messy, political, and uncomfortable. By blurring the lines between politics and art, a whole new generation of politicized artists have been given permission to emerge and that has infused Bay Area dance with a lot of new ideas and energy. Joe Landini, Director, The Garage

Krissy and the Dance Brigade have been at the forefront of bringing political concerns into the theater. They have paved the way, both artistically and practically, for dozens of politically engaged artists who may or may not identify with their work. To me, Dance Mission is a physical embodiment of the importance of the Dance Brigade’s values of democracy. It’s not easy to separate the artistic and the community legacy of Dance Brigade’s work; it’s the combination that makes them so powerful. Jessica Robinson Love, Executive and Artistic Director, CounterPULSE

When Dance Brigade emerged in San Francisco in the mid-’80s as an outgrowth of the nearly-mythical Wallflower Order, they brought together a number of tendencies that were already percolating in the dance community: using dancers of widely varying body types, introducing world music (sometimes performed by the dancers), spoken word, and text narrative, circus and vaudeville tricks and, always, no-holds-barred political content. Dance Brigade inspired other companies to be braver through their example of what might be called gonzo feminist dance. Krissy and her dancers and collaborators took these disparate influences and turned them into powerhouse performances where the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Kary Schulman, Director, Grants for the Arts. (Compiled by Rita Felciano)

GOLDIES 2011: Katie Faulkner

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2011: Katie Faulkner

GOLDIES In 2005, in deference to the shaky ground we walk on, choreographer Katie Faulkner dubbed her new ensemble little seismic dance company. For an upstart, it seemed an oddly modest name — considering the waves she’d been making, something grander might have been more appropriate. But then that’s not Faulkner’s style. Her choreography doesn’t shout; it grabs you because her dances are full of surprises, finely crafted, and have a strong sense of identity.

Most exhilarating about Faulkner’s work is its sense of adventure. You never know what this North Carolina-born choreographer will dive into next. She thrives on intimacy — a solo physicalizing the process of dying in the Road Ahead — as well as the messy process of choreographing by committee. She created Terra Incognita, Revisited, shown last summer at the 2011 WestWave Dance Festival, with colleagues Kara Davis, Manuelito Biag, and Alex Ketley. For We Don’t Belong Here, a recent commission for the Dancers’ Group ONSITE series, she needed 20 dancers. So she held “very stringent auditions,” explaining, “I needed people who could hold their own and also contribute to the process.”

Perhaps Faulkner developed her appetite for the untried through an early interest in theater. An inspiring teacher in a playwriting class encouraged her to “take myself more seriously as a creative person.” She never did finish that play, opting for what she thought dance would give her over the precision of language: “a sense of looseness and abstraction.” But it’s not by chance that she has worked so often with former ODC dancer Private Freeman, an intensely physical and dramatic performer.

Perhaps joining AXIS Dance Company straight out of Mills College (she earned her MFA in 2002) also created possibilities a more conventional company might not have offered. Not only did Faulkner’s four years with AXIS challenge her to perform a wide range of repertoire, she also watched experienced choreographers step into what was for them virgin territory. It was at AXIS that Faulkner had her first taste of choreography. The intricate, yet crystal-clear Decorum looked at sibling rivalry within a constrained environment. In it she remembered having grown up in a community “where there was a right and wrong way to look and to be.”

Faulkner, who calls her own work “imagistic,” also has made intriguing dance films and will, if she has anything to say about it, do more. The duo Loom (2008) is set on San Francisco’s rooftops; for the quartet High Tide (2006) she traveled to the edge of the continent. Up next is a still vague project about multiple perspectives. She might want to take a look at Rashomon.

GOLDIES 2011: San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2011: San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest

GOLDIES “Five, six, seven, eight!” Micaya — teacher, choreographer, and unstoppable producer of the San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest (the 2011 edition is coming up Nov. 18-20 at the Palace of Fine Arts) — is counting off for her beginners’ class at ODC. Some of these Saturday-morning devotees are skinny; others are not. One has gray hair, most do not; some are dancers, while some … “They are all dancers. We are all dancers,” Micaya (who often calls herself “Mama”) insists after class.

There is something, perhaps not exactly maternal, but definitely loving and encompassing about the way she talks about dance in general and the Hip Hop DanceFest in particular. No matter whether she is, as now, in worn pedal pushers and thick-bottom sneakers or, as emcee at the Palace, in five-inch heels and a tight skirt barely longer than the heels are high — one way or the other, you get a sense that she feels a personal responsibility for the dancers in her life.

As a producer Micaya is a phenomenon. She has single-handedly moved hip-hop from the studio and community hall to a proscenium theater, giving it widespread recognition and enthusiastic audiences. Uniquely, she has done so by honoring the art as a social activity and in its more theatrically evolved expressions. On Micaya’s stage there is room for the recreational dancer and the professional. Significantly, she refers to all of them as “companies,” preferring that term to “crews” or “troupes.” “It’s a matter of respect,” she insists.

Yet the Hip Hop DanceFest, now in its 13th year, started on a hunch. In the late 1980s, Micaya had just arrived from the South, a dirt poor single mom with her small son in tow. “I know what it means to live on food stamps,” she remembers. But she had two kinds of wealth: love for dance (ballet, Latin, modern, jazz, African, hip-hop) and an embracing attitude towards difference, something to which she credits her upbringing. Teaching hip-hop in San Francisco, she offered yearly recitals at Dance Mission. “They always sold out,” she remembers. So she started a festival, and “that’s when I found out how big and rich Bay Area hip-hop is.”

This year the festival had over 100 applicants, from as far away as Kenya and Uganda. Seventeen of them — local, national and international — made the cut. Yet Micaya is a still frustrated producer: so much good art, so little money. No matter, she’ll soon be back on the Palace of Fine Arts stage, pointing to the dancers and exhorting audiences to “give ’em love!”

Rhythm nations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Rhythm nations

DANCE Watched over by two pink carousel horses, a rainbow. and a big lotus flower, they sway, stomp, and slide even as they chant, clap, and body slap in increasingly complex rhythms. They are SlamDance, Keith Terry’s sextet of musician-dancers, and they are rehearsing their upcoming performance at the fourth International Body Music Festival, held this year at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Last year, the (free) festival took place in São Paulo, Brazil; next October it will happen (also free) in Istanbul, Turkey. “Free performances [are] something we could never do in this country,” Terry ruefully observes. Still, the plan is to have a local festival (2011 tickets start at $25) every other year.

Terry, who organized the first festival in 2008, started out as a percussionist. He was the first drummer for the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and he is a founding member of Berkeley’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya. So the beat has been in his body for a very long time — yet early in his career he changed from “a seated musician to a moving musician,” as he calls himself. Using one’s body as a musical instrument, he says, sometimes is called “body percussion” or “body drumming.” Terry prefers the term “body music” because it includes melodic and harmonic aspects as well as its rhythmic components. SlamDance performers, for instance, use their voices to percussive effect as well as in simple part-singing.

Using your body to make music is pretty basic. We all do it, perhaps starting as toddlers with patty-cake, progressing into clapping games at recess, and ending up as oldsters who play the spoons. Much of these practices go back to folkways rooted in ritualistic endeavors. But there are also innovations: the gumboot dance, for instance, was developed by South African miners early in the 20th century, while African American fraternities popularized a particular form of step-dancing.

Body music is both a communal practice with a sense of freedom even as it demands great discipline and precision. “That’s what makes it fun,” Terry explains. Often it integrates improvisation and fixed passages, not unlike what happens in both hip-hop and jazz.

Noticeable from a dance perspective is the SlamDancers’ slight sway in the torso. “It helps with the breathing,” Terry notes, though he was surprised to see how practices change from culture to culture.

“One of the things that fascinates me about these festivals is how differently these musicians, who come from all over the world, carry themselves. It was one of the most profound experiences with my first body music festival because we are, basically, all just clapping and stepping. It’s definitely a cultural thing. You put a French group next to a Brazilian one and you can immediately see the difference.”

One of the first groups Terry identified with as kindred spirits was Çudamani, an astounding troupe of male dancer-musicians from Bali. They perform kecak, a rhythmic, chanting-and-swaying “monkey dance” that originated in trance rituals. Six of its dancers bring new choreography as part of this year’s International Body Music Festival line-up, which features a total of eleven companies.

Others include the theatrical Cambuyón, from the Canary Islands, which integrates tap and hip-hop into other percussive forms, and Kantu Korpu, which draws on flamenco and tap to translate regional Greek music into motion. Both of these groups are making their US debut. KeKeÇa’s five performers interpret Turkish songs within Near Eastern movement traditions. Fernando Barba from Brazil draws from samba and maracatu; Danny “Slapjazz” Barber is a hambone virtuoso; the Las Vegas-based group Molodi pulls in theater and just about everything with a beat. A gentler soul is Quebec’s Éric Beaudry, who will also team up with a trio of Oakland step dancers.

 

INTERNATIONAL BODY MUSIC FESTIVAL

Fri/4-Sat/5, 8 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m., $25–$50

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF.

www.internationalbodymusicfestival.com

The right combination

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The right combination

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Deborah Slater Dance Theater celebrated its 20th anniversary last year; for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, 2011 is its 38th season. The two choreographers have had enviable careers both locally and nationally. By now they know what they are doing. Or do they? Are there roads not yet taken?

Talking with both of them on the eve of their latest premieres — Slater’s Night Falls October 21 at ODC Theater, Jenkins’ Light Moves November 3 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — it is striking about how enthusiastic they are about the unknown. At this point in the rehearsal process they have an idea where the new pieces are going, yet they are also conscious of how fragile, risky, and exciting this whole art-making endeavor still is — particularly when it involves new collaborators.

The two women have much experience working closely with dancers, writers, designers, and composers. They are particularly committed to soliciting, and acknowledging, the contributions that dancers make in developing the movement material. But here they are both stepping into unknown territory, pushing their processes into new dimensions.

In Night Slater takes on the subject of aging. It’s a particularly poignant topic for dancers who are considered over the hill by the time they are 40. As is her want, Slater has done her research. Besides doing a lot of reading, she hosted a series of get-togethers with women between 30 and 80 who discussed the subject from a kaleidoscope of perspectives — physical, emotional, social, psychological. They provided welcome information but also elevated the topic beyond the level of personal experience.

The biggest input, however, came from an old friend, playwright-director Julie Hébert, with whom Slater worked early in her career as a soloist. Though the two have never collaborated on a company project, they have had many fruitful conversations over the years. Hébert wrote the script for Night featuring a heroine, Peregrine, who (Hébert and Slater agreed) would be realized by two male and four female performers. Each one, says Slater, acts his or her own age.

Jenkins’ new collaborator is visual artist Naomie Kremer, whose paintings and multi-media work she has admired for years. Jenkins recognized its theatrical potential when she saw Kremer’s video set for the 2008 Berkeley Opera production of Bluebeard’s Castle. In a preview last year, the video environment for Light looked sometimes saturated with color but airy and always luminous — in part, perhaps, because video depends on direct, and not reflected light.

Collaborating with Kremer provided Jenkins, who calls herself hopelessly monolingual, with the opportunity of learning a “new language.” Kremer imposes strong visual rhythms and cadences on what she does; her art dances even on a flat canvass. So to create a piece about the trajectory of daylight as it changes while traveling from dawn to dusk, the two artists had to juxtapose two different kinetic languages.

So what are the particular challenges that Slater and Jenkins are facing in working with these new collaborators? For Slater it is the fact that only one of her performers is a trained dancer. Over the years, she always worked with dancers who express themselves well in words and movement. Actors, apparently, want to use movement on a one-to-one basis with words. The two mediums are different, Slater says, “but they are learning. It’s all coming together.”

Her fellow choreographer has experienced a similar shift in her idea-sharing process: “I have learned to be much more articulate and precise in communicating my observations,” Jenkins says. Night Falls and Light Moves sound like they just might be companion pieces. *

NIGHT FALLS

Fri/21-Sat/22 and Oct. 27-29, 8 p.m.; Sun/23 and Oct. 30, 2 p.m., $17-$20

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.deborahslater.org

LIGHT MOVES

Nov. 3-5, 8 p.m., $25-$30

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

The right track

Andrew Lam
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The right track

DANCE Have you noticed that San Francisco is changing for the better? No, I’m not talking poor and homeless people being given services they need (I wish that were the case) — I’m talking public art.

The concept used to refer to murals, airport exhibits, sculptures in downtown plazas, and those arrows that would periodically pop up on mostly ugly buildings. But dance — unless you count parades and demonstrations as a form of dance — certainly wasn’t part of beautifying the spaces we all live in. But today, dancers are taking to the street and other public arenas, and they look good.

Perhaps it all began in 1995 when Joanna Haigood and her Zaccho Dance Theatre troupers bounced off the Ferry Building’s massive clock, daring it to stop working. Last year they ceremoniously danced down Market Street, memorializing the exodus of middle-class African American residents from San Francisco. Jo Kreiter’s Flyaway Productions has taken to alleys, danced on cranes, and dangled off the mural-covered Women’s Building.

Lovely about this trend is that all these performances were free, and audiences could come upon them almost accidentally. Though still modest in scope, dance is becoming part of our urban environment. “Jewels in the Square” is a weekly dance series in Union Square that runs April through October; the Rotunda Series (first Friday of the month) brings dance into a glorious public space, City Hall. The Mark Foehringer Dance Project curates “Dancing in the Park,” a Golden Gate Park festival during National Dance Week in April, and Mint Plaza seems to have become the latest open-air dance stage for the late-summer Central Market Arts Festival.

But credit for the longest running commitment to taking dance to the people belongs to Kim Epifano’s Epiphany Productions, whose Trolley Dances mark an annual celebration of public transit and public dance. For the eighth year, and for the price of a Muni fare, people can board a streetcar — or “trolley,” as they are called in San Diego, where the event originated — and take a ride to be entertained by some of San Francisco’s finest.

Epifano is an artist with flying hair, unbounded enthusiasm, and a firm belief that if something needs to be done, she can do it. This includes bringing out the creative spark in refugees in Oakland, or developmentally challenged adults in San Francisco, or, for that matter, young dancers whom she set loose in a Mexicali bar. So moving the San Francisco bureaucracy to grant her the various permits needed for this festival is, apparently, child’s play.

The minute Epifano encountered Trolley Dances in Southern California, she knew she wanted to bring it to San Francisco. (“It was fun and it was free,” she remembers.) Over the years, in addition to robust audiences, Trolley Dances has attracted a veritable who’s who of local choreographers — Janice Garrett, Deborah Slater, Joe Goode, Sue-Li Jue, Yannis Adoniou, and Sara Shelton Mann among them.

This weekend, catch a glimpse of Jody Lomask on a seven-foot cube, and Salsamania on the sixth floor of the San Francisco Public Library. KT Nelson will preview a section of Transit: A Vertical Life, in which she celebrates what she calls “urban humanity.” A bike that turns into a bench will be included.

In addition to seeing a panoply of artists — a total of seven this time around — Trolley Dances opens opportunities to visit less-familiar pockets of San Francisco. I had never traveled all the way down the Embarcadero to the Caltrain station until Trolley Dances took me there. This year, Epifano had her own eye-opener. “After all these years of living here, I didn’t even know about West Portal,” she admits — which is where this year’s journey ends.

 

SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES 2011

Sat/15-Sun/16, every 45 minutes from 11 a.m.-2:45 p.m., free with Muni fare ($2)

Tours depart San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin, SF

(415) 226-1139

www.epiphanydance.org

From an epic, a classic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
From an epic, a classic

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE What makes watching the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dido and Aeneas such a satisfying — and ultimately profound — experience? It’s really simple: give a story of love and war to a poet, who creates a rhythmically and imagistically suggestive libretto, which then gets into the hands of a genius composer, and finally ends up with Mark Morris, who just happens to be a great choreographer and company director. That’s it.

Morris created Dido in Brussels in 1989, where the Opera de la Monnaie had everything he needed: a budget for production, support for a large group of dancers, and the freedom do what he wanted. That experience decisively shaped the 33-year-old choreographer and put him on the world stage to which the controversy surrounding the premiere probably did its part.

By casting the Sorceress as Dido’s darker side — and having the characters interpreted by the same dancer — Morris injected an intriguing Freudian note, though it added little to the tragedy. However, it gave Morris, a superb dancer, the role of his life. He did the part until 2000. In his company’s performance at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Sept. 16-18, he put his stamp on the production by conducting the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale (performing Henry Purcell’s 17th century score) in the pit. He did it well — not surprising, since he’s renowned for his musicality.

In this incarnation of Dido and Aeneas, Amber Star Merkens dances the double role convincingly, making it her own, though she doesn’t have Morris’ solid physique and bone-deep expressivity. You couldn’t help but see Morris in the jaunty lift of her chin and the way she placed her hands. As a Sorceress, throwing her arms up in mock desperation at the antics of her fellow witches, Merkens becomes every inch the aging Madam in a roadside whorehouse.

Opposite Merkens, Domingo Estrada Jr. gave Aeneas just a touch of vanity and self-involvement. He seemed very young.

But it’s not only the leads who need to switch emotional gears back and forth; the ensemble of courtiers, witches, and soldiers has to follow suit. Despite some initial hiccups, Morris’ dancers did themselves proud.

What continues to surprise in this remarkable work — certainly one of Morris’ finest, if not his greatest — is the economy of means with which he weaves this tale, drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, of the outsized passion and grief of Dido, Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Founder of Rome. The dancers wear black tops and skirts except for Aeneas, who is topless. Robert Bordo’s set consists of two benches and a washed-out curtain that looks like it might have belonged to a traveling theater group.

Though Morris’ vocabulary includes some of his more literal responses to the music that (as a more mature choreographer) he now pretty much foregoes, the depth of his imagination is breathtaking. He plants the legs even as the arms fly out as far as the body can reach. He draws on Martha Graham’s use of the ground, Irish folk dancing, and ballet’s toe work, and makes them his own. The dances, whether in strict unisons or opposing and interlocking patterns, are stenciled into space.

Most unusual is the way Morris infuses Dido with a sense of absence, of negation. We see the dancers in half-profile or with their backs to us. Even the witches cover their eyes. When Aeneas arrives, Dido turns away. In their love duet, he holds her hand, yet looks over his other outstretched hand across the ocean. It is as if the passion and pain were too much for us to witness.

Much like a Greek tragedy, Dido proclaims a sense of order and restraint that is disturbed but ultimately restored. But at what price. At the end of her lament — Purcell at his most lyrical — Dido, with her arms outstretched, lies on the bench that became her bier. Her retinue processes out two-by-two except for the Second Woman (Rita Donahue). She looks at Belinda (Maile Okamura), her lover and Dido’s faithful confidante. Then she turns and leaves. Alone. At that moment the heroic and the human became one.

Fighting to be free

Andrew Lam
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0
Fighting to be free

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This past weekend, an unlikely double bill once again proved how fertile the Bay Area soil is for dancers’ imaginations. FACT/SF’s Pretonically Oriented v.3 was steeped in critical theory yet physically grounded. Drawing on local history, Lenora Lee Dance’s Reflections offered a window into self-assertion. While employing Asian American images — martial arts and lion dancing — the work resonated beyond its specific cultural context. Both works were developed during summer residencies at CounterPULSE.

“Pretonic,” a program note explained, refers to the unstressed (“pre”) syllable which precedes a stressed one (“tonic) in a word. Charles Slender used this linguistic precept to fold his rehearsal process into the actual piece. While his trio of exceptionally focused dancers — James Graham, Erin Kraemer, and Catherine Newman — performed variations of material they had accessed through free-writing, we also watched and listened to streamed videos, including Slender at his most slyly professorial, of the rehearsal material that had gone into the making of Pretonically. These layers of information sometimes looked as solid as what happened in real time, sometimes as evanescent as memory floating by.

The idea of conjoining process and product is intriguing. Pretonically could prove utterly absorbing. Watching the trio in one corner of the stage in front of videos taken in exactly the same spot (but depicting different movements) suggested a fascinating sense of simultaneity. Listening to Slender’s voice while his face on the wall clearly spoke different words created a disconnect between two modes of communication.

Toward the end, just as the work seemed to have run its course, the dancers returned and went into a retrograde mode, performing some of their material backwards. It looked as if someone had pushed the reverse button, and they had joined their own selves in a different reality.

At 40 minutes, however, Pretonically could not sustain itself. Once you understood the complex structure, the piece needed to communicate beyond what it became. Like so much conceptual art, the idea behind it often proved more intriguing than its physical realization.

Having said that, the dancers were mesmerizing by the sheer force of their presence. Moving glacially, they inexorably focused on something ungraspable. Perhaps Kraemer’s energy originated from the bottom of her spine, Graham lived off percussive lines, and, though ground-hogging, Newman fixated on the above. Slender is lucky to have dancers as excellent as these; they could run circles around most Butoh practitioners.

Lee’s fine Reflections also benefited from excellent dancers. Translating to the stage the difficulties of retaining or creating one’s identity in an unwelcoming environment is a theme that runs through much of contemporary dance and theater. Lee has previously examined the topic with her Chinese American background in mind; she based 2010’s Passages on her grandmother’s life. In Reflections she strikes a fiercer note as she examines the ferocious, even brutal strength required for self-assertion. A male narrator’s voice movingly personalized the struggle of escaping the bondage of being “the good son.”

Lee made a brilliant choice in enlisting two martial arts group, Kei Lun Martial Arts and Enshin Karate, South San Francisco Dojo. They were the warriors who fought each other in the “cold streets of Chinatown,” but also embodied the ongoing struggle within. Raymond Fong, who is as fine an actor as he is at practicing karate, became Reflections’ everyman. Lee’s mixing of her own choreography with pure martial arts worked well; seeing the real thing onstage (and not often-vacuous “martial arts inspired moves”) was thrilling. At the same these performers looked more nuanced than they might otherwise. Weakest was the choreography for the two women characters, Marina Fukushima as the unattainable dream and Lee herself as a compassionate woman warrior.

Making fine use of a lion dance, including bamboo lion heads that imprisoned, Lee strung together the work’s seven scenes rather straightforwardly. Weaving them more tightly together and including better transitions might strengthen Reflections‘ backbone in future performances.

Turning the tide

Andrew Lam
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0
Turning the tide

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Joan Lazarus is one determined woman. This month, WestWave Dance celebrates its 20th anniversary. WestWave originated in 1991 as SummerFest by choreographer Cathleen Murphy; Lazarus joined her three years later, and the two women ran it together until Murphy moved on.

A few months ago Lazarus made noises about perhaps calling it quits. She was frustrated because in all the years of curating these annual menus of contemporary, often brand-new, choreography, “I could not make it work,” she says. Audiences remained small, budgets smaller.

From the beginning, Summerfest/WestWave had a clear idea of its role within the panoply of Bay Area dance. Most important was offering opportunities to choreographers who may not be on other presenters’ radar screens and who didn’t have the cash — or energy — to self-produce. The application process has always been wide open. This year, for instance, Lazarus programmed three unknown-to-her choreographers simply on the basis of the video they submitted. “I was intrigued by their work,” she explains.

It was imperative to present each choreographer under the best circumstances, which meant a professional presentation — lighting, sound, tech — in a professional setting, like the Cowell or ODC theaters. It was also important to create visibility, which usually translated into getting reviews. “It was only in year seven or eight that we started getting reviewed,” Lazarus remembers. “That’s when we noticed a tremendous jump in people who wanted to be in.” Still, the festival barely scraped by. Every year it was touch and go.

Lazarus sounds newly invigorated about starting another decade for this problem child of local dance that, nonetheless, has given many a choreographer — Katie Faulkner, Ben Levy, and Kara Davis among them — a push up the professional ladder. So what happened?

An experienced local presenter Lazarus consulted with told her that what she did didn’t work because it couldn’t be done. Audiences, she was told, will not attend contemporary performances on successive nights, so forget about trying to run this type of program as a festival. She should also forget about preferring world premieres (something Lazarus admits she was “prejudiced toward”) and insist instead that the artists present the best pieces they have. “You choose the artists based on their previous works and then let them make the decision on what they want to show,” she recalls from the conversation.

Last year — by programming WestWave on three monthly Monday nights — Lazarus took a first step in rectifying the situation. The overall quality of the three evenings turned out to be more than respectable.

For the 20th anniversary season she expanded the format. Evenings of solos, duets, trios, and more will again be shown on Monday nights: Aug. 15, Sept. 12, and Oct. 10 at ODC Theater.

This month, Lazarus wanted to feature some of the artists for whom WestWave had been an important early step. This weekend (July 22-24) at Z Space, she offered Seiwert — in 2007, WestWave had hosted her first full-evening concert — another program along the same lines. But Seiwert demurred, wanting her im’ij-re dancers to grow beyond her own choreography. So with Lazarus’ assent, Seiwert commissioned works from Matthew Neenan (Philadelphia), Adam Houghland (Cincinnati), and Susan Roemer (San Francisco).

For the second July program (July 28-29), the artists Lazarus selected asked to co-choreograph a single work. Lazarus told Manuelito Biag, Davis, Faulkner, and Alex Ketley to go ahead. Since each of them has a well-developed independent voice, this collaboration could prove fascinating. Later that weekend (July 30), Viktor Kabaniaev and Tina Kay Bohnstedt — Diablo Ballet’s strong in-house-nurtured choreographers — present an evening of their own work. Why? “Because they have never had one, and it’s about time,” Lazarus says.

One more change. Lazarus quit her daytime jobs so that she won’t have to steal an hour here and an hour there, often at midnight, to work on WestWave. “We’ll see how it goes, ” she laughs, ever the optimist.

WESTWAVE DANCE

July 22–31, 8 p.m., $18–$25

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

Aug. 15, Sept. 12, and Oct. 10, 8 p.m., $18–$25

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

1-866-55-TICKETS

www.westwavedancefestival.org

Don’t fence him in

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Don’t fence him in

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE One of the most fascinating aspects of the world of dance studies has been the split that has taken place in the last few decades between dance history and dance theory. To oversimplify, the first concerns itself with discussing works in terms of their formal values of aesthetics; the second, influenced by cultural studies, prefers to look at pieces as social constructs.

Of course, there is an overlap between the two fields, and while I appreciated this new way of thinking about dance as a mind expander, I also deeply resented what I considered the devaluing of individual artistic achievement.

Good news: dancers themselves have come to the rescue. Immersed in cultural, gender, race, and other sociological studies — the lingua franca of today’s academy — they have started making works in which concepts like ambiguity, perception and reality, performance and identity, and direct and mediated experience are the subject matter, not a byproduct, of their work-making concerns. Some of these approaches — such as Jess Curtis’ ongoing Symmetry Project Studies, for instance — have yielded astounding results. Or Keith Hennessy’s mashing together of sociopolitical issues into novel form-giving approaches. Even at the heart of Joe Goode’s work, though he is in many ways a more traditional artist, lie principles of uncertainty and multiplicity on a constantly shifting ground.

It’s probably no accident that Miguel Gutierrez, a prominent member of this group of artists, started his career in the Joe Goode Performance Group. Gutierrez, now a New York City resident with a growing international reputation from France to Australia, is bringing his most recent piece, HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE, to San Francisco. Clever that man he is, he recently refused to describe this solo in an interview with the Dancers Group’s indance publication.

Gutierrez last performed in San Francisco in 2008, when he brought his Bessie Award-winning Retrospective Exhibitionist/Difficult Bodies to what is now Z Space. It consisted of a solo for himself and a trio for Anna Azrieli, Michelle Boule, and Abby Crain. Although the trio had its own merits, it was Gutierrez’s appropriately-titled solo that communicated as a gutsy, spectacularly in-your-face piece of dance theater. Retrospective intrigued because of newness, intoxicated because of its intensity, and overall impressed because it was a complete statement. The questions Gutierrez asked about identity, perception, and the nature of performance may not have been that novel or original, but the way he framed them within a reshaped theatrical context made them so.

Wriggling lasciviously on a full-length mirror, he attempted to devour and slip into his own image. It was simultaneously pathetic and touching. Putting side-by side a video of himself as a high school pretty boy with two girls and his current, lived-in body as a gay man on stage put both identities in question.

In another section, Gutierrez laconically read aloud answers he had given in a videotaped interview while we watched the original on a monitor. What was more true: the artifice of his aping himself or the fake spontaneity of the television image?

Gutierrez appears in San Francisco as part of the Garage’s Verge festival, where kindred spirits Laura Arrington, Jorge de Hoyos, and Jesse Hewit will open for him. Garage director Joe Landini is presenting Gutierrez because he wants to encourage this type of performance practice, but also because he is an old friend. “Miguel used to run that [Methuselah-age] elevator at 50 Oak Street,” he remembers — up to Lines Ballet’s studios and down to the basement swimming pool. 

HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE Fri/8–Sun/10, 8 p.m., $15. Garage, 975 Howard, SF. www.brownpapertickets.com

 

Ready for takeoff

Andrew Lam
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Ready for takeoff

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Life partners running a dance company together is rare, and when it happens the couple usually keeps responsibilities distinct. In ballet, Gerald Arpino and Robert Joffrey did it for many years; Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary are making a go of it in Los Angeles. In modern dance, it is simply unheard of. Modern dance companies are one-man or one-woman affairs. But no longer: Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton have broken the mold.

A couple for the last 15 years, they plunged into choreographing together in 2007 with the splendidly original String Wreck. In 2009, they raised the ante with The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories, which used a movement choir — something Moulton had perfected in his Precision Ball Passing works — of student performers and Garrett’s professional dancers. Now they have refined that model.

The exhilarating The Experience of Flight in Dreams was a wondrous meditation on the idea of being liberated from the boundaries and restrictions — physical and intellectual — that tie us down. With Experience, Garrett and Moulton have, in fact, taken flight. This new work tightly integrates the dancers and the choir into a propulsive whole without infringing on the essential identities between the two groups.

The choir was used ingeniously. Their many hands allowed the dancers to fly or float or swoop and dive. With their fingers, they delineated individual portraits. But they also became obstacles to be overcome and roads to be traveled. At one point supine on the floor, they were the dead calling out to dancer Nol Simonse.

The choreography for the five professional dancers was so fragmented and high-pitched that the relative calm of the choir’s activity created balance. Their unisons were also much less regimented; they were alive and filled with breath.

There were dreamers of many kinds in Experience. Dudley Flores was a loner who, encased by supporting arms, periodically woke up and tried to reach for the beyond. He finally succeeded at the end when, carried above the heads of everyone, he became a living image of transcendence — though it wasn’t an image I found convincing.

There was also the petite dynamo Tanya Bello and Yu-Mien Wu in spitfire encounters of kicks, rolls, and lock-steps. When carried aloft by the choir, Bello and Wu looked as if they had sunk into pillows and seemed slightly surprised at what happened to them. Wu is a stunning newcomer with a bravura elevation and leaps that hang in the air forever. He didn’t, however, need such a long solo to prove the point.

Simonse and Carolina Czechowska’s duet had a twitchy but distanced intensity to it as they tried to make contact. Simonse’s dream was a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake up. Like a wounded soldier who comes home, he couldn’t open his fists, no matter how hard he tried. Carried out by the choir, he looked like he had been crucified, or was a carcass. Always an intense artist, he outdid himself in this show.

But not all of Experience‘s dreams were lofty and profound. Some were earthy and simple, like a high-spirited social encounter to some gypsy music. Or Flores and Simonse in a hilarious, gesture-driven meet in which they went at each other, as a friend observed, like two roosters. Or perhaps Bello who, for the heck of it, interrupted a solemn proceeding with a running, screaming fit that, no surprise here, became infectious.

In the penultimate section, the choir hoisted and lowered big panels of fabric that created billowing waves the dancers had to pass through (not unlike the worshippers did in the “Wade in the Water” section of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations). Perhaps it was meant as a transition to the finale. It didn’t seem to make much sense.

Garrett and Moulton work well together; they also choose excellent collaborators. Foremost among them was group of eight top-flight musicians who, under the guidance of Jonathan Russell, played one of the most deliciously appropriate dance scores that has been heard in these parts in a long time (along with the absolute pleasure of having live music). Oana Botez Ban’s red and black palette for the costumes worked well, as did Jacob Petrie’s supportive lighting design.

Around the bay, around the world

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Around the bay, around the world

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE “When one door closes, another opens” is the kind of cliché that drives you batty when you’ve been fired, or your lover has literally showed you the door. But once in a while even clichés prove their right to exist. Take the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, which last year faced homelessness when Caltrans requisitioned the Palace of Fine Arts’ parking lot for the duration of the Doyle Drive reconstruction. With poor access to MUNI and no parking lot, EDF had no choice but to start a frantic search for another venue. The crisis challenged them to rethink a format that has worked for them since 1989 — potentially very risky, because, to quote another cliché: “Don’t mess with success.”

With a need to move from one temporary shelter to another, EDF took the opportunity to reshape its offerings in a way that might yet prove beneficial to both audiences and performers.

For one group of dancers, however, this year’s EDF is a homecoming. For the first time in more than 200 years, dancers and musicians from the Rumsen Ohlone Tribe will perform on their own land. Decimated by disease and dispersed because of persecution and discrimination, most live in a diaspora in their own country. But they did not, as popular history and the federal government would have it, die out; the tribe is 2,000 members strong. Many, including tribal chief Tony Cerda have settled in the Pomona area. But their ancestors are buried below what is now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

On Friday, June 3, in the presence of tribal dancers and musicians, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee presented Cerda with the EDF’s annual Malonga Casquelourd Lifetime Achievement Award. The homecoming festivities continue on June 18, when a half-dozen other California tribes join the Ohlones for an all-day “California Indian Big Time Gathering” at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Two other aspects of this year’s program deserve special attention. June 11 and 12, eight companies will perform at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley for the first time. For dancers used to showing their work in community halls, stepping onto a generous professional stage (and in front of a potential audience of 2,000) will be both a challenge and a delight. In January, EDF held its auditions at Zellerbach to an enthusiastic response from the primarily East Bay crowd. The word clearly had gotten out about how much fun these auditions are. In previous years at the Palace, the events regularly sold out.

The Zellerbach lineup aims to offer a similarly broad perspective of world dance. The eight companies will present taiko and Bharatanatyam contextualizing each other; African music and dance as practiced in Benin and Ghana; ancient belly dancing with a modern twist; and theatrically appropriate rituals from the Philippines and Bali. It also includes a barefoot version of flamenco, dances from a multicultural Veracruz, and, to top off the evening, a premiere for 100 celebrating Tahitian culture.

This year’s other innovation relates to performances June 19, 25, and 26 at YBCA’s Forum, where audience members will have the opportunity to enter the world of these dances. It makes sense. Culturally-rooted dance is integral to a community’s sense of well-being. It enhances milestones — courting, funerals, the changing of seasons, coming-of-age ceremonies, and thanksgiving practices.

These dances are not primarily meant to entertain — although of course they do — and many are participatory. When divorced from their contexts and put on a proscenium stage, something is inevitably lost. The Forum performances will restore some of the communal aspect of world dance. Each program offers a different quartet of companies that will perform a short piece, then invite the audience to join them in one aspect of their practice. You can choose among Balinese, Polish, square, Filipino, capoeira or African dance.

Or how about a piece of poppy seed cake served on a sword?

SAN FRANCISCO ETHNIC DANCE FESTIVAL

Through July 3, $18–$58

Various venues

www.sfethnicdancefestival.org

 

Dancing in the light

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Dancing in the light

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The Ka-Ren people, who live on the border between Thailand and Burma and who have never recognized these political divisions, are known for their indigenous jewelry-design traditions. They didn’t get a gemologist in Ledoh, though they did get a dealer in a different kind of jewel — dances — and not because of a well-developed plan. Rather, it was serendipitous.

Performer-choreographer Ledoh — one name only, as is common among the Ka-Ren — came to this country at age 11 when his father realized that the family, although relatively well-off economically, might not have much of future in Burma. (Ledoh’s preferred name for his country; it is also called Myanmar.) The boy found the contrast between “garden parties and embassy events” and “having to take care of my sisters and slug to the Laundromat in the snow” striking, to say the least. But he dove into his American life, focusing his energy on visual arts and athletics. Dance, and butoh in particular, was nowhere near his horizon. But the Ka-Ren culture was ingrained into his DNA.

After college, on his way to Bangkok to study gemology — “I wanted to help my people,” Ledoh explains in a post-rehearsal conversation — his life took an unexpected turn. During a stopover in Kyoto, a friend took him to a butoh concert by one of the Japan’s great practitioners, Katsura Kan. Ledoh was hooked, and an intended three-month stay in Asia turned into three years.

This weekend sees the premiere of another of Ledoh’s full-evening works, Suicide Barrier: secure in our illusion, choreographed and performed by himself and dancers Iu-Hui Chua and Tammy Ho.

Even though he has lived in San Francisco since 1998, Ledoh has stayed on the margins of Bay Area dance. For one thing, he works very slowly. You can expect about one piece every two years; in the swirl of local dance-making, their impact has been low-key until recently. He gets an idea, he explains, “and then I crawl under a rock and come out when it’s time to do so.” The name of his company, Salt Far, says it all. Salt is the result of crystallization when “nothing is left except the essence of what there was.” His most recent work started as Signature Required: Life During Wartime, a response to 9/11 that evolved into ColorMeAmerica, a meditation on a personal journey through a strange land. It took him two-and-a-half years to complete.

While the influence of butoh is unmistakable in the choreographer’s work, the label doesn’t quite stick. Borrowing a definition from film, he calls what he does “butoh vérité.” He wants to pierce the genre’s trappings — glacial speed, bodily distortions, and white body paint — and focus the attention on the reality underlying the external phenomena.

Ledoh also works out his pieces into the smallest details. Nothing is left to chance. They are tightly structured multimedia events evincing a hands-on approach to integrating dance, sound, and visual elements. For Suicide he is again working with composer Matthew Ogaz and videographer-media artist Perry Hallinan.

All these aspects of Ledoh’s artistic temperament have earned him the admiration of ODC Theater director Rob Bailis. ODC Theater, in collaboration with Circuit Network, is producing Suicide. “Frankly, Ledoh is a genius,” Bailis says. “He is extremely diligent, lives a good long time with a subject, and comes to the table with a well-realized and courageous approach to a topic.”

Ledoh lives in Sonoma and San Francisco. His daughters, whom he had to take to their piano lessons between a rehearsal and this interview, live in SF. The eternal commute between the two places may well have sown the seeds for what has become Suicide. The Golden Gate Bridge Authority is considering installing a wall and a net to discourage jumpers. The intent may be to save lives but, in all likelihood, an ancillary purpose may be avoiding lawsuits. It’s a very fractured approach to seeing reality.

For Ledoh, this act of wall-building became an image of a self-deception that inevitably alienates us from full consciousness. For some, that blindness is hubris; for others, it means an inability to see the “other.” In his work, Ledoh tries to penetrate the false sense of reality and security that he observes everywhere in contemporary life. It’s in the dancer whom he sees only as a reflection thrown back by a mirror — and in the shopper who walks the aisles of a supermarket. He finds it even in the Ka-Ren, who, with the advent of ecotourism, “are now stuck in a game reserve of a natural forest.”

In a publicity shot, Ledoh is shown with a white flower stuck in his mouth. Is it a chrysanthemum, a funeral flower in many cultures? “It is a Gerbera daisy, and yes, it is a mourning flower for me,” he explains. The Ka-Ren grow them — for export.

Ledoh is not naïve about our ability to break through the walls we build around ourselves. He calls it “chasing our tail and never biting into it.” In his art, he tries to get as close as he can. Butoh, he says, is the means to “keep it honest, not to stylize,” which would distort the perspective. Working with the exquisite, ballet-trained Ho, he whispers images to her: “brush it away”; “reach for the apple.” These images, he later explains, are grasped by the mind that then has to let them sink inside the body. Gradually, Ho transforms herself into a vessel beyond what she thought she was. Then the choreographer encourages her to open and neutralize her eyes. When she no longer focuses, her eyes have become lenses through which we can look inside.

SUICIDE BARRIER: SECURE IN OUR ILLUSION

Fri/3-Sat/4, 8 p.m.; Sun/5, 7 p.m., $15–$18

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF (415) 863-9834 www.odctheater.org

Earthly creations, unearthly longings

Maria Poblet
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0
Earthly creations, unearthly longings

arts@sfbg.com

The San Francisco International Arts Festival’s model of presenting guest and local dancers side by side was initially designed to alleviate Bay Area artists’ concern that SFIAF might siphon off funding for their own work. Yet the format works artistically. The 2011 festival’s first week’s lineup of local and imported dance proved it. One-night stands at the Marines Memorial Theatre came from Israel’s Barak Marshall Company and Santa Fe’s Dancing Earth. From San Francisco, Hope Mohr Dance and FACT/SF shared evenings at Fort Mason.

Marshall is a Yemeni-Israeli American now primarily living in Israel. Apparently the 2010 Monger was influenced by servant-master dichotomies like those portrayed, most prominently, in the evergreen British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs. The work turned out to be a Kafkaesque film noir comedy that wore its desperation just barely covered by maids’ aprons and grooms’ suspenders. That the despot, a mysterious Mrs. Margaret, is a woman — Marshall calls her the Whore of Babylon — only heightened its impact. After the recent Middle East (and elsewhere) turmoil, it’s impossible not to see Monger as deeply political. Marshall first presents his 10 dancers wrapped in black, anxiously scanning the sky. He ends on the same pessimistic note.

Marshall’s variety show format separates Monger‘s acts with blackouts and punctuates them with the tinkling service bell. Both provided a welcome continuum, though most of the sections work individually. The servants scurried like road-runners; the emotionally temperature between them steadily increased like a boiler about to explode. Attempts at self-assertion, whether through love or violence, failed repeatedly. I saw a touch of Ohad Naharin — Marshall cut some of his teeth in Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company — in the hilarious hate- and gossip-mongering “upstairs” ladies. Spitting venom, they bobbed up like corks in the sea. Monger gained valuable support from the choreographer’s own exceptionally imaginative patchwork score.

I have, however, major concerns with the choreography. Although the extensive use of unisons, punctuated by gestural language, made intellectual sense, they pulled the piece down toward monotony.

What’s your idea of “Native American dance?” Stomping feet, flying fringe, and pounding drums? Not a trace of a powwow could be found in the excellently danced Of Bodies Of Elements by Dancing Earth’s 10 dancers (plus two babies).

Choreographed by Rulan Tangen and performed by members from diverse North American tribal cultures, Bodies included contributions from traditional practices, including a “Deer Dance” (by guest artist Jesus “Jacoh” Cortes) and a “Prayer Dance” (by Deollo Johnson), suspiciously looking like an Eagle Dance with strong elements from women’s fancy dances. But this is a thoroughly contemporary work with performers — men and women alike — whose athleticism and multifarious talents and training acknowledge the air as much as the ground under their feet.

Bodies is presented as a creation myth whose believers become alienated from the natural order but find their way back into it. The choreography sometimes doesn’t spell out the narrative that clearly, so the program notes help for those unfamiliar with indigenous American beliefs.

A small ritual sets the tone. A member of the local Ohlone tribe blessed the space the company had asked permission to perform in.

At 90 minutes, the two-act Bodies could be tightened, though I wouldn’t give up a second of the opening, which imagines the natural world — including a splendid tree — emerging from an inchoate mass. Moving from hunter-gatherers to agricultural life was economically and clearly presented, though the water choreography for the women felt vapid. But Raul Trujillo’s “Cage Dance,” which used an elaborate double contraption (one part of it a hoop skirt) to indicate various forms of imprisonment, missed its target. The dancers physically struggled to get in and out of it — surely not the intent.

The second act included a haunting Ghost Dance. It was danced with traditional bobbing steps against a wailing wall (video by Alejandro Quintana) that documented the destruction humankind manages to inflict on itself. Perhaps Tangen’s idea that a deracinated people experiencing degradation can still hear Earth’s heartbeat in contemporary urban rhythms is overly romantic. But it’s a lovely idea to consider and made for some impressive hip-hop dancing.

Putting Hope Mohr and Charles Slender on the same double bill paired two artists who are relatively new in town — Mohr since 2007, Slender since 2008. They have nothing in common except that they clothe their formal concerns with clear expressive intent. For Mohr, this has sometimes meant working in tandem with community and professional dancers. Slender has elaborate theatrical trappings that he seems to be constantly reworking at his disposal.

Mohr’s world premiere, the deep-ringing Plainsong, was a fragile mediation for a sturdy performer, the renowned Aleta Hayes. The subject is the mythic Penelope, waiting for Odysseus to return. Katrina Rodabaugh wove-unraveled Plainsong‘s exquisite backdrop. Every meaning, every gesture of this 20-minute solo was suspended in ambiguity. In Hayes’ touch, the pile of wool became bloody entrails. She enclosed her space with a fragile thread — to imprison or to protect herself? With vigorously shoveling hands, she could have been unearthing or burying something. Her deep, almost masculine voice surged from inside her guts. The full-of-potential Plainsong is one of Hope’s finest works yet; she may want to consider refining it in the future.

Slender’s mildly witty Consumption Series is a chameleon that adapts to wherever his intrepid FACT/SF troupers take it. It’s a piece — this is the third time I’ve seen it — that looks at obsessions (food, sex, power) and envelops them with pseudo-baroque accoutrements and a slyly ballet-based vocabulary and its aberrations. The costumes and the ideas are beginning to look ragged; it’s time to retire both. 

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

Through June 5

Various venues

www.sfiaf.org

 

Kinetic changes

Maria Poblet
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0
Kinetic changes

arts@sfbg.com

In 1810, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans were divided between white and black (free and slave). In 1910 “mulatto” and “other” were added. Last year’s respondents had the choice among 15 racial categories, in addition to a space for ones not listed. Assigning people to predetermined slots is becoming so complicated — and controversial — that it’s hard not to wonder what the census form will look like in 2050 when more than 50 percent of the population will be “mixed.”

It’s a question that Raissa Simpson grapples with in her new dance installation piece Mixed Messages, running at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (May 21-28). Choreographed for the six dancers of her Push Dance Company and youngsters from the 3rd Street Youth Center and Clinic and beyond, the work uses a sound score by El Kool Kyle that includes comments from multiracial people who face the perennial question, from others and from within themselves, “What are you?”

Simpson is comfortable with multiple identities: ballet, jazz, hip-hop, modern. “For a while, I was greedy — I wanted it all,” she says. At home she grew up eating Filipino food but once she went to college, she took “a lot of African American history and identity classes.” Among her friends, “mixed” is what she calls a form of “friendly street-slang’ in the sense of “Oh, you are mixed. I am a … ” Part of the inspiration for Messages came from a comedy act in which the performers talked about their multiracial heritage. “It was hilarious and absurd,” she remembers. “Everyone started with, ‘Guess what I am?’ “

Yet when she began to explore the subject, she found a lot of resistance from people who didn’t want to talk about it. It simply was too painful. For many, the word “mixed” still resonates with violence, pain, and something forced on them and their ancestors. Being defined — often by what is still the dominant culture — simply by the way they look, infuriates others. Some also consider multiple backgrounds a loss of cultural identity and pressure to choose one over the other. Simpson insists that “it doesn’t have to be that way.”

As a choreographer, Simpson developed her voice locally by dancing with Robert Moses’ Kin and Joanna Haigood’s Zaccho Dance Theatre, two companies that couldn’t be more different from each other. Her five years with Moses, she says, taught her a strong work ethic as well as “the possibilities of movement and how to build a work.” From Haigood, with whom she still performs, she learned “to go deep into a subject matter. Diving into something helped me edit myself as an artist.”

But she has not finished learning from others. During her 2010 Chime fellowship — the Margaret Jenkins mentorship program that pairs younger dancers with more experienced choreographers — she worked with choreographer and cofounder of the WestWave Dance Festival Cathleen McCarthy, also a graduate of the SUNY Purchase dance department. Choreographing her hip-hop opera, Black Swordsman Saga, Simpson credits McCarthy with “knowing how to tell a story” and “how to bring out hidden mysteries and emotions.”

As a dancer, Simpson is still fearless and fierce, the kind of performer who is unstoppable. Her 2008 whirlwind solo, the appropriately named Judgment in Milliseconds, performed in a straight-hair and Afro wig, thrives on split-second emotional and kinetic changes. Most recently, Simpson danced in Haigood’s The Monkey and the Devil, as painful a work about the soul-destroying effect of racism that I have seen. “In order to perform hate, you first have to be friends,” Simpson explains about the difficulties of performing such unremittingly antagonistic choreography.

Watching this dynamo in rehearsal is a surprise. Soft-spoken, calm, and focused, at times she seems almost reticent, perhaps thinking aloud. As she demonstrates an across-the-stage sequence, she tells the dancers exactly what she wants even as she encourages them to find their own way through the phrasing. At one point, she asks for more articulated details that have to run current-like through the whole body. “I am a quiet person,” she tells them, “but I like loud dancers.” 

 

PUSH DANCE COMPANY: MIXED MESSAGES

Sat., 2 and 4 p.m.; Sun., 1 and 3 p.m.,

Through May 29

Museum of the African Diaspora

685 Mission, SF

www.moadsf.org

 

New resonance

Maria Poblet
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0
New resonance

arts@sfbg.com

The the sleek, the sublime, and the serendipitous hold each other aloft in Smuin Ballet’s spring concert, which runs at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through this coming weekend and then moves to Walnut Creek (May 20-21) and San Mateo (May 25-29). Artistic Director Celia Fushille’s job is to hang on to the Michael Smuin fans and bring in new audiences wanting to see other approaches to choreography. She’s on the right track. Overall, the program, with Cho-San Goh’s much praised, little seen Momentum, the premiere of Amy Seiwert’s Requiem, and Smuin’s bonbon To The Beatles, made for a well balanced, decently performed evening of contemporary ballet.

Seiwert faced what looked like an impossible task: choreographing one of Western music’s sublime choral works, Mozart’s unfinished Requiem. The piece is burdened with all kinds of rigmarole about authenticity, a mysterious visitor, and his connection to Mozart’s death. Additionally, this is a deeply religious, apocalyptic piece of music about the “days of wrath” and a “just and avenging God,” an alien language for many 21st century listeners.

Wisely, Seiwert stayed on the human level. Her stoic Requiem explores the inexorable journey toward death in a manner that is profoundly respectful of the music. She may, however, have restricted herself too much emotionally. creating a chasm between music and dance. Particularly toward the end, when she was trying to approximate a suggestion of transcendence, the choreography didn’t quite convince. Alexander V. Nichols’ design of columns of light and glimpses of an unseen space — and a body being grasped by unseen hands — seemed almost too overt.

Mozart’s Requiem is dramatic, even operatic; Seiwert’s is a quiet meditation on the process of dying — as influenced by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, which the choreographer claims as an inspiration. In the end Seiwert returns her dancers to the beginning to start the process anew.

Despite what probably is a mismatch between music and dance, Seiwert’s accomplishment is considerable. Her Requiem is a quietly brave and thoughtful interpretation of a great piece of music. She expertly worked with a vocabulary that included a resonant use of the upper body and a gestural language for the arms that sometimes approximated hieroglyphs. Movement motives returned and metamorphosed into rich textures. A sense of loss and loving support pervaded the multiple drops, supports, and lifts. It all started with Erin Yarbrough-Stewart spreading her arms to raise the crumbled performers to begin the dance.

Goh was a Singapore-born choreographer who died of AIDS at 39, in 1987, in the middle of what had been a highly successful career. Some had great hopes for him as “the next Balanchine.” So it was good to see his Momentum, set to Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Flat — notable for its highly percussive piano writing — quite ignored by the choreography.

Set on two primary and three secondary couples, Momentum is striking for the way its liquid and spacious design suggests an ensemble much larger than the mere 10 dancers who keep leaping from the wings. The lead couples smoothly glide in and out of the ensemble, suggesting quasi-egalitarian rather than hierarchical relationships. The costumes — shiny white unitards with black sashes for everyone — enhanced Momentum‘s democratic aspirations. The nonstop work thrives in an attractive windblown environment in which a circle evaporates into duets and men and women confront each other across space only to hook up with each other again. Symmetry and mirror imaging — traditional structural procedures — abound, though Goh often tries to hide them. It’s all very attractive — very balletic, very contemporary — though not very exhilarating.

Yarbrough-Stewart and Jonathan Powell, a fine addition to the company this season, danced the allegro duet; newcomer Jane Rehm, a lovely refined dancer, paired with Travis Walker for the adagio. Momentum‘s choreography is highly exposed — all the time. It would benefit from a more refined performance.

Smuin’s take on the Beatles is slight. It shows the choreographer’s second love, show business, and was an opportunity for the dancers to shine in soft-shoe routines (Powell and Shannon Hurlbut), high kicks (Rehm), tap (Hurlbut), and acrobatics (Yarbrough-Stewart). Former San Francisco Ballet dancer Jonathan Mangosing, however, was a smash in his louche rendering of “Come Together.” 

SMUIN BALLET

Wed/11–Fri/13, 8 p.m.; Sat./14, 2 and 8 p.m.;

Sun./15, 2 p.m.; $20–$62

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

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