Rita Felciano

Back to nature

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ODC/Dance opened its 38th season with world premieres by artistic director Brenda Way and co-artistic director KT Nelson. Neither Way’s In the Memory of the Forest nor Nelson’s Grassland broke new ground. But novelty is overrated. What you want from experienced choreographers is that they continue challenging themselves with ideas that are compellingly realized. If both works need some settling, the rest of the season should take care of that. In upcoming performances they will be presented as part of the repertoire, which will give them a warmer context than the opening gala did. The dancers, who now include Robert Dekkers and Vanessa Thiessen, look as good as you may want them.

Nelson set her Grassland to a commissioned score by Brazilian composer Marcelo Zarvos, with whom she collaborated for her 2006 Stomp a Waltz. It’s a restless, driving piece of music, forcefully interpreted by a piano quintet and well-suited to Nelson’s equally restless, driving choreography. She kept the relationship to the music elastic, sometimes following its rhythmic impulse but also anticipating its sweep or going against its complexity.

Even without direct references to natural phenomena, Grassland suggests a vast sense of open space. Dancers tore in and out of the wings; they walked or scurried on tiptoe as if trying to see beyond the horizon. Legs swept the floor like scythes; four-legged critters scrambled across. The beautifully individualized duets for Daniel Santos and Yaoi Kambara, Anne Zivolich and Corey Brady, and Elizabeth Farotte and Jeremy Smith involved collisions and interlockings that then split, slithered, or scooted apart. The whole suggested a pulsating sense of aliveness, sometimes almost too much to take in.

Way’s elegiac In the Memory of the Forest was inspired by her mother-in-law’s escape from Poland in 1941 to find the man she loved. The work ended with parts of a recording — incorporated into Jay Cloidt’s musical score — of Iza Erlich telling her story. The audio was fragmented, pensive, and a little scratchy, just like Way’s choreography. Instead of fashioning a narrative, Way explored the anxiety, uncertainty, and determination — as well as the innocence and sense of loss — inherent in Erlich’s experience. More than anything, this is a piece about remembering. Cloidt’s music was multilayered and supportive; in the hands of Elaine Buckholtz’s set and lighting design, David and Hi-Jin Hodge’s video work looked first rate.

The piece opened with a stunning line of hand-holding dancers stepping from video images of woods; their line then began to fracture as if an earthquake had broken the ground beneath them. Joining them were video images of white-clad dancers who accumulated until they gave the sense of a world about to drown. But Way kept the focus on the private. Couples fused and separated, sometimes like silhouettes, sometimes very physically. Kambara was the heroine who flitted hither and yon. A limp Zivolich, dragged around by Santos, seemed to be an alter-ego whom Kambara befriended. In good movie tradition, it was not the men’s uniform gestures but Cloidt’s sound track that terrified. When Kambara finally threw herself against a slightly overwhelmed looking Smith, both froze and began to turn like music box figurines, while the shadows kept pace with their own whirling dance.

ODC/DANCE DOWNTOWN

Through March 29, $10–$45

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.odcdance.org

“Fridays at the Ballet”

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PREVIEW By now the fact that San Francisco Ballet is one of the hottest ballet companies in the country is no longer news. It’s also common knowledge that ballet is an extremely expensive art form. Ticket prices reflect that unfortunate reality. That’s why SFB’s "Fridays at the Ballet" are such a good deal. For $59 (or even less if you shop around) you get a performance plus drinks afterward in the War Memorial Opera House lobby. The first of this season’s "Fridays" features Helgi Tomasson’s lovely, romantic On a Theme of Paganini (2008) and two glories of the repertoire — Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and The Concert. The SFB premiere of Antony Tudor’s 1936 Jardin aux Lilas celebrates Tudor’s 100th birthday with an early work that is perhaps his all-time masterpiece. Its drama, its heat, its agony are underground; nothing is spelled out, everything is implied. Yet this story about love acknowledged and love denied will haunt you. Jerome Robbins’ 1956 hilarious The Concert strikes an altogether different note. Ballet doesn’t take to comedy easily, so Robbins was in for a challenge — but he watched silent movies and studied comedic timing. His mayhem in the concert hall has become a classic, and SFB has the dancers to pull it off. It’s the first of Robbins’ choreographies set to Chopin, a composer he would use very differently in later works, and all you can do is pity the poor pianist who has to contend with the kind of audience Robbins gave him. "Fridays at the Ballet," with a different program, returns April 3.

"FRIDAYS AT THE BALLET," Fri/20, 8 p.m., $59, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. www.sfballet.org/fridays

Project agora’s “With (& Without) Words”

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PREVIEW In 2006 Kara Davis and Bliss Kohlmyer Dowman founded project agora as an umbrella organization under which they could present their own choreography. Strong and experienced performers — Davis with Kunst-Stoff and Janice Garret and Dancers; Kohlmyer Dowman with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Robert Moses’ Kin — the two got to the point where realizing other choreographers’ dances became less attractive and creating their own work grew more compelling.

For With (& Without) Words, Davis went solo. She hooked up with soprano and songwriter Kary Stephan for an evening of songs and dances in a format in which a dance may be performed in silence and a song without dance. Davis and Stephan had admired each other from afar but decided to work together when they found that they had more in common than either initially had thought. Both were classically trained: Davis in ballet, Stephan in opera. Yet both had vastly expanded their artistic interests since those early days. For Davis, the idea of performing to live music became irresistible, while Stephan had watched and taken some of Davis’ modern dance classes and found she liked the experience.

The resulting collaboration will run in something akin to a salon format at the Community Music Center with the audience surrounding the vocalists and dancers. Davis’ veteran and new colleagues Nol Simonse, Marina Fukushima, Daniel Howerton, and Sierra Stockton will perform, and Stephan will be accompanied by a chamber music trio.

PROJECT AGORA’S WITH (& WITHOUT) WORDS Fri/13–Sat/14 and March 20–21, 8 p.m.; $10 at door only. Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF. (415) 509-2124

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

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PREVIEW If success breeds success, why has Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater not had any imitators? The company celebrated its 50th anniversary in December, and Revelations will be half a century old next year. Yet Ailey and Revelations continue to be as unique as they were on Jan. 31, 1960, when the company thought the work had failed because the audience greeted it with a stunned silence. Then, of course, the roof came down, and Revelations continues to move audiences around the globe. So would the Ailey company be such a hit wherever they go without Revelations? It’s on every single program of this year’s Berkeley run, and my suspicion is that it wouldn’t.

Still, the company has more going for itself than one masterpiece. For one thing, there are the dancers. They all are virtuosic, generous, and committed to each other. A sense of inclusivity was also key to Ailey and continues to be vital for artistic director Judith Jamison. Ailey never wanted this to be an Ailey-only, American-only ensemble. Today the company still takes chances — with younger choreographers such as Hope Boykin, whose 2008 work Go in Grace will be on Program A. Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen’s 1997 Solo, also seen at San Francisco Ballet, will be on Program D, as will Festa Barocca, a 2008 commission from the Italian Mauro Bigonzetti. One definite highlight should be the West Coast premiere of Ailey’s 1969 piece Masekela Language on Program C. It makes you wonder, what took them so long?

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Wed/4–Fri/6, 8 p.m.; Sat/7, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun/8, 3 p.m.; $36–$62. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Jerome Bel’s “Pichet Klunchun and Myself”

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PREVIEW In Europe, French dancer-choreographer Jerome Bel’s work has earned him the nickname of the "pope of anti-dance." While it’s true that Bel has a tendency toward pontificating on contemporary performance theories, and his work — minimalist in terms of movement, maximalist in terms of embracing the ordinary human body — stays far outside the parameters of what dance audiences might expect, he is anything but anti-dance.

He lives and breathes dance — the relationship between performer and choreographer, the persona and the person, the meaning and the content, the concepts of absence and presence. This type of theory-driven work has gained him ardent admirers as well as virulent detractors all over Europe.

To some American observers, his approach recalls the coolness of the Judson Church dancers of the early 1960s. But Bel is much more a creature of the theater than the Judson people ever were — or pretended to be. Communication with an audience is a key motivating factor of his practice. With Pichet Klunchun and Myself, Bel has succeeded in reaching his viewers more than he ever thought he might: the work has been a hit ever since that first, almost accidental encounter between Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun and Bel during the 2005 Bangkok Fringe Festival. Some super-savvy presenter hooked them up for an interview onstage in which the two artists were supposed to question each other about their respective disciplines. What has evolved from this meeting is an evening of wide-ranging conversation and dance demonstration by two artists whose lives literally evolved worlds apart but who found themselves connected and separated in ways neither could have dreamed of.

JEROME BEL’S PICHET KLUNCHUN AND MYSELF Tues/3, 8 p.m., $15–$20 (ticket buyers receive 50 percent off to David Rousseve’s Saudade March 5–7). Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

San Francisco Ballet’s “Swan Lake”

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PREVIEW Maybe it was not the best move politically for San Francisco Ballet to schedule a new, no doubt very expensive version of Swan Lake just now. But a lot — besides the pragmatic "you have to spend money to make money" — can be said for Helgi Tomasson revisiting the world’s most popular ballet. In European-derived dance, Swan Lake is the great classical achievement. Theater has Hamlet; the opera has The Marriage of Figaro; and ballet has Swan Lake.

When Tomasson joined SFB in 1985, the company had a 50-year history of presenting contemporary ballets — and had performed Willam Christensen’s Swan Lake in 1940 and Balanchine’s one-act version in 1953. But the emphasis throughout SFB’s history had been on new work, an approach that had taken them a long way. Still, Tomasson knew that the dancers of a great ballet company need the classical idiom. It creates and refines technique and roots the dancers in a living tradition. So in 1988 he choreographed Swan Lake even though he was a relative neophyte as a choreographer.

It was a risk — and a smash popular success, and by now, its sets and costumes have more than amortized. Twenty years later audiences and dancers deserve the rethinking by a much more mature artist who in the interim has created a truly great company. Tomasson is no revolutionary: choreographically this Swan Lake will respect the tradition. However, there will be a first: designer Jonathan Fenson has worked in the West End of London and on Broadway. He has seen little ballet and has never designed one.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET’S SWAN LAKE Sat/21, Tues/24, Feb. 26–28, 8 p.m.; Sun/22, Feb. 28 and March 1, 2 p.m.; Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m.; $45–$255. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. (415) 865-2000, www.sfballet.org

Spirited

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For its opening weekend, the fifth Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now relocated to Laney College in Oakland, once a focal point for local dance in the 1990s. The suggestion that Laney’s lovely theater — the best in the East Bay — might once again become available to outside dance presenters is wonderful to contemplate.

With six works, three of them world premieres, producers Laura Elaine Ellis and Kendra Kimbrough Barnes hit the spot on opening night. The pieces spanned a wide spectrum of styles and experiences, indicative of the spirit of generosity and support that permeates this festival. Black Choreographers continues this weekend and Feb. 20–21 with new programs at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco.

Jaime Wright’s Envelope in Blue — for budding ballerinas Alyson Abriel, Alissa Baird, and Sarah Wellman — opened the program. Unpretentious but lovingly tended, the gentle new ballet blossomed and curled in on itself. Premiering with a dynamite performance by choreographer Rashad Pridgen — alongside Byb B. Bibene, Juanita Brown, and Sheena Johnson — Motif Performance Group’s first-rate Interludes to Intimacy synthesized a volatile cocktail of dance languages that veered between the discipline of stepping and the freedom of jazz. On the other end of the continuum from Envelope in Blue, Mind over Matter’s first performance of the hot and heavy Where you at?! boiled over with sass, sex, and attitude.

The mix of hip-hop and physical comedy in Sometimes was irresistible: dahrio wonder and robert d. lupo, a.k.a. Neopolitan, proved once again how theatrically pungent their work has become. Antoine Hunter is a gorgeously expressive long-limbed dancer whose passionate Now People traveled between utmost despair and the shining heights of hope. His ensemble piece Bullet in the Head, however, needs a lot more structure and discipline to hold its disparate elements together. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/13–Sat/14 and Feb. 20–21, 8 p.m.; Sun/15, 7 p.m.; $10–$15. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. www.bcfhereandnow.com

“A Modern World: Latino Perspectives”

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PREVIEW Walk the streets of San Francisco and look at the map of California, and you’ll notice so many roads and towns with Spanish names that you’ll be struck by the fact that we often take their presence for granted. Little wonder, since the Spanish, Mexicans, and other Latinos have played a major part in the Bay Area longer than many other demographic groups. Likewise Hispanic writers, painters, musicians, and dramatists have slowly but surely become part of our cultural ecology. Dancers — partly for economic, partly for cultural reasons — have had a harder time finding a place for themselves in the patchwork tapestry that is Bay Area dance. But they are beginning to make their voices heard, not only as interpreters and performers, but as creators of their own works.

Still, when David Herrera looked around, he found a Black Choreographers Festival, a Women on the Way Festival, and a Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Festival — but no Latino festival. So "A Modern World: Latino Perspectives" is his attempt to gain visibility for choreographers of his heritage. Inspired by his mother, Herrera examines the societal role of Hispanic women in his own works, Seguimos/We Continue and Sin Vencer: Amigas y Comunidad. In Love Beyond Body, the Brazilian-born Paco Gomes looks at how a profound desire to love can open people beyond the limits set by sex, gender, class, and religion. Jacinto Vlach, who two years ago founded her own Liberation Dance Theater, created SSL (Spanish Second Language) based on her experience as a non-Spanish-speaking Latina traveling through Central America while searching for her identity. 

A MODERN WORLD: LATINO PERSPECTIVES Fri/13–Sat/14, 8 p.m., $17. The Garage, 975 Howard, SF. (415) 885-4006

Ode to Joy

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REVIEW Sean Dorsey’s new Lou is a gem. Deeply felt, splendidly shaped, Dorsey’s most ambitious project yet tells a tale of vulnerability, passion, joy, and transcendence. It’s the story of one human being: transgendered writer, lover, and poet Lou Sullivan, who died in 1991. Dorsey, who was born a woman and lives as a man, used Sullivan’s extensive archives to create a portrait of a man who had the bravery and persistence to do what he thought was right, not only for him but others. Isn’t that what the mythic heroes used to do — slay the dragons within and without? Yet an important story does not necessarily translate into good dance or theater. Lou, however, is very good.

Dorsey framed the story within the larger current debate on history. The scholar, politician, or family record keeper who gets to tell the story, or as Dorsey put it, build the "house" that contains the records, is the one who shapes our present and future perceptions of what happened. In this instance the multitalented Bay Area writer, actor, dancer, and thinker has pulled an involving, theatrically viable piece from the thousands of possibilities his research must have suggested. He selected judiciously, opting for about dozen episodes at the center of which is a rollicking paean to love, sexuality, and ecstasy. Words, movement, music, and narration blend into a beautifully modulated dance-theater piece. The family portrait is hilarious; the delicate moment when Dorsey strips off his shirt feels as pure as freshly fallen snow; the lack of recognition of himself in the mirror is poignant; and the "Perfect Day" duet aches with beauty and grief. Working with the excellent Brian Fisher, Juan de la Rosa, and Nol Simonse, Dorsey chose an unadorned, intense contact movement style with the hug as a central motive that works. A small quibble. Lou has about three endings — that needs to be rethought.

Gloves on

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PREVIEW Leslie Seiters entered college as a visual artist — and left it as a choreographer. Or at least that’s what her MFA diploma from Ohio State University says. Seiters prefers to call herself a director. "I am allergic to ‘choreography,’<0x2009>" she says from her home in San Diego. "When something looks ‘choreographed,’ it turns me off."

Seiters, who lived and worked in the Bay Area between 2002 and 2007, has nothing against the craft of choreography, of course. In fact, her own works are exquisitely crafted. But she doesn’t want to see the hand of the maker because she feels it keeps her from entering a piece and having it speak to her in an unmediated manner.

Seiters left Ohio right after graduation and relocated to San Francisco, where she worked and performed with Jo Kreiter, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Jess Curtis, and Sarah Shelton Mann. All the aforementioned artists have a strong commitment to contact improvisation, which is characterized by its immediacy and the performers’ ability to remain present in the moment — an approach that has influenced Seiters’ own work. The physicality of things — an object, a move — continually fascinates her. Seiters differs, however, from her colleagues — and just about any other dancer working in the Bay Area — in her acute and exceedingly refined interest in using objects beyond their function in dance as props.

In a Seiters’ piece — she calls them installations — the edge between the animate and inanimate material is often blurred. She might have dancers double each other’s movements so precisely — as they did in such tiny danger (2003) and an attic/an exit, which premiered at last year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival — that they begin to look as if they had been set in motion by an outside force. Or they might appear like a single image that, for some mysterious reason, split in two only to merge again. "I love repetition," she explains. "This may go back to my visual background, where I would sculpt by wrapping and wrapping or cutting and cutting over and over again."

At the same time, the objects — all quite ordinary — often acquire a life of their own. Sometimes this can be quite disconcerting. When two dancers slide their arms into suspended jackets, the garments begin to manipulate the women. Dozens of suspended teacups keep up their clinking chatter long after their users have left them behind. Huge shoes move people who step into them. Dancers in paper dresses recede into and are swallowed by identically patterned wallpaper. And what about the woman on a swing, seen through a hallway, who never alters her trajectory? At what point does she become the pendulum of some unseen time machine?

Seiters’ work is both immensely playful and physically sturdy in the way she treads that thin line — she confesses to an affinity with magical realism — between the everyday and the fantastic. The process allows the familiar to become more so, even as it grows strange. For her, dance must not be pinned down, but kept open-ended. "I like it when dancers can take a movement, and turn it into a question," she says.

For the Bay Area premiere of Incidental Fear of Numbers at CounterPULSE this weekend, Seiters and her Little Known Dance Theater is partnering with Lux Borealis, a modern dance company from Tijuana, Mexico, whose "intelligence and physicality in the way they use weight and motion" Seiters admired. It’s her first full-evening performance and her most ambitious work yet. Included as part of the performance will be lots of tops and at least one very tall stack of yellow pages with a turntable on top. She also loves the sound of gloves on a cardboard floor.

INCIDENTAL FEAR OF NUMBERS

Fri/30–Sat/31, 8 p.m., $10–$15

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org

“Japan Dance Now”

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PREVIEW What does avant-garde Japanese dance look like? Butoh is 40 years old. Eiko and Koma have been working their version of slow dancing for three decades. What about dancers who have grown up in a high-tech, high-velocity, video-drenched urban environment? We at least get glimpses of the movies, comics, and pop music that are part of their lives. Once in a while, a company like the Condors will come through town on their way to somewhere else. But for the most part, our exposure to that type of edgy new dance — highly influenced by electronic media and sophisticated in its use of those elements — remains nil.

Now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is making an attempt to open minds and ears to new moves from Japan. Next month they bring back Papa Taruhamara, and this weekend they present three companies in a performance titled "Japan Dance Now" on their first stop of a three-city tour of the states. Baby-Q, a multimedia company that includes a robotics specialist, is directed by choreographer Yoko Higashino. The group stages her solo E/G-Ego Geometria. Nibroll’s seven athlete-dancer-comedians are taking on the everyday in their excerpt of Coffee. Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club is an all-female ensemble with serious hair. The company describes The End of Water as an exploration of aspects of femininity from a pop butoh perspective.

JAPAN DANCE NOW Thurs/29–Sat/31, 8 p.m., $25–$30 (On Sat/31 audience members receive special entrance to the post-performance "Big Idea" party, 9 p.m.-midnight, in the Grand Lobby and Galleries). Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Fill her up

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REVIEW In the late 1990s, Mary Alice Fry, artistic director of the now defunct Venue 9, found a hole. She has been filling them ever since.

The January performance calendars at her theater and many other local small venues, she noticed, were empty. At the same time her curatorial experience had shown that women artists still had a harder time getting noticed than their male counterparts. "So many of them," Fry said, "struggle with multiple responsibilities of mortgages, children, two or three jobs, keeping relationships going." So she started the Women on the Way Festival, now in its ninth year, to create "a stepping stone" for local women performers.

After Fry lost her lease on Venue 9, she moved the Festival to the Shotwell Studios and to Joe Landini’s Garage. For reasons of practicality and availability, WOW’s lineup changes every night. The performers seem to enjoy what, to an outsider, looks like a complicated format. "They like sharing the stage and seeing each other’s work," Fry explained. "For them it’s about standards and not competition. These women are pumped up and work and scramble and always want to do more."

While this year’s 17 performers working in theater, the circus, comedy, and dance are mostly up-and-coming, WOW also invited at least two highly experienced artists. Molissa Fenley and Nina Wise have each been working for more than three decades apiece. Each will present a world premiere.

On opening night, Jan. 15, the Garage hosted two soloists and a quartet. While none of the three pieces broke revolutionary ground, each had that spark of effervescence that makes one want to see where these artists are going. They deserve a bigger audience than they got.

Ara Glenn-Johanson’s based her earthstepper on a 10th-century English poem, "The Wanderer." As a choreographer for herself, she proved to be rather heavy-handed as soon as she moved beyond a rather basic gestural vocabulary. But she is a strong, expressive vocalist — both live and in duets with herself on tape — and her solo became an intermittently moving meditation on loneliness and perseverance.

Gretchen Garnett’s Edited for Time needs more editing for time, but impressed the audience with the ambition, if not quite the realization, of a rigorously conceived study in formal structure. With an extended duet for Garnett and the beautifully expressive Leah Samson, the piece started with simple swaying motions and quickly evolved into patterns of elastic tension that would snap, only to be picked up again. Edited looked full of contradictions, pre-ordained accidents, and surprising repetitions. The other committed dancers were Becca Rufer and Chad Dawson.

Despite having what must be one of dance’s more convoluted titles, Pfannenstiel Incision Marks the Spot, Lenora Lee’s solo was a stark, tightly choreographed portrait of one woman’s fear and anguish about her own body — Pfannenstiel was the surgeon who invented the so-called bikini cut. With her feet planted as if nailed to the ground and her hands veering between tendrils and claws, Lee pulled, yanked, spread, and hung her guts inside out. Performed in silence, Pfannenstiel was small in scale, but it resonated in a big way.

WOMEN ON THE WAY FESTIVAL

Through Feb. 1

Thurs-Sun., 8 p.m., at the Garage, 975 Howard, and Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St., SF

$15-$25

(415) 289-2000, 1-800-838-3006

www.ftloose.org

Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenco

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PREVIEW Two years ago when Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenco filled Zellerbach Hall to the rafters and awarded its performers with a standing ovation the likes of which Cal Performances probably had not experienced in a while, I felt very much like an outsider. I am crazy about flamenco, yet it was only when Barrio took to the stage that I got an inkling of why that southern Spanish form, which reaches deep in that country’s Arabic heritage and perhaps even further into its even more ancient gypsy roots, still manages to take my breath away in the 21st century.

Every pause, every rhythmic explosion, every serpentine turn spoke of something inside her that needed to come out. It was powerful, intimate, absolutely theatrical, and totally genuine. She was defiant, playful, and mysterious — frequently all at once. It was an unforgettable performance that probably would have been even better in a smaller venue — this tiny woman held 2,000 people in the raised palm of her hand.

The rest of the company is by no means simply backup for Barrio. These are superbly trained performers who manage to hang onto their individuality despite the constraints of this type of highly controlled, technically virtuosic performance. Company director Martin Santangelo, who got his start on the stage with El Teatro Campesino, knows how to put together sizzling shows. But the primary reason to welcome this company’s return is Barrio.

SOLEDAD BARRIO AND NOCHE FLAMENCO Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m., $24–$48. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642–9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Short and sweet

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PREVIEW Leave it to Joe Goode to come up at the end of the year with something as untried as a series of pieces, some as short as 30 seconds. Having enlisted the collaboration of Portland, Ore., singer-songwriter Holcombe Waller, Goode modestly calls the program small experiments in song and dance. The idea is to create works that, as Goode describes it, have music and dance "collide."

It’s another step in the choreographer’s ongoing search for new theatrical forms in which the aural and visual feed off each other, hopefully in surprising ways. On a practical level, this means Goode’s dancers will sing while Waller, whose voice has been described as "soft as white velvet," will dance. Waller, who arrives with two instrumentalists, is bringing to the performance his experience of stretching the concert format into more theatrical frameworks. Additionally, he has worked with dancers in past. But more than that, small experiments looks like it might be a meeting of two kindred spirits. There’s a wistfulness and poignant tenderness to much of Waller’s music that surely must have resonated with Goode. The opening night will be a special New Year’s Eve celebration and includes a pre-performance champagne reception and post-performance party.

JOE GOODE PERFORMANCE GROUP’S SMALL EXPERIMENTS IN SONG AND DANCE Wed/31, 9:30 p.m., $25–$125; Fri/2 and Sat/3, 8 p.m., $20–$25. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., SF.

(415) 561-6565, (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org, www.joegoode.org

Steps that impressed

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Looking back over the past year always entails a look forward, and perhaps the best part of 2008 is that in 2009 there is at least the possibility of the arts becoming part of the national dialogue. Two reasons warrant such optimism: during the Great Depression, people still wrote books, went to the theater and movies, and created canvasses. Modern dance went through its most crucial development in that time.

Furthermore, President-elect Barack Obama actually has an arts agenda — the first president to have one in a long while. That alone is encouraging. As for 2008, out of dozens of experiences, some inevitably have imprinted themselves more than others.

**If I had to choose the single most important event of the year, it would have to be the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s two-week residency at Cal Performances, culminating with Craneway Event at a former Ford auto plant in Richmond. It was a quiet, luminous, and utterly unforgettable Sunday afternoon of being in the presence of genius.

**San Francisco Ballet’s commissioning of 10 works by 10 choreographers in honor of its 75th anniversary could have been more adventuresome. Still, it signaled a commitment to the future. Margaret Jenkins’ and Julia Adam’s pieces were not critically acclaimed, but both choreographers dared to go outside the conventionally balletic.

**Ballet San Jose impressed with first-rate programming. Just Balanchine, Swan Lake, The Firebird, and The Toreador highlighted just how fine a group of dancers they are — with an excellent repertoire the South Bay can call its own.

**Shelley Senter set Trisha Brown’s 1979 hauntingly beautiful Glacial Decoy before the professionals and graduate students of Mills College dance department, titling it Glacial Decoy Redux. Adapted for a smaller stage, the 30-year-old piece looked as pristine and daring as ever.

**Joe Goode Performance Group made Wonderboy after a sabbatical spent recharging batteries with travel. With its touching tenderness and poignant exploration of loneliness and community, Wonderboy was vintage Goode, though in its use of the material — dance in particular, but also text, music, and puppetry — it was as fresh and imaginative as anything he has created.

**Former Joe Goode dancer, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People’s edgy and audience-challenging Retrospective Exhibitionist asked the year’s most intellectually trenchant questions about the nature of performance, perception, and theatrical manipulation.

**Hip-hop artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s: a mixtape for stage proved to be another of his meditations on what it means to be an African American, a man, a father, and a human being. Using a travel diary approach, he integrated language, music, and movement into a self-effacing monologue that was as freewheeling yet formally cogent.

**Certainly the most intriguing, but least promising, collaboration happened between Janice Garrett and Dancers and the Del Sol String Quartet. The idea was to have dancers and musicians physically interact with each other. The result was the sparkling StringWreck, a spirited entertainment with musical as well as choreographic substance.

**Jess Curtis/Gravity’s imagistic Symmetry Study #7 for Curtis and Maria Francesca Scaroni paired the two nude dancers in a structured contact improvisation in which their interlocking bodies became a piece of sculpture trying to find its form. They used the body at its most basic: weight, mass, and skeletal structure.

**The San Francisco International Arts Festival brought the year’s best surprise: Berkeley’s Art Street Theater’s US premiere of Yes, Yes to Moscow, a wistful and beautifully imaginative dance theater work that picked up where Chekhov’s Three Sisters left off. If you have ever wondered what would have happened if Olga, Masha, and Irina had made it Moscow, go and see Yes — if it ever returns.

Half-forgotten memories

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PREVIEW Choreographer-dancer Erika Tsimbrovsky and visual artist–performer Vadim Puyandaev may be new to the Bay Area, but they are old hands in the theater. Having more than a decade of what they describe as "audio-visual-kinetic" performance under their belts, mostly in Eastern Europe and Israel, they have also developed a fine nose for ferreting out good collaborators. For their new Scrap-Soup, they have enlisted some top Bay Area artists: musicians Sean Felt and Albert Mathias and, among others, dancers Suzanne Lappas, Kira Kirsch, and Andrew Ward.

The primary impetus that drives Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev’s work is an interest in exploring — through improvisational structures — different media and their relationships to one another. The Garden (2007), their first work in this country, looked at how gestures — musical, visual, and kinetic — can reignite half-forgotten memories. For Scrap they went through records of how information has been visually transmitted historically, via medieval manuscripts, hieroglyphs, and Japanese scrolls, and in contemporary mass communication, by way of billboards and computer screens. They want to know whether the preservation of content has been changed by today’s technology, and if so, how? Those are big theoretical questions, but the artists involved — all of them experienced improvisers — are hands-on, dig-into-the-material kinds of collaborators. Scrap‘s format will take the shape of a constantly shifting installation for which Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev set the parameters, but within which the performers are on their own to hopefully bounce off one another.

SCRAP-SOUP Fri/19–Sat/20, 8 p.m., $15–$20. Project Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, www.artaud.org/theater

Party hardy

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REVIEW Going to Smuin Ballet’s The Christmas Ballet feels like going to a big party. You’re glad to see some guests while others make you want to head for the door. Currently touring the Bay Area, the 15-year-old holiday extravaganza finishes its annual run at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Dec. 17 to 28.

It’s easy to see why this two-part concoction of 30 numbers, divided into The Classical Christmas and The Cool Christmas, has become a holiday staple. If the late Michael Smuin was anything, he was an entertainer. It’s what he loved and it’s what he was good at, even if some of us believe he could have been more.

During its Dec. 4 performance at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the company, now under the direction of Celia Fushille, showed itself in good shape. The 14 disciplined but free-spirited dancers injected the requisite sentiment and sass into choreography by Smuin and new additions by Amy Seiwert, Viktor Kabaniev, and Val Caniparoli. The Christmas Ballet lives by its musical choices. Smuin’s taste was far-reaching and inclusive: he loved pop as much as Bach, and his unabashed largesse enlivened the sometimes problematic choreography.

At its most objectionable, the choreography dips deep into the sentimental and skims the surface of great classical music as if it were whipped cream. But Smuin also knew when to step back. You can’t compete with "Veni Emanuel," or vocalists like Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. So he opted for simple strolling patterns, which became a theme weaving throughout the two hours. At its best The Christmas Ballet is unpretentious, musical, and witty.

Contrary to expectations, The Cool Christmas looked more dated than The Classical Christmas, which intersperses carols from around the world with selections from the symphonic repertoire. Cool‘s pop choices stopped at around 1980 — it could have used an injection of more contemporary fare. But don’t even think of touching Santa Baby.

The dancers were a joy to watch. Susan Roemer was lyrical, melodramatic, and super-vampy; Brooke Reynolds, dignified in some seriously convoluted partnering; Shannon Hurlbut, on the dot in his tapping; and Aaron Thayer, joyous and committed in everything he danced. As for Ted Keener’s Elvis, not quite, but he’ll get there.

SMUIN BALLET Dec. 17–20, 23, and 26–27, 8 p.m.; Dec. 20–21, 23–24, 26–28, 2 p.m.; Dec. 21, 7 p.m.; $18–$55. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 495-2234, www.smuinballet.org

The odd couple

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PREVIEW Do we have a new odd couple in town? At first glance Todd Eckert and Nol Simonse don’t seem to have much in common though both are tall, lanky dancers who allow themselves to disappear into other people’s choreography. Eckert’s steadying presence in Robert Moses’ Kin company contrasts strongly with Simonse’s febrile intensity in companies as diverse as Kunst-Stoff, Stephen Pelton Dance, and Janice Garrett and Dancers.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the two have in common a desire to strike out on their own. Unlike ballet dancers, who are still mostly trained to interpret within a given language, modern dancers learn early on to create language and content from within themselves. So last year Eckert and Simonse hooked up for a performance of their own works. They liked what they saw. So did audiences.

For Shared Space 2, an evening of world premieres, each artist will create a solo and a group piece. Eckert’s Routines of Chaos investigates compulsive behavior: his yet unnamed quartet looks at self-sabotage in connection to relationship building. Simonse’s How Fortunate the Man with None mixes his own material with some "borrowed" from other dancers. For his group piece on grief, he examines the concept of the journey as developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.

SHARED SPACE 2 Fri/5-Sat/6, 8 p.m., and Sun/7, 7 p.m.; $20. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. (415) 273-4633, www.dancemission.com

Let the rhythm hit ’em

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The exuberance bouncing off the walls of the Palace of Fine Arts at the Nov. 22 opening of the 10th annual San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest probably kept the audience in a buoyant mood well beyond the theater. These young dancers — and hip-hop is still primarily a young person’s art — presented a show that was sassy, skilled, and a hoot to boot.

Artistic director Micaya has developed a dual approach to programming, and it works. She showcases local hip-hop schools that are worthy of exposure and that bring in audiences, and features them with professionals who, increasingly, may come from abroad. This year, in its infinite wisdom, the US Department of Homeland Security denied visas to dancers from Russia and the Netherlands.

Still, the DanceFest carried on. By their very nature, the school performances are ensemble-oriented. To watch these dancers is to be drawn into the sheer joy of what they are doing. Split-second timing and constantly shifting relationships within the group compensate for the relative simplicity of the individual steps. The whole, with its sense of interlocking gears, is held together by a sometimes almost militaristic discipline. Yet the format is flexible enough to showcase individual talent.

The DanceFest also gauges hip-hop’s ongoing evolution. Having started in the ’70s as a popular expression — urban folk dancing rooted in African and African American practices — hip-hop has been moving from the streets to the theater, from the community center to the concert hall. Whether that means that hip-hop will lose its grounding in pop culture remains to be seen. It probably has already. But there are gains.

Returning to this year’s festival with their mesmerizing HipHop/Beebop was the first-rate MopTop Music and Movement from Philadelphia. Two years ago they took on the founding fathers. Last year it was The Wizard of Oz. This time they brought a fabulously slinky vision of a hot night on the town. With Buddha Stretch and Mr. Valentine in zoot suits and rakishly tilted hats, and Uko Snowbunny and B-girl Bounce in flouncing minis, they were a marvel of strutting control, flashing showmanship, and barely contained heat. Flawless’ Manipulation was indeed flawless in the way its two ingenious dancers — dressed in metallic hats and jackets under black lights — sent currents of energy into each other’s bodies, both to support and to control. It’s no surprise that they were the UK’s World Hip Hop Dance Champions in 2006. Another champion was one-man wonder, veteran hip-hopper Popin Pete from Electric Boogaloos. With appropriate wigs on hand, he unfolded popping’s history in one smooth take — from a vibrating ’70s style, to raucous ’80s moves, to today’s elegant, dinner-jacket-clad incarnation.

Breaksk8 Dance Crew from Indiana, on rollerblades, disappointed. While somewhat impressive for their technical skills, they performed This Is How We Roll with a studied nonchalance that was off-putting. Also new to the festival was the all-male Formality group from San Diego. Their well-performed Players Club had the energy of a traffic jam and stood out in its fresh use of arm gestures. SoulSector turned out to be the only company interested in exploring hip-hop’s capacity to delve into deep issues: their Reinvention: Headhunters was a tough examination of militarism and war.

There was much to enjoy in the studio-based ensembles — the clean and swift U.F.O. Movement among them. Sunset’s smartly staged and hilarious Toonz dressed its dancers as Looney Tunes characters. Its smallest elementary-school-age dancers, of course, got the biggest applause. If this year’s DanceFest proves one thing, it’s that the artists have barely begun to scratch the surface of the genre’s potential for entertaining and thought-provoking dance. Now if we can just get Homeland Security off their backs …

Irresistible ODC

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PREVIEW Some traditions are just too good to give up. I can forgo most holiday customs, except for singing carols, The Nutcracker, and a Tom and Jerry with lots of nutmeg and rum, preferably drunk from properly labeled china cups. Another, a peculiar San Francisco tradition is ODC/Dance’s The Velveteen Rabbit. It has proved remarkably sturdy and remains quite irresistible.

You’d think at a time when kids are growing up with anime and Nintendo games, there would be little interest in a story about a sawdust-stuffed rabbit and 10-foot-tall nanny who brooks no nonsense in the nursery. Yet KT Nelson’s 22-year-old adaptation of Margery Williams’ 1922 classic,with its whiff of upper-class British propriety, has not lost one iota of its charm. Nelson choreographed it when her son was young. Maybe that helped with the inspiration.

Another reason is that right from the beginning, ODC went for top quality in its choice of its collaborators. They could barely afford children’s author Brian Arrowsmith’s costumes and design, but what an investment that turned to be. The combination of Geoff Hoyle’s narration, Benjamin Britten’s score, and Rinde Eckert’s voice was inspired. By now ODC’s dancers may be able to dance their roles in their sleep — but it doesn’t show. They don the parts like a second skin and seem to enjoy themselves. Daytime performances, at 90 minutes, in a relatively small theater, should make Rabbit accessible even to the younger crowd.

THE VELVETEEN RABBIT Fri/28-Dec. 14, call for times, $15–$45. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org, www.odcdance.org

What do you remember?

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PREVIEW "You can surely remember episodes from your childhood. Do you consider some of them or several so precious that you wouldn’t want to do without them?" "Is there an experience or experiences among your memories that you would describe as mystic, spiritual, or religious?" "What is your earliest memory?" "Which episode(s) of a sexual nature do you remember particularly fondly?"

These are but a few of the 50 questions that have been floating around the Internet and on printed questionnaires this fall. If you answered any of them, there is a good chance that your observations may show up in one of the season’s more unusual theatrical experiments, The Execution of Precious Memories, a collaboration by Nanos Operetta, Kunst-Stoff, and Blixa Bargeld, who created the first Execution in 1994 in Berlin. The idea is to develop a piece of dance/music/theater piece from the memories of people who live in specific places. So far Executions have taken place in London, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Kraków, among other cities. This is the first American version. Bargeld became famous in the 1980s as a cofounder of Einstuerzende Neubauten, one of the first and most influential industrial bands. But the Berlin native and current San Francisco resident is also an artist steeped in dadaism, an architectural critic, and one of the more radical and fascinating thinkers on contemporary culture, particularly as it plays itself out in Germany. Nanos Operetta founder Ali Tabatabai claims Bargeld as an important influence on all their work.

THE EXECUTION OF PRECIOUS MEMORIES Wed/19-Sat/22, 8 p.m.; Sun/23, 7 p.m.; $20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, www.brownpapertickets.com, www.kunst-stoff.org

Inspiring at 89

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REVIEW After the Company’s opening night performance on Nov. 7, 89-year-old Merce Cunningham took to the Zellerbach Hall stage in a wheelchair. With his impish smile still intact but otherwise looking frail, he spread his hands. That’s when I started to cry for the second time that week. It’s what happens when history unfolds before your eyes.

Cunningham is the single most important 20th century choreographer still alive — and still working. The opening concert of his company’s two-week residence showed why: imagination, buoyancy, and impeccable craft. Nowhere was this more evident than in the breathtakingly beautiful Suite for Five (1953-58), the company’s first group piece — its male roles originally realized by Cunningham himself and our own blithe spirit, Remy Charlip. As performed by Julie Cunningham, Holley Farmer, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, and Marcie Munnerlyn, the work was crystalline in its transparent clarity. Every unadorned gesture, every gazelle leap, and every pivoting turn filled the stage with radical purity. One can only fantasize about what the original audiences must have thought at a time when Martha Graham and Jose Limon still dominated concepts of modern dance. Only Balanchine could rival Cunningham.

In this context the other two pieces, eyeSpace (2006) and BIPED (1999), with many more resources and 40 years of dance-thinking behind them, seemed almost tame. EyeSpace was made with the iPod generation in mind. You could either bring your own, or borrow one in Zellerbach’s lobby. Mikel Rouse’s score was made of environmental sounds — mostly urban but also from nature — and you superimposed the sounds you could find at the moment. Cunningham’s urgent choreography had the quality of bouncing water drops on a hot griddle. A dozen performers popped off the floor, in and out of the wings, into unisons, trios, and off-kilter solos in this good if not spectacular late Cunningham.

The astounding BIPED juxtaposed the 13 company members with three "virtual" dancers, created with Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser’s motion-capture technology. Projected onto a scrim of ever-changing light beams, the work suggested a voluminous universe whose spatial dimensions expanded and contracted, dwarfing or putting into relief the glorious performers. In this third viewing, BIPED still felt too long, and Gavin Bryars’ textured score didn’t help. For the metaphorically inclined, however, the piece’s pulsating sense of presence suggests nothing less than a physical universe made up of light and energy.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Fri/14–Sat/15, 8 p.m., $26–$48. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

LEVYdance

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PREVIEW LEVYdance company is small: only five performers. But they dance big — hugely physical, totally in charge — and they also think big. They once performed at ODC Theater, but that was too small. Last year they pushed themselves onto the much larger stage of Kenbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center, yet even that space proved too confining. So for the fall season LEVYdance created its own space on the street outside their studio, where they built three stages connected by catwalks. Audiences are interspersed between them. The location: one of the city’s smallest alleys — with very supportive neighbors. No wings or sets. Graffiti will have to do. Since it’s November, the company will provide hot beverages. For sweaters, blankets, and hats, you’re on your own. The program includes three world premieres: Physics, with a commissioned score by composer-DJ Mason Bates, which looks at the forces the body is subject to; Wake, a duet about the essence of communication for company veterans Brooke Gessay and Scott Marlow; and a yet-unnamed ensemble work performed to music from the Middle Ages. The event also introduces LEVYdance’s newest member, Aline Wachsmuth. Last year’s pop music-inspired and now-reworked Nu Nu completes the lineup.

LEVYDANCE Wed/12-Sat/15, 8 p.m., $20–$30. Heron Street, off Eighth Street between Folsom and Harrison, SF. www.brownpapertickets.com.

Erin Mei-Ling Stuart

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When Erin Mei-Ling Stuart packed her bags to leave her hometown of Fresno in 1992, she included her viola — because she had won a scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Here, however, she played so much that she developed tendinitis and had to take a break. That’s when dance kicked in. Big time.

The viola went into the closet, and Stuart started to study modern dance — she had dabbled in ballet as a child — first at City College and then in just about every studio she could find. She turned herself into a liquid, sensuously vulnerable performer who learned to work with anybody who piqued her interest. Some were choreographers who sought direct input from their dancers — Erika Chong Shuch, Jesselito Bie, Stephen Pelton, and Chris Black — while others, like Nancy Karp, Jennie McAllister, and Deborah Slater, created along more traditional, formal lines.

Stuart learned from both approaches and expresses no preference. "There is such freedom when you can make up movement, but also it’s wonderful when you can just show up and dance," she explains.

Along the way, Stuart started to choreograph, often creating vignettes with casual looks that belie the attention to detail behind their making. These sketches and miniatures are frequently funny, evoking not a guffaw but a chuckle. They bring to life characters we probably have known or whose experiences we have shared. And Stuart does so without a word — she works purely through movement. Remember your prissy elementary school teacher and the know-it-all class brat? Stuart did in Continuing Education (2006). Have you ever been in an elevator with one other person so different from yourself that you felt creeped out? Stuart has, in Between Floors (2002). Do you walk in a neighborhood of lost souls who nonetheless furtively relate to each other? You’ll recognize its inhabitants in Songs for You (2004). And do you live with roommates? She does in her most recent work Keyhole Dances.

Stuart freely confesses that her commitment to create formally cogent dances "rubs up against a desire to examine often overlooked aspects of everyday life," and that she likes to work with "the shared intimacy of daily experience." She knows that she is old-fashioned that way. "I can’t help it," she says. "I like to make dances about relationships."

What she sees — on the bus, on the street corner, in the coffee shop — is us, more or less bungling our way through the day-to-day grind. That’s where she gets her material. If there is a political component to her work — and I happen to think that there is — it is an implied criticism of the social institutions to which we commit ourselves or by which we let ourselves be trapped.

Stuart does skewer, but does so gently, focusing on the mess humans manage to create for themselves. For her recent excursion into a mess — Sara Shelton Mann’s My Hot Lobotomy, which looks at the difficulty of staying sane given our environmental policies — the dancer took her viola out of the closet.

www.emspacedance.org

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