Rita Felciano

Let it show

Andrew Lam
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Let it show

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE In December 2009, as part of a double bill with Kara Davis, Kate Weare showed an excerpt of a work in progress in which Leslie Kraus rammed her head into Douglas Gillespie’s chest, knocking him flat on his back. It’s a moment one is unlikely to forget. Weare must have thought so as well, because she retained the passage in Bright Land, which received its San Francisco premiere at ODC Theater this past weekend.

The setting is a hootenanny with the Crooked Jades quintet — splendid, smart, solid musicians — providing both the inspiration and the live accompaniment to the dances. Many of the songs — they were listed in the program, with the lyrics available online — are dark and ambiguous in the way that folk material tells one story on the surface, but covers up more complex perspectives. I regretted that more of the texts could not be easily understood during the performance.

Bright opens with the musicians strolling in and Lisa Berman’s steely version of “Moonshine” — a song about incest, rape, prison, and death. Not exactly happy-time music, but it pays tribute to those stark parts of life we don’t like to think about. Reflecting that double vision, the choreography starts with the dancers walking in, the men (Gillespie and Adrian Clark) from one side, the women (Kraus and Marlena Penney Oden) from the other. Crossing paths, they stop in their tracks and the party is on.

From the beginning, these dancers are as weary of as they are attracted to each other. Traditions are acknowledged, with the men swinging the women and the women circling the men — there are even shades of square dancing. But encounters are rough, short-lived, and pulling-at-the-seams. They are angular, dense, and then, for no apparent reason, the tumultuous actions stop, as if a film has been cut. Yet there are moments of joy and tenderness: a cheek receives a caress, skin-to-skin contact is fully relished.

In addition to the ever-surprising full-body language, Weare uses a rich mix of gestures: ramrod straight arms, chopping hands, sly smiles. Throughout the work, the women seem to have particular powers. At one point they head straight for each other and plant a kiss on each other’s lips. While clearly a sexual act, it looks even more like an acknowledgment that the two are on the same page. For “Old Man Below,” they sit like crones in wide squats, never taking their eyes off of the male duet. Skipping in an exuberant sisterhood, they swing the men’s shirts around their heads. Often they seem flirtatious, flipping their skirts and fanning themselves.

But Bright is no political tract. These dancers tangle, dive, and pull each other into duets, trios, and quartets, not so much in romantic or oppositional relationships, but as part of defining themselves and each other. In a slow dance section — with the lights discreetly lowered — the two couples seemed glued to each other, but without the expected erotic heat. In “Uncle Rabbit,” watched over by his colleagues, Gillespie’s questioning solo sent him into a tortuous back bend, echoed by the observers. Later he launched himself headfirst between the supine Kraus’ legs with no reaction from her. Penney Oden, however, stripped off her dress.

A long, sculpturally intricate duet in which the dancers flowed like cream over each other took excellent advantage of Kraus’ petite but fierce persona and Gillespie’s tall but lanky frame.

What fascinated throughout, besides the precise use of an intricate language, was the sense of these people simultaneously being pulled every which way. Weare doesn’t present this issue in terms of resolvable conflicts but as an existential state of being. These men and women live off ambiguity, contradictory impulses, and instability. They are going full-speed, except when everything stops. Yet they are also vibrantly and sensuously alive, every pore of their skin open to the next sensation, and knowing they can be kicked out of the game anytime. Rarely does putting up a mirror to our frantic, multitasking, and always-on existence make for such satisfying and well-performed choreography.

 

Going back

Andrew Lam
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0
Going back

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Speaking from her home in New York, choreographer Lucinda Childs recalls the unfavorable reception to her 1979 piece Dance. “People walked out saying that I didn’t have a vocabulary and that anybody could do that kind of dancing.” Fortunately, perceptions and concepts of dance have evolved.

Childs’ one-hour pure dance piece, set to music by Philip Glass and accompanied by Sol LeWitt’s film, is presented this weekend by San Francisco Performances in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It is a rare opportunity to see a work by one of the seminal artists from the Judson Church movement, named after the New York City location that hosted the revolution.

In the early 1960s, choreographers tried to wipe the slate clean of what dance was, could, should, or need be. Technique, virtuosity, a codified vocabulary, and style — whether Balanchine’s, Martha Graham’s, or Merce Cunningham’s — were out. Everyday movement, improvisation, matter-of-factness and wysiwyg’s were the “cool” of the day. These at one time radical ideas were largely responsible for democratizing dance.

Today the movement has run its course. Its practitioners — with a few exceptions, such as Trisha Brown and David Gordon, who have continued onto international careers — are part of history. Childs is one of them — a legend in her own time whose choreography is almost never seen, in part because she works primarily in Europe. After the end of this tour, she is heading to Nice in France, then returning to the Ballet du Rhin, where she has been in residence for the last decade. “I am looking forward to going back,” says Childs, “It’s nice to work with dancers you know.”

So why Dance, and why now?

Even though her recent rigorous choreography is more conventionally theatrical, Childs is at heart a classicist. A piece like Dance transcends time and place even as it changes. Childs takes pedestrian movements — walking, skipping, running, hopping — and strips them of whatever context the steps might imply. They are performed with utmost clarity, without personal inflexion, giving the illusion that they are pure designs in space. But they are not. Repetition, accumulation, retrograde, overlaps, and mirroring are the formal devices that create incremental change, similar to the way it happens in Glass’ music. The whole dance becomes a shimmering unit and you begin to recognize differences among dancers. Geometry comes alive.

No surprise, therefore, that LeWitt was drawn to Childs. His work is as conceptually exacting as hers. His paintings and wall drawings are as meticulously planned and “impersonally” realized as her choreography. It probably also helped that Childs has a highly developed visual sense; she once took a section from a Seurat painting and danced its dots — backward.

For Dance‘s film element, shot by Lisa Rinsler, LeWitt superimposed a grid on the floor and captured sections of the choreography. He used split screens, odd angles, and close-ups. The film is synchronized with the live dance, initially making the performers dance with themselves. In 1979, video wasn’t as pervasive, so the effect of seeing the same dancers simultaneously on screen and on the stage was startling.

In the contemporary version of Dance, a gap has opened between the live and virtual performers. “The dancers today, are very different from what they were,” Childs explains. “They are much more technically trained, they also are different people.”

But the biggest change will be in the solo, which, when I saw the work a decade ago, Childs still danced herself. While it was fascinating to see contemporary and earlier dancers cohabiting the same universe, to see Childs dance against her younger self was breathtaking. Time collapsed into an eternal present.

At 70, Childs no longer performs the solo, yet she believes it’s in good hands. “I told Caitlin [Scranton] not to dance it like I did — to make it her own.”

LUCINDA CHILDS: DANCE

Thurs/28–Sat/30, 8 p.m.; $35–$60

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

Laughing and screaming

Andrew Lam
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0
Laughing and screaming

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Is it desirable to invest time and money in an elaborate dance theater piece about a noncontroversial subject? Are we supposed to walk away from an artistic experience having learned something about ourselves that we didn’t know before? Is it worthwhile to make a work about a common or familiar topic? Those are some of the questions that percolated through my mind watching Amara Tabor-Smith’s rich Our Daily Bread, which runs at CounterPULSE through April 24.

The answers, of course, are yes, yes, and yes. Tabor-Smith and her exceptional collaborators, primarily her fellow dancers Stephanie Bastos, Adriel Eddo, Eyle Moore, Aimee Suzara, and Alicia Walters, took on the complex yet basic topic of food — how we choose, prepare, and consume what we put into our mouths — and kneaded it into shapes that proved both muscular and smooth. Laura Diamondstone’s lobby installation and Lauren Elder’s set transformed CounterPULSE into something akin to a home, even including a small arbor with hanging pots of herbs. Ajayi Lumumba Jackson and Guy de Chalus contributed the music.

With the audience being prepped by the smell of cooking wafting through the theater and performers interacting with people as they entered, the experience felt more like visiting somebody’s house instead of a theater. And sure enough, we were offered palate-cleansing ginger, pieces of cake that we fed to a partner, and tiny portions of collard and black-eyed peas. If these gestures proved nothing else, they showed that the way to the heart goes through the stomach. Bread became a love feast.

But Tabor-Smith is too much of an artist to be satisfied with all of us walking out newly determined to become more responsible in our relationship to food. That would have been easy. She did more than that. Bread is a theatrically cogent, emotionally rich piece of dance theater that made us laugh at ourselves and want to scream at the end. The lens she offered is that of African American women as a feisty, independent, cantankerous, and embracing group of human beings. Seeing her dancers teasing and competing in the kitchen — wearing kerchiefs and stirring the pots — and the next moment as fierce warriors with masked faces and shaking fists, raining terror on anybody standing in their way, was transformational. At one point, the women stood huddled in fear back-to-back, reduced to a tiny space, but not giving an inch.

In addition to the dancers, two ancillary figures observed and participated in the work’s trajectory. Elizabeth Summers, an older woman, was the storyteller, the Griot who wandered in and out of the action. A white-clad Pippa Fleming, silently watching from her rocking chair or with her face pressed against the “kitchen” window, acted as an Orisha of death, but perhaps, when sanctifying the dancers at the end, also of hope.

Bread‘s central metaphor of the gumbo — that wondrous stew that would taste so much better without that vile spice called filé — was turned inside out. Women on stage and on video quarreled about the ingredients and you saw it being made. We got to peek into CounterPULSE’s tiny kitchen. But the traditional dish also became a way of honoring the women who made it over the years, and what it represents within individual families. And perhaps even more poignantly, it stood for the tension and love between generations, for a time when eating together created a bond between people like no other. Too bad they couldn’t serve some of it. Without filé please.

In the second half Bread became much darker as it focused more tightly on the exploitative farming practices that prevent communities with little economic power from accessing wholesome food and allow middle-class Americans to spend less of their food budget. An old news clip described “hard-working” braceros working in the fields. The reporter was so condescending in the way he described the “efficiency” of these farming practices, you wanted to scream. The choreographic response paid tribute to the workers’ physical gestures.

In the beginning, Bread meandered. Its ending — a memorial service honoring a Latino teenager who died of heat exhaustion because of no access to water — came at you with the force of a divine revenge. Imagine a wake in which weeping turns into screaming whose fury quite possibly might awaken the dead.

OUR DAILY BREAD

Thurs/21–Sun/24, 8 p.m.; $15–$22

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060

www.counterpulse.org

 

Next step

Andrew Lam
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Next step

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater may be an American treasure, but it’s one that has been adopted by the world. Wherever these dancers go, they jam the houses with enthusiastic audiences. That’s why it may seem curmudgeonly to say that while fabulous, they could be better. Not the dancers: technically, they are top-notch, as well as brave, fierce, and committed. What the company needs — and will now get — is a new vision.

It was both hopeful and disconcerting to see the company’s last Zellerbach engagement (March 30) under the leadership of Judith Jamison, Ailey’s first muse. She took over the company upon Ailey’s death, in 1989, when it was demoralized and deeply in debt. Today, Ailey’s repertoire is in good hands, and Jamison has built an enviable infrastructure. But the dancers are such technical powerhouses that audiences the world over gladly indulge work with surface glitz as long as they get Revelations at the end.

The first of this year’s programs showed what is right and wrong with the company. The best pieces by far were by Ailey: Cry (1971) and Revelations (1960). Both received excellent performances. They also showed that the Ailey dancers can be nuanced and expressive, when given half a chance.

Cry is dedicated to “all black women everywhere — especially our mothers,” and was created for Jamison. Here its three sections were entrusted to the majestic Rachel McLarec, a fiercely despairing Constance Stamatiou, and Briana Reed as the victorious survivor. The approach worked, though when performed by one woman, Cry feels more complex.

In Revelations, Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims pushed themselves physically and emotionally to the edge during “Fix Me, Jesus,” while Amos J. Machanic Jr. almost turned himself inside out in “I Wanna be Ready.” For “Rocka My Soul,” the dancers held back. A wise move: the audience wouldn’t let them go without an encore.

The first of two Bay Area premieres, Christopher L. Huggins’ three-part Anointed was intended as a tribute to the growth of the company under Jamison. Unfortunately, it played to the worst of the audience’s expectations. It was visually full of sound and fury, but conceptually and choreographically dim. A dark-clad figure (Jamar Roberts) calls upon a fierce, fist-clutching fighter (the incredibly fit Sims) to follow him. In voice-over, a reluctant Jamison accepts the call. Next, “Sally Forth,” the work’s best choreography, features Sims in a female quintet with a modicum of rhythmic invention as five dancers fly apart and coalesce into solidarity. A parallel men’s quintet, with a “transfigured” Roberts now in white, presented the men in unison turns that spun off into the wings. Not much there. Only the dedication of the dancers kept Anointed from burning itself to ashes.

In the second Bay Area premiere, Robert Battle’s The Hunt, Brown, Sims, Roberts, Antonio Douthit, Kirven James Boyd, and Yannick Lebrun used every ounce of reserve strength. Battle created a convincing evocation of masculinity that turned a cliché — man as hunter — into a complex ritual expression of solidarity, submission, and friendship. Good times were mixed with aggression and victimhood. The ideas flowed in and out of each other in rhythmically intricate stomping, skipping, and running patterns of considerable nuance. All were immaculately performed to music by the outstanding percussion ensemble Les Tambours du Bronx. It’s reassuring to hear that Battle will be taking over the company.

 

Motion pictures

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Motion pictures

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Dance and the camera have a long-lasting love/hate relationship. Films that honor the art, such as 1948’s The Red Shoes or 1951’s An American in Paris with its extraordinary dream sequence, are rare. Although dancers like that their performances acquire an afterlife, they also hate giving up three-dimensionality for two-dimensional space. Nor are they fond of editing practices that alter continuity, control a viewer’s focus, and favor smiles over feet. Nonetheless, a recently discovered snippet of film that showed Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in a blurry clip of Les Sylphides, apparently the only extant film of the legendary company, sent dance historians into a tizzy.

Now in its second annual incarnation, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival concerns itself with more contemporary dance films. The advent of inexpensive, lightweight cameras has made possible a new genre, “screendance,” which features choreography designed for the camera. Los Angeles and New York City have long had had festivals honoring these creations. Now the Bay Area, after previously unsuccessful attempts by presenters like Cynthia Pepper and Charlotte Shoemaker, is getting its own look at what’s floating out there. “We received 110 submissions from 25 countries,” producer Greta Schoenberg says of this year’s selection process.

Schoenberg has assembled a program in which shorts are bookended by longer films such as Victoria Marks’ ground-breaking 1993 Outside In and the San Francisco premiere of Finite and Infinite by RJ Muna, who is best known for his spectacularly airborne dance photography. Historian/critic Joanna Harris will also show rare films of Bay Area dance pioneers and work by avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.

In the Bay Area, a small but growing group of dancers is intrigued by the specific requirements of dancing for the camera. Among them are Private Freeman, Nol Simonse, and Maria Kotchekova, who in 2009 won the solo gold medal on the TV show Superstars of Dance. Schoenberg cast her film noir Nightingale, which receives its world premiere at the sold-out opening night gala, with local dancers. Freeman is one of them.

“I like the idea that film can focus a viewer as long as it wants,” Freeman says. “I also like that you have a 360-degree sense of space. You are working with different concepts of continuity and detail. At the same time, when you have several takes, you need to remember how exactly you had positioned your leg.”

Brevity, with most works typically lasting between three and 10 minutes, characterizes most “screendances” Even the experienced Mitchell Rose, who recently moved to the Bay Area to teach Dance on Camera at Mills College, stuck to this YouTube-friendly time frame when making his wondrous Modern Daydreams: Part One (2001).

The 18 selections in this year’s San Francisco Dance Film Festival stick to the norms. Marta Renzi’s Texas Plate (2007), a romance to music by singer-songwriter Patti Scialfa, is two minutes. A journey onto a wooded mountain, Stronger (2010), by the U.K.’s Wilkie Branson, takes four minutes. Dutch director Carmen Rozestraten’s trip into a Catalan woman’s dream world in After the Water the Clouds (2009) requires nine.

Neither Schoenberg nor documentary and experimental filmmaker Ben Pierce — a former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer who showed work in last year’s festival — can explain the logic behind the short format. Perhaps, they suggest, it’s what audiences want to see, and what festivals like theirs prefer to program. The time frames of YouTube, where a lot of these works end up, is a definite reason. Lack of financing for bigger projects may be another. It’s also possible that the creators of these collaborative ventures haven’t developed the necessary technical chops to master longer works yet.

One festival juror intrigued by the buzz around dance on screen is ODC associate director and choreographer KT Nelson. She finds herself fascinated by the idea of honing in very closely to the body (“Let’s say to the crook of an elbow”) or to create a work in a completely different setting (“Water, for instance”). She hasn’t jumped in yet — but there’s always next year.

SAN FRANCISCO DANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/24 through Sun/27, $10–$25 ($75–$125 for workshops)

See website for venues

www.sfdancefilmfest.org

Body talk

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Body talk

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Forty is the time when the midlife crisis is supposed to hit, but there’s no sign that ODC is even close. At its short but sweet gala performance on March 11, which opened this year’s three-week “Dance That Matters” program, the artists looked stunning, the choreography fresh and fun, and the audience thoroughly pleased. What more would you want? A home that is paid for? ODC has it. Some money in the bank? ODC has enough to stay alive. Plans for the future? Yes: more dance, and something called the ODC Campus that might include housing for dancers and perhaps even college degrees.

The gala featured new works by Brenda Way and Kimi Okada. (KT Nelson’s Listening Last, a collaboration with Shinichi Iova-Koga, premieres this week.) For the celebratory yet pensive Speaking Volumes: Architecture of Light II, Way reworked the installation piece that ODC’s company reopened its theater with last year. Speaking is linear and therefore allows for a different trajectory. Way takes stock of a dancer’s life, from the working individual to the end of a career that gets absorbed into a mass of humanity. Thirty-five current, former, and recreational dancers flooded the stage for a communal celebration of dance. Along the way, they regaled us with aphorisms along the lines of “Art gives shape to life,” and “Don’t be afraid of people seeing your ideas.” Their energetic optimism is characteristic of Way.

Speaking opened with Jeremy Smith following a voice-over instruction for a new piece. (For example: “Make a triangle with your arm … stick your head through it.”) His responses, sometimes literal, other times imagistic, were fascinating. Then flashlights began to search, a little too long, for potent ideas among dancers half-hidden in the dark.

The lights found, among other treasures, a quintet that reminded me of frolicking dogs and a fluidly stretched give-and-take trio for Dennis Adams, Quilet Rarang, and Vanessa Thiessen that allowed sparks to fly between friendly moments of repose. Fierceness and volatility without rancor propelled Elizabeth Farotte Heenan and Daniel Santos’s duet. At the end of Speaking, they embraced. (Farotte Heenan is retiring.)

Associate choreographer Okada runs ODC’s school and its mentorship program, so she choreographs little these days. That’s why I look vacantly at the Pacific … though regret — a humorous look at misunderstandings, erroneous assumptions, and long-held behavioral patterns — was so welcome. Good intentions won’t keep you from making faux pas in a world that values “diversity.” Yet Okada’s take is so witty and good-natured that it would take a real curmudgeon of political correctness to take offense at this light-hearted consideration of a serious subject.

Look moves speedily through awkward encounters; it presents a world that’s a merry-go-round from which there is no escape. Anne Zivolich, hair flying, skipped through the chaos. The English language can yield rich images, and Okada’s choreography also presents more than a few. Two men literally bite the bullet; Yayoi Kambara points a Medusa finger and everyone freezes. Jerky, fragmented movement illustrates the topsy-turvy results of linguistic maneuvering to oft-comic effect.

But there is more to the piece, namely its navigation of culture gaps. In a smartly-timed encounter, two couples try to greet each other. One bows, the other outstretches hands. Each attempt to connect only drives them further apart. During one of Look‘s funniest moments, Jay Cloidt introduces a section of Japanese classical music. The dancers freeze in terror and embarrassment. Rubbery-limbed Santos, clad in a business suit, tries to toe the line — here we go with an image — but falls all over himself. He had my sympathy. *

ODC/DANCE DOWNTOWN: A FORCE AT 40

Through March 27; $20

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

The end?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The end?

DANCE Looking at the magnificent and elegant Merce Cunningham dancers perform Pond Way (1998), Antic Meet (1958) and Sounddance (1975) in the by no means sold-out Zellerbach Hall on March 3 made me sad. Each of these works showed such skill, beauty, and intelligence. Yet they left me pessimistic about the future of a precious repertoire.

So this was it. This was end of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which has appeared at UC Berkeley since 1962. Some people there this past weekend have been watching them since year one. I am not one of them. It took me a quite while to realize the difference between “connection” and “coexistence” of movement, music, and design. But I finally understood that connections happened between these elements — not as a result of planning, but simply by together at a particular moment. And once I apprehended Cunningham’s multifocused — rather than front- and center-oriented — stage picture, a wondrous world opened up.

Now it’s finished. Shortly before his death, the choreographer decided the company would go on a two-year “Legacy Tour” around the world and then disband. Following the Balanchine model, Cunningham set up a foundation that can license the pieces to companies that want to perform them. That’s the rub.

Who can do them? The company’s early quintets or septets are one thing, but his big, companywide choreographies, which still don’t make for easy viewing, are another. We don’t have a tradition of repertory modern dance companies; they are driven by their founder-choreographers. So who can do justice to Cunningham?

Ballet companies would seem the logical choice, since Cunningham’s technique — though exceedingly specific — relies heavily on ballet-trained dancers. But would these ensembles invest the amount of rehearsal that a Cunningham piece would require, especially at a time when choreographers are given as little as two weeks to create a new piece on a company? And what about their conservative base of support?

The serenely lyrical Pond Way has been described as one of Cunningham’s nature pieces. To be sure, Brian Eno’s sound score includes some howling monkeys and barking dogs, and if you want, you can see loping gazelles and hoping frogs in the choreography. But the work, with the ensemble dressed by Suzanne Gallo in tunic-like tops and wide pants, suggests a crowded Elysian fields — assuming one knows what that looks like — where the inhabitants are engaged in some kind of praise dancing.

Maybe Roy Lichtenstein’s barely perceivable ship on the backdrop had brought them there. Brandon Collwes, his hair bleached the whitest of blonds, magisterially streaked through the unisons, only to join them. An upstage quintet for women seemed inspired by Greek vase paintings. And then there was Marcie Munnerly, who for the longest period stood frozen in a running position, oblivious to the guys who tried to get her attention. She finally whipped herself into a solo that pulled her into the wings.

The recently-reconstructed Antic Meet, with Robert Rauschenberg’s design, is a rarity. A mashup of vaudeville and silent movie pratfalls, it’s a full-blown comedy. It takes on the oh-so-serious attempts of (old school) modern dancers to squeeze meaning out of every gesture. The dancers strained, pushed, pulled, then hopelessly collapsed into a muddle. Four of them, dressed in fluttering parachutes, flopped and hopped and surrounded their “heroine.” They looked as much like Edward Gorey characters as Martha Graham acolytes. Curiously, John Cage’s score sounded very much of its time, but the wittily-danced choreography looked as fresh as ever.

In this context, the sweet Sounddance felt like a farewell. Robert Swinston, the ensemble’s rehearsal director and a company member since 1980, stepped into the Cunningham role. As heavy baroque curtains seemed to spit out the dancers one by one, he tried to keep an eye on the multiple actions — four men manipulating Andrea Weber; evanescent couples and line dancing; Rashaun Mitchell enclosing everyone in a magic circle. In the end, the dancers and Swinston/Cunningham disappeared back into the curtains. It seemed very final.

The children

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The children

Robert Moses may not know it, but he is a pied piper. The ability to hold the attention of 200 hormone-packed middle school students at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in early February must qualify as some kind of superhuman ability.

But Moses, choreographer and artistic director of Robert Moses’ Kin, defers to his own pied piper, the one on stage who immortalized the German city of Hamelin. As the fabled character, Dexandro “D” Montalvo twitches, churns, and first commands the rats; then, with beckoning index fingers, he mesmerizes the “children” to follow him who knows where.

The Sunset District students may not have known the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who was cheated out of his justly earned wages and took awesome revenge. But they surely recognized the popping moves Montalvo so skillfully threaded into his character. One way or another, the kids were hooked. For close to an hour, they sat quietly and took in what Moses and his dancers had to show them from their upcoming world premiere, Fable and Faith.

As a kid, I was terrified by the Pied Piper story. No good grades or cleverness — usually assigned to boys anyway in fairy tales — were going to get me out of this scenario. No prince was coming, and there was no happy ending. I was going to be locked in that mountain. The adults had royally messed up. My mother assured me that “it’s just a story.” Well, mom, you were wrong.

Myths, fables, and fairy tales tell us about the way the world works. “Actions”, Moses explains after the performance, “have consequences. The stories talk about life, adversity and perseverance through hard times.” He admits that some of them can be problematic. Stepmothers, for instance, get a “major bum rap.”

Perhaps that’s what initially drew Moses to last year’s The Cinderella Project, which will be performed with the new Fable and Faith before going on tour later in the spring. Cinderella Project, his first collaboration with writer/actor Anne Galjour, who also wrote and performs the text for Fable and Faith, was informed by interviews with contemporary constructed families rooted in love, not blood. “Still, tough as it was,” Moses notes, “Cinderella stuck to who she was and it turned out alright.”

In the 1950s, there was a move underfoot to clean up some of these old tales; the thinking was that children’s psyches would be damaged by so much darkness and uncertainty. Fortunately, the stories have survived, though it’s good to know that Rapunzel no longer gets locked up in the tower because she was pregnant — it was just the evil deed of a jealous witch.

Moses takes a common sense, “age-appropriate” approach when he reads to his own two children, ages five and three. It was this fatherly task of sharing an imaginary world — everything from Dr. Seuss and the Brothers Grimm to African American folktales and Greek mythology — that got him to think about the contemporary resonance of some of these once-upon-a-time tales.

“Think of it,” he says. “Children are being abducted. Or today we talk about ‘the wolf at the door.’ ” In Fable and Faith, the wolf (Montalvo) goes to see a psychiatrist (Katherine Wells) to find out why he is behaving the way he does. The back-and-forth exchange in words and movement ends on a note of real poignancy.

Formally, Moses and Galjour decided on a structure “in which stories clash into each other.” The setting, they felt, had to be a village. “It’s where life happens,” Moses says. Elaine Buckholtz, who started lighting with Contraband and who has become a magician of visual installation, will do the honors on Fable and Faith. To keep a child’s presence at the forefront of these adult dances, Moses is partnering with the San Francisco Boys Chorus. They will perform, among other selections, the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem.

As the students were leaving for their classes, a teacher turned to me and whispered, “We have been very lucky this morning.”

FABLE AND FAITH

Fri.18-Sun./20, 2 p.m.; $25–$35

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Real fiction

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Real fiction

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE There is a guy in town named Jess Curtis who has the most gorgeous mop of white hair and a smile to match. His body is taut and muscular; it also shows signs of wear from working hard and probably playing hard. Curtis used to be part of the now-legendary Contraband, for a while the most radically inventive dance troupe in the country. Then he and his buddy Keith Hennessy took off for France where the ministry of culture — anybody listening at the NEA? — set up a special, nicely funded section for Circus Arts. This should have made red-blooded Americans recoil in horror. Instead it invigorated the two guys’ ideas about performance and its role in society. Above all, they got in closer touch with their own bodies and how they wanted to use them.

Coming back, Curtis took off for Davis (Hennessy was to follow), the former agricultural college, now a production line for the Bay Area’s starving dancers, who want to acquire (a wee bit of) wealth, wisdom, and perhaps a job in a university. A body-based, anarchical perspective, so integral to the critical theory thriving in academia, also generally opened a universe for dance, which for so long had been intellectually suspect because it had no “text” that could be studied, analyzed, and turned into a dissertation.

For Curtis, a socially committed artist since his Contraband days, who wants his work to at least chip away at the conflicts, prejudices, and histories that divide us, body-focused thinking was a good place to start. The body, after all, is all we have; it’s our home and our hell. As artistic inspiration, the idea is not new. Take one look at Picasso, and you see a patriarchal guy obsessed with the human female body.

Along comes Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies, Jess Curtis/Gravity’s two-hour extravaganza for six artists — Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Matthias Hermann, Jörg Muller, Maria Francesca Scaroni, and Bridge Markland — who keep shifting and revealing new sides of who they are or might be. It’s a fun game to see how new individual “fictional bodies” pop up like corks from what sometimes is a morass of images and information. that in turn fatigue, delight, and surprise. This stripping away and putting on of new identities is often accomplished by changes in attire. (PhD dissertation, anyone?).

Dances lives off the talents of its protean performers. Muller, who under his Red Riding Hood outfit hides a rabbit in his crotch (take that, Freud), levitates so that an object can scoot under his horizontally-stretched body. Curtis passes out philosophical treatises but creates another type of enlightenment by engaging in what amounts to a 20-mile stationary bike ride to illuminate a string of holiday lights. Scaroni dons a fat suit and dumpy clothes yet turns herself into an elegant roller skating virtuoso. She’s also a karaoke singer and, with the help of Mueller, a cross-dresser.

My favorite chameleon, however, was Cunningham, whose dainty feet and delicate fingers use crutches as pincers. For much of the first half, she scoots around like a Roomba, busily rearranging props and — if I saw correctly — audience members. In the end, donning a red boxing outfit and sitting in a bathtub, she reveals herself as a soprano, delivering a respectable Bach aria.

For all its embrace of egalitarianism and plenitude, to the extent that Dances works it is because of the care and shape-shifting craft that these artists imposed on a rich mix of physical props, performance ideas, and individual talents. Like it or not, this is an elite collection of performers. During the post-show discussion, Curtis explained that artist-activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who was present, had been helpful with Dances‘ timing. It became quickly evident that Gómez-Peña does not want to be a consultant; he wants to join the circus.

DANCES FOR NON/FICTIONAL BODIES (COMMUNITY CHORUS INSTALLATIONS)

Thu/10, noon–2 p.m.; free

Yerba Buena Gardens

Third and Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.jesscurtisgravity.org

Ms. Behavior

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Ms. Behavior

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Fat chance Aura Fischbeck could have escaped becoming a dancer. Her mother was one of the last students of legendary German Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman; her father is an actor/musician who pioneered multimedia dance theater in the 1960s. Additionally, she had an older sister, also a dancer. “[She] was always a step or two ahead of me,” Fischbeck remembers. “I grew up surrounded by dance, but I didn’t like some of the politics that go with the profession.”

So what’s a gal to do? Fischbeck was drawn to poetry and history, but the pull of “embodying ideas,” as she puts it, was too strong. If you can’t fight ’em, join ’em; Fischbeck became a dancer.

The Philadelphia-born, Naropa University-trained dancer recently met me for an interview at CounterPulse during a break from rehearsing the upcoming world premiere of Bodies That Won’t Behave, to be presented this weekend in a double bill with The Riley Project. Although her company, Aura Fischbeck Dance, is only two years old, she has been dancing, rehearsing, choreographing, studying (with Kathleen Hermesdorf), and producing in SF ever since she hit town seven years ago. She immediately hooked up with Joe Landini when he opened The Garage in 2007. Since then, she has participated in just about all of the various programs that home-for-dancers offers.

As a choreographer, Fischbeck’s work — such as Relay and her solo Compass — has resembled a dialogue between a kind of abandon that looks spontaneous or improvised but isn’t, and a fascination with control and formalized structures. She has managed to put a personal, fresh twist on this common tension between two modes of being. It’s a pull she readily admits to in her own life. “I want to let loose and let go, and then I have to reign myself in.” In Fischbeck’s choreography you can also see a strong conceptual basis, much as you do in the work of people she admires: Miguel Gutierrez, Ralph Lemon, John Jasperse, and Jess Curtis.

In the trio for Bodies, which Gretchen Garnett, Julie Potter and Travis Rowland are rehearsing when I arrive at CounterPULSE, Fischbeck is working with “proper” and “improper” behavior. (An accompanying video by Chris Wise shows the dancers “misbehaving” in Golden Gate Park.) Fischbeck doesn’t make moral judgments about comportment. She wants to explore the body as a vessel for conflicting values.

In an e-mail later the same day, Fischbeck is at pains to articulate the motivating force behind Bodies: “The idea of misbehavior is unpacked in this work as a way of expressing love and acceptance for our imperfections,” she writes, “and for allowing the parts of ourselves that are awkward or unkempt or simply uncontrollable to be witnessed and celebrated.”

What you are likely to see on stage this weekend is comédie humaine: three dancers, with Potter as the smallest one in the middle, on adjacent folding chairs trying to negotiate individual and common spaces. During the rehearsal, this attempt to balance conflicting interests very quickly began to look like a fierce competition. Attempts to navigate and hoard resulted in moments that are frustrating, painful, hilarious, tender, and just plain awkward. When the trio finally broke into spaciously flowing unisons even those soon began to hiccup and disintegrate.

Bodies will be seen in conjunction with two premieres by Leigh Riley, All You Need and DuBeUs. All You Need grew out of Riley’s interest in Aristotle’s concepts of love: philia, eros, storge, and agape. “I grew up in a Christian tradition where we always heard about those four different kinds of love,” Riley explains. “But I really wanted to make four very different duets.” DuBeUs is a collaborative quintet for Caroline Alexander, Jennifer Bennett, Leah Curran, Stacy Swann, and Katharine Vigmostad. It examines the demands on an individual’s identity when belonging to and assimilating into a group, such as happened, for instance, throughout “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” *

AURA FISCHBECK DANCE AND RILEY PROJECT

Fri./21-Sat./22, 8 p.m. Sun./23, 2 p.m.; $12–$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060

www.brownpaperickets.com

How can you stay in the house?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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How can you stay in the house?

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN DANCE Watching dance in the Bay Area is a privilege. With the constant influx of eager young talents, people who stick around and develop, and established artists who still manage to surprise year after year, the experience can be a ball. This celebration is boosted by the “travelers” from other cities and countries who come in for a day or two and keep local dance from becoming overly self-satisfied. There is a lot wrong with capitalism, but competition — in terms of ideas — can be a real quality booster.

Watching dance in the Bay Area can also be a chore. Performances bunch up on each other, making it difficult to schedule which shows to attend. No one seems to perform on Easter or Memorial Day, but everyone goes crazy on the adjacent weekends. What is this — do we all go to church on Easter or to the beach on Memorial Day? Kudos to the West Wave Dance Festival, which this year moved its schedule to Monday nights.

One consequence of the plethora of dance available all year round is my editor’s annual request for a retrospective of the past 12 months. It’s a useful exercise, I suppose, though I have yet to decide whether it’s a privilege or a chore. Here are a dozen highlights that rose to the surface.

1. I call them surprisers, because you think you know what to expect from them and then find out that you don’t. One example is long-term dancer Kara Davis. She’s unafraid to use large ensembles in increasingly complex choreography. Another is Katie Faulkner, who possesses wit in addition to a fine eye for form. Jazz choreographer Reginald Ray Savage took Stravinsky’s Agon and used it to choreograph for his tiny group. I still don’t know whether the result works, but it was great to see him daring to take on a ballet icon. Rajendra Serber and Stephany Auberville’s Dance for the Flies was an hour-long improvisation that thrilled, thanks to the dancers’ intensity and the contributions of equally good musicians Matt Davignon and Cheryl Leonard.

2. San Francisco Ballet. Helgi Tomasson is committed to stretching our notions about ballet. So he programmed John Neumeier’s visually stunning though choreographically problematic The Mermaid. Was the risk worth taking? Perhaps. SFB artists who still dance in my head: Sarah Van Patten as Juliet; Maria Kochetkova in Yuri Possokov’s Classical Symphony; Damian Smith in everything he touched; and Pascal Molat as Petrouchka.

3. Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project’s Love Everywhere in the City Hall rotunda on Valentine’s Day. Professional and community performers, plus a chamber ensemble, celebrated people’s commitment to each other in a work that was funny, humorous, and ever so gentle. It humanized the seat of power.

4. Lines Ballet. By now we may know choreographer Alonzo King’s choreographic language, yet he finds wondrous new ways to use it. For the gorgeous Wheel in the Middle of the Field, he interpreted European classical songs, putting the singers on stage with the dancers. With Zakir Hussein, he rethought both the music and the tale of Scheherazade.

5. In its reprise this year, Joe Goode Performance Group’s mesmerizing Traveling Light proved to be one of Goode’s most worthwhile journey in every way. Inspired by the Old Mint’s history and architecture, his company of seven and 15 additional dancers evoked 19th century ordinary folks, all of them recognizable.

6. Kuchipudi is one of the lesser-known classical Indian dance forms. It’s even more of a pity that Shantala Shivalingappa, a dancer of rare refinement and virtuosity, showed her Gamaka for one night only. Part of this evening’s appeal came from the ease and joy that she and her musicians brought to the performance.

7. In October, Zaccho Dance Theatre’s noble Sailing Away commemorated the exodus from San Francisco in 1858 of a whole segment of the African American community. When it was performed on Market Street, the contrast between the everyday crowd and the dignity and steely focus of the traveling performers (Anna Tabor-Smith and Antoine Hunter) created a high drama of its own.

8. If anybody still needed to be convinced, Socrates confirmed that the Mark Morris Dance Group is the finest modern dance company in the country. Based on Eric Satie’s astounding score, Morris luminously quiet meditation on death wove a spell that has yet to evaporate.

9. Ralph Lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? drew me in because of the many balls — formal questions about tonal nuances; juxtapositions of material; deeply-felt thematic concerns — that he had to keep afloat. He did so brilliantly. It was lovely to see — a major accomplishment by a gifted artist-thinker.

10. Carole Zertuche, artistic director of Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco, has reoriented flamenco to where it belongs: the soloist. For “Una Noche Flamenco,” the company’s 44th season, she invited dancers Manuel Gutierrez, Juan Siddi, and Cristina Hall, whose takes on flamenco could not be more different. They joined Zertuche and a group of equally strong, individualized singers and instrumentalists for an exceptionally well-balanced evening of powerfully performed dance.

11. This year also brought the inaugural — and much-needed — San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Greta Schoenberg assembled an impressive program of locally-made and imported works. The sheer number of perspectives that these dance/film artists brought to their work was inspiring. Good news: the festival returns March 25-27, 2011.

12. The collaboration between AXIS Dance Company and inkboat resulted in Odd — a work that was anything but odd. It was exquisite, fragile, and wispy. Taking his cue from Norwegian painter Odd Nordrum, choreographer Shinichi Iova-Koga worked with two groups of nontraditionally trained dancers. The result was a stunner. May it have a long and healthy life.

‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

You don’t have to be into winter solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa celebrations to realize that there’s something about December — the end of another decade this time around, the darkest part of the year — that calls out for treats either for yourself or a friend or two. Here are a few dance-related suggestions between now and the end of the year that won’t bust your budget.

Born in Imperial Russia, The Nutcracker has become a peculiarly American institution. Almost against my will, it pulls me in every time. Though bifurcated, the masterful music — no matter its commercialization — pulls together the story of a brave little girl and her adventures. Reasonably priced options exist. San Francisco Ballet’s (through Dec. 27; War Memorial Opera House, SF) starts at $32. Take binoculars, you’ll be fine. The Oakland Ballet Company’s highly acclaimed version by new Artistic Director Graham Lustig (Dec. 23-26; Paramount Theater, Oakl.) starts at $15. Berkeley Ballet Theater’s (Dec. 10-12 and 17-19; Julia Morgan Theater, Berk.) has a one-price ticket for $26. After 20 years, this will be former ODC dancer Brian Fisher’s last Fritz.

If you like your Nutcracker to have sharp edges, the Dance Brigade’s mashup of politics and fun, The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie (Dec. 11-12; Brava Theater, SF; $15–$17), has been reimagined by another generation of grrrl dancers and friends. The Dance Along Nutcracker (Dec. 11-12; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; $16–$50) was a hoot the first time around and continues to be a splendid mix of circus, dress-up, and community celebration. This year the revelers have invited the Twilight Vixen Revue. The SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band does the musical honors — fabulously.

Stepping outside of Nutcracker territory into original holiday fare, Kirstin E. Williams’ all-female Strong Pulse company hooks up with CCSF students for Be Cool, (Dec. 10-11; CCSF Performance Theater, SF; $10–$15) a jazz/ modern dance/hip-hop concert that is guaranteed to resonate all over the Phelan Avenue campus.

If you have never seen ShaSha Higby work her magic with phantasmagoric concoctions of human-made and natural materials, be prepared to being pulled into a world as dreamlike as it is tangible. In Folds of Gold (through Dec. 10-11; Noh Space, SF; $12-20) examines deep winter issues surrounding life, death, and rebirth.

The circus-based Sweet Can Productions newest show, Candid (Dec. 17-Jan. 9; Dance Mission Theater, SF; $15–$60), is sweet but not saccharine-sweet. These performers juggle and subvert cherished concepts as well as objects — brooms, dinner plates, hula hoops — to stretch credulity and the imagination. It’s what happens when life meets art.

With Lo Clásico, (Dec. 17-19; Cowell Theater, SF; $15–$35), Caminos Flamencos — 22 dancers and musicians — are performing Spain’s two major historical dance forms. There is, of course, flamenco, including Yaelisa’s breathtaking Soleares, but also examples of lesser-known Spanish classical dance choreographed to Ravel and de Falla.

WestWave Dance (Dec. 13; Cowell Theater, SF; $22–$68) closes its season with another quintet of new choreography by Pam Gonzales (from L.A.), Alyce Finwall, Christy Funsch, Carolé Acuna, and Ingrid Graham. The festival curates promising work by artists who can’t on their own afford the professional production values WestWave offers.

How about insight into dancers’ thought processes? For free? Chime Live (Dec. 11; Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, SF; free) offers conversations and showings of work from Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab’s mentoring program. In the monthly program “2nd Sundays” (Dec. 12; CounterPULSE, SF; free), artists show pieces-in-progress and invite feedback. “Dancemaker’s Forum” (Dec. 19; SF Conservatory of Dance, SF; free) workshops new choreography by Manuelito Biag.

Contact improvisation has become a valued tool for choreographers, but it’s also a glorious performance art that redefines the concept of being “in the moment.” One of its originators, the masterful Nancy Stark Smith (Dec. 18; Eighth Street Studios, Berk.; $10–$20) is in town to connect with local and guest practitioners.

The connection between the Odette and Odile characters has puzzled Swan Lake lovers forever; the roles used to be danced by two different performers. SF Ballet’s recent production hinted at one interpretation. For another take, you might want to go to the movies and see Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (now playing; Bay Area theaters; prices vary).

The Dozen

Andrew Lam
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The Dozen

DANCE The Hip-Hop Dance Fest has grown up. What started 12 years ago as a showcase for local crews and studios has become an excellently balanced showcase of national and international artists. Only four of this year’s 11 participants came from the Bay Area. Sad to say, the sorriest performance all night long came from a local one. Still, the future for hip-hop dance on stage looks brighter than ever.

One of the most moving and wildly applauded works on Nov. 19 was South African dancer/choreographer Jane Sekonya-John’s deftly and economically choreographed Spoti. She donned an old spoti — fisherman’s cap — and transformed herself from a limping, bent old woman into a victorious (though scar-bearing) freedom fighter. Another highlight was Raphael Xavier’s almost oppressively serious Black Canvas, in which breakdancing, much of it floor-bound, became the paint that portrayed three men in fractious, competing, and cooperating relationships. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of hip-hop’s theatrical expressiveness.

Los Angeles’ exuberant VersaStyle Dance Company’s Legacy paid tribute to hip-hop’s ancestry by weaving live dance with beautifully chosen video clips from past greats such as Bill Bailey (inventor of the moonwalk), Fred Astaire, Peg Leg Bates, and the Nicholas Brothers. DS Players from San Jose returned with Before Old School, a tribute to the ballroom style of the 1930s and ’40s. Anything this trio touches is blessed with understated wit and a sense of camaraderie.

Also from Southern California, One Step Ahead presented Tables and Chairs, which brought split-second timing and a sometimes humorous approach to the subject of an argumentative family. The kitchen table became the locus for blame-assigning, with flips, kicks, and leaps as synchronized as clockwork. Everyone took as much as they got. Bringing up the L.A. contingent was the b-boying duet between Rock Steady Crew’s YNOT and BailRok, a pint-size virtuoso with a mountains of attitude. Remember the name.

Pro-Phenomen, seven men from France, closed the program with a performance of Signum that justifiably brought down the house. Thematically, the piece had something to do with the preservation of freedom. Impeccably performed, the dancers’ silken combinations and fabulous sense of timing were mesmerizing. Gestures ran down a line or through a circle. Helicopter-like movement popped up like an afterthought from otherwise engaged groups, and tiny dramatic or tender duets exploded out of nowhere and evaporated as quickly. Huge stretches went into military-type push-ups; dancers “fainted,” were thrown, or ended up on the sidelines.

The 12th Hip-Hop Fest also embraced more traditional presentations. Future Shock Bay Area, a large studio company, opened the evening with Rappin Da Bay. The choreography broke what could have been tedious unisons into ever-shifting small ensembles, with a spot for a soloist or two. Perhaps not terribly original, Rappin stayed vital through its performers skill and commitment. SoulForce Dance Company enlivened its choreography by assigning it to characters such as Brandy Logue as “the Elder” and Meegan Hertensteiner as “Miss Meow Meow,” among others. The piece was an amusing, successful mashup of individuality.

Mind over Matter was this year’s serious misstep. Choreographer Allan Frias, who recently appeared on So You Think You Can Dance, has made it something of a specialty to go for sex and violence. Psyke was probably inspired by gangsta rap and underground aspects of gay culture. (The performance was announced as having “adult material.”) Raunch — in this case, simulated violence against women and simulated sex — can be funny, ironic, and pornographic. What it should never be is boring.

Return to me

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Return to me

If magical realism is rooted in Latin American cultures, nobody told Adia Tamar Whitaker. Her Ampey!, a 50-minute dance, chant, music, film, and narration piece, is an incantatory celebration of life — including the parts of life ingrained in our muscles and our dreams. If CounterPULSE’s Performing Diaspora program had produced nothing but Ampey!, it would have been worth doing. Performed by a stellar cast of dancers and musicians, Whitaker has succeeded in pulling together strands of complex subject matter into a first-rate, original piece of poetic theater.

Whitaker is equally skilled in verbal and movement languages. The blunt honesty with which she looks at herself, refusing to sentimentalize or overplay her sense of identity, gives Ampey! a strong backbone. The impetus for the work came from a trip to Ghana, where Whitaker traveled to explore her roots. A small-boned, light-skinned woman who shaves her head, she found herself at odds there. With Ampey!, she set out to explore the disconnect between her African and African American identities. Perhaps not surprisingly, she found misunderstandings on both sides. One of the show’s most insightful moments comes via a film clip, in which an elderly Ghanaian man talked about how outsiders not only view his country, but the whole continent.

Whitaker divides Ampey! into three acts: “Freedom,” “Home,” and “Family.” Her periodic narrations, on film, feel a bit like a personal travelogue, but they also create a sense of anticipation for the live segments. On stage, her persona shifts identity by moving from one dancer to another, an effective way of expanding the personal into a larger context.

In “Freedom,” the dancers, dressed in prim American school uniforms, dive into a high-energy children’s clapping dance, “Getting Lite.” With limbs flying, this is an exuberant, wildly energetic but also playful form of urban expression whose African origins — at least as seen here on stage — are unmistakable. A ring shout and a Haitian dance raise the volume of this affirmation of freedom, though in actually it is being denied. Strong vocalist-dancer Tossie Long, scurrying anxiously among the celebrants, acts as an Elder, cautioning Whitaker to be patient.

“Home” switches gears drastically. With one chair conspicuously empty and Whitaker as the lead vocalist, the dancers sit in a row, chanting and keeping the beat with gourd-like rattles. According to the program notes, the dance is a version of the Ghanaian agbadza, usually performed on an open field. Here, clapping and percussion underline rhythmical, forward-bending movements. The flowing harmonies set against that regular bending pattern proved to be hypnotic — I kept thinking of Muslims praying together on the floors of their mosques. Whitaker dedicated this section to her former teacher, Alicia Pierce, who died in San Francisco while Whitaker was learning this very dance in Ghana. This mourning dance, rising and falling, like waves, like deep breaths, was perhaps Ampey!‘s single most beautiful moment.

The final section, the somewhat problematic “Family,” finds Whitaker on her knees. Carefully measuring and pasting segments of tape, she tries to rearrange the complex floor patterns that look like a mixture of astrology charts and gym floors. As people in colorful garb spill onto the stage, she keeps up her task for a while. The scene becomes a marketplace, with dancers “selling” their wares to each other and to the audience. Here, the performers’ individuality — Eyla Moore, Stephanie Bastos, Veleda Roel, Zakiya Roehl, and Rashidi Omari Byrd — creates a vibrantly pulsating environment. Still, as Whitaker finally takes her place among them, the finale feels a little too easy. It is a lovely ending, but not a completely convincing one.

AMPEY!

Thurs/18–Sat/20, 8 p.m.;

Sun/21, 3 p.m., $19-$24

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.counterpulse.org

GOLDIES 2010: Amy Seiwert

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Amy Seiwert

As a kid in Cincinnati, Amy Seiwert didn’t want to be a ballet dancer. She strove to become a gymnast, just like her adored older sister. But, she says, “I was a scrawny little thing.” And when she tried walking on her head because her arms couldn’t support her, her parents suggested that ballet might help her gymnastics. “I didn’t want to do it,” she explains. “Ballet was ‘girly’ stuff and I was a tomboy.” Gymnastics’ loss, however, became ballet’s gain.

At 10, Seiwert got hooked on ballet — not the polite, princess/sylph/fairytale type, but the kind that let her soar, jump, turn, and “dance, dance, dance.” For her, the big attraction was ballet’s physicality. “I have always been fascinated with the geometry inside and outside the body. What you are drawing in three-dimensional space is based on physics. Ninety-eight percent of ballet makes perfect sense of what you want to do physically.” She even took a year’s training in Pilates to understand the body’s mechanics from a different perspective.

Seiwert became a good dancer, but she has the potential to become a great choreographer. She quite possibly is the Bay Area’s most original dance thinker, taking what some consider a dead language and using it as a 21st century lingo to tell us something about who we are. Monopoly took on the corporate glass ceiling. It’s Not a Cry looked at the difficulty of letting go even though a relationship has died. Static explored our tendencies to accentuate differences instead of seeing underlying commonalities.

As a choreographer, Seiwert credits much of her development to the late Michael Smuin, in whose Smuin Ballet she performed for nine years, even though his choreography could not have been more different from her own. Current Smuin Artistic Director Celia Fushille appointed Seiwert as choreographer in residence for exactly that reason. With Smuin Ballet, she will face her biggest challenge yet: choreographing Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, which premieres next spring at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

But it’s for her own pick-up company, Im’ij-jre, that Seiwert is creating her most experimental work. It’s there that she works toward overcoming her fear of creating “the same ballet over and over.” In Relying on Fragmentation, she worked with controlled improvisation. In Light Essays, her dancers collaborated with set and light designer Marc Morozumi. Her most daring sharing of responsibility occurred in last year’s White Noise, with Berlin-based software artist Frieder Weiss.

Seiwert comes from a long family line of piano teachers, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she often lets music influence the kind of ballet she chooses to make. She doesn’t eschew the classics, but favors the music of our own day. She draws on a variety of sources, from Kevin Volans to Otis Redding, Steve Reich to Leonard Cohen, Zoe Keating to Morton Feldman.

Three years ago, while working with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s CHIME mentoring program, Seiwert met poet-performer (and 2003 Goldie winner) Marc Bamuthi Joseph and used some of his work within Double Consciousness, a solo for her former colleague Charlie Neshyba-Hodges. “I just so much regretted that I couldn’t have Marc on stage,” she remembers. Next May, Seiwert will get her wish. Atlanta Ballet recently commissioned a new work from her; Bamuthi Joseph will help bring it to life when it premieres. (Rita Felciano)

www.amyseiwert.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Ramón Ramos Alayo

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Ramón Ramos Alayo

Whoever coined the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” didn’t foresee an artist like Ramón Ramos Alayo, who is a stunning dancer, a socially committed choreographer, a passionate advocate of Afro-Caribbean culture, scholar of Yoruba spirituality, and an inspiring teacher of modern dance and salsa.

With his tall, powerfully built frame, Ramos Alayo is a mesmerizing presence whether he dances the West African Warrior God Ogun, the Tibetan Lord of Death, the son in La Madre — his tribute to family — or a prisoner trying to shed his shackles. Most recently he assumed Bob Hope’s mantle — unusual even for an open-minded artist like him — by spending a month entertaining American troupes stationed in Europe. “It was a good experience,” the Cuban-born dancer explains. “It was needed. These people have no entertainment. All they do is walk around with guns all day.”

Ramos Alayo regularly returns to Cuba. Next year he’ll go to choreograph and, even more important, to take classes. “The training in Cuba is very strict. There is no choice — you have to go to class,” he says. At 11, he began studying modern and folklórico. He still remembers that unless you met established standards, you couldn’t move to the next level. That kind of discipline paid off. Locally, he has danced with ensembles and choreographers as diverse as Robert Moses’ Kin, Zaccho Dance Theater, Sara Shelton Mann, and Krissy Keefer.

Ramos Alayo has two other passions: choreography and spreading the word about Caribbean culture.

For his Alayo Dance Company, he uses song, music, visuals, and narration to create theatrically potent works that include Afro-Cuban, modern, folkloric, and popular dance styles. Structurally these pieces can be rough, but they have an intoxicating quality — and often a no-holds-barred political perspective — that can prove irresistible. “Mixing things the way he does comes to him by nature and training,” Deborah Valoma, textile artist and costume designer for some of the choreography, explains. “The results are vibrantly alive pieces, approached from an unusually broad set of disciplines.”

After Rain looks at destruction and regeneration from an individual and social perspective. Blood and Sugar traces the passage of slavery through history and geography. A Piece of White Cloth metaphorically explores the movement of culture from Africa via Cuba to the Bay Area. These are big-themed endeavors, but Ramos Alayo also embraces athletic intimacy in works such as Wrong Way and last year’s Grace Notes. Still, Keefer, who first met Ramos Alayo when she took over Dance Mission Theater in 1999, appreciates him above all as a storyteller. “There are so few choreographers in modern dance who create narratives,” she explains.

The Cuba Caribe Festival, which Ramos Alayo founded in 2003, has become a mini ethnic dance festival, showcasing groups from the Cuban diaspora on the first weekend and Ramos Alayo’s ensemble on the second. The festival is always a rollicking, joyous affair. If sometimes there is a friendly rivalry between ensembles, it’s all in good spirit.

In the past, most of Cuba Caribe’s participating groups have been grounded in folklórico traditions. Lately, however, reflecting both the changes taking place within that community and Ramos Alayo’s personal interests, modern dance groups like Paco Gomes and Dancers and Liberation Dance Theater have made successful appearances. Master classes, workshops, and lectures augment the offerings.

Just how successfully Ramos Alayo will be in helping the Caribbean diaspora deepen its roots in the Bay Area remains to be seen. He has two daughters. “One of them is a dancer, the other a soccer player.”

www.alayodance.org; www.cubacaribe.org

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

Paradise lost

Andrew Lam
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0
Paradise lost

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Expanding like a landscape, the view into ODC’s theater from its narrow hallway entrance has become a theatrical experience. Passing through, you can’t help but be in a good mood. For the site’s official opening program, ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis invited two local choreographers of quite different temperament to create their own scenery. Planned or not, Yannis Adoniou and Ben Levy explored similar territories — the debt that each of them owes to his heritage as an artist and human being. Adoniou is of Greek and Levy of Jewish Persian descent. Neither lapsed into sentimentality; the two pieces were fierce and dark, and each connected like a powerful punch.

Adoniou based Kunst-Stoff’s Rebetiko on the underground music that Greek emigrants brought with them when they were forcefully expelled from Turkey in the early part of the 20th century. It’s a work in which haunting memories and contemporary pain flow through choreography that whimpers, rebels, and howls yet finishes on a note of peace, or at least resignation. At 45 minutes, Rebetiko is a stretch for its material. Nonetheless, it is perhaps Adoniou’s most integrated and finest work to date. Marina Fukushima, Chin-chin Hsu, Daniel Howerton, Daiane Lopes da Silva, and Julia Stiefel were the ferocious dancers; Catherine Clambanevea the excellent singer.

Adoniou plunges his refugees into a sea of darkness (fabulous lighting by Lisa Pinkham) and ominous city sounds (music and songs by Minos Matsas). They struggle, hide, escape, and survive — barely. Whips lash, ropes imprison, bodies are pulled to ground. Lopez da Silva whirls herself into a fury like a goddess of revenge and Howerton runs, hunted by invisible pursuers. Hsu seems stunned, frozen in deep plié or doubled over. Yet out of the darkness emerges a ray of hope, a tentative Greek folk dance duet for Howerton and Fukushima. Still, at the end he collapses — a man overcome, a culture destroyed.

Setting off the gloom is a luminous banner that spills onto the stage. Under Pinkham’s masterful lighting, it variously suggests turbulent memories, a place of safety, a paradise lost. It also pays fine tribute to rebetiko’s culture of shadow puppetry.

In Our Body Remembers, LEVYdance strips away the layers that have accumulated in our bodies, sending us back into an inchoate state of being. If I understood choreographer Levy correctly, he looks at this unspooling with a mix of trepidation, bemusement, and awe. Sarah Phykitt’s lighting and set divides the stage into various areas of activity, making fine use of ODC’s new space. Kardash (Marty Huerta and Murat Bayhan) create the aural landscape.

Initially Our Body uses an epigrammatic, quasi-narrative structure, out of which bursts an increasingly physical flood of energy that borders on the violent. Drawing turbulent emotion and motion from Persian dance’s curvy lines and gentle undulations seems like an act of foolish bravado. Yet Levy succeeds admirably. A charming dance for hands pays tribute to Middle Eastern and Asian traditions of using fingers as something more than the end of an arm.

The dancers (Aline Wachsmuth, Ali Schechter, Morgelyn Tenbeth Ward, and Bianca Cabrera) are credited with movement. Levy provides the direction and — no doubt — the drive. My one reservation about Our Body pertains to the writing scene in which Wachsmuth gives and denies written cues about her body’s function. It didn’t add enough to the piece’s thrust.

The tempest starts slowly. Little tremors shake these women as they pass snippets of paper — gossip? memory? — to Wachsmuth, who becomes increasingly agitated. Putting heels on the barefoot dancers, Our Body hits high gear, sending the dancers down the runway, primping and posing, but with a decidedly aggressive note. When they begin tearing clothes off of each other, this is no mere catfight. It’s anger, chaos, and violence at its most extreme, and it’s frightening. Finally, stripped down with feathery snowflakes falling on them, the dancers awaken into a dream state. I couldn’t decide whether Levy was sarcastic or lyrical.

KUNST-STOFF AND LEVYDANCE

Thurs/28–Sat/30, 8 p.m.; $15–$18

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

 

 

Delicate power

Andrew Lam
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0
Delicate power

arts@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCHEHERAZADE

Thurs/21–Sun/24, $25–$75

Novellus Theatre

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Dance performance: “Keep Her Safe, Please!”

Sue Vaughan
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1

Many traditional dancers are no longer content with merely preserving a valuable heritage; they want to put their own stamp on it. So now there’s a new kind of dance, already conveniently labeled “ethno-contemporary.” Taiwanese-born, Indonesia-raised, and additionally US-trained Wan-Chao is at the forefront of this promising new genre. She dedicated Keep Her Safe, Please! Jakarta 1998 (Sat/16-Sun/17 at the Cowell Theater) to the victims of the anti-Chinese pogrom that included particularly vicious attacks against women.

The thoroughly contemporary work draws on both Chinese and Indonesian music and dance. Sharing the program will be Gadung Kasturi Balinese Music and Dance in three works. One of their dancers, Rotrease Regan Yates — ten years with Gamelan Sekar Jaya — has a whole encyclopedia of dance in her body: ballet, modern, Polish, Russian, Javanese, Cambodian, and of course, Balinese. 

Keep Her Safe, Please! Jakarta 1998

Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 1 p.m., $12-$20

Cowell Theater

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

 (415) 345-7575

www.fortmason.org

 

 

Hula heartbeat

Andrew Lam
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0
Hula heartbeat

arts@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 YEARS OF HULA: A SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY PERFORMANCE

Sat/16 through Oct. 24

Palace of Fine Arts Theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 392-4400

www.CityBoxOffice.com

 

On the way

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
On the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUMPSTART

Oct. 16, noon–11 p.m.

ODC Theater

351 Shotwell, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

 

Visionary movement

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Visionary movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRADITIONS ENGAGED

Thurs/30-Sun/3;

$25–$75 ($235–$295 for festival pass)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Fresh “Horses”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Fresh “Horses”

arts@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leap into fall

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Leap into fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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