in a blue tango with jules feiffer

viva la revolution

(I've left in a few phrases the editors removed--the ones that plant Morris in dance history but mean little to non-dance folks. quel dommage!)


Choreographer Mark Morris has never worn his politics on his sleeve. He hasn’t had to. Decades ago he established himself as a late baby-boomer choreographer who loves music to distraction and built not merely a dance company but a village whose residents stay with him for years and years. His life itself was political.

Now, in a program Thursday night at Cal Performance’s Zellerbach Hall, (continuing through the weekend), politics comes into sharp if quiet focus, signaling that Morris has evolved into a mature, often disquieted artist who sees the inextricable link between tragedy, pleasure, chaos, beauty and the political state.

While Morris has always cared about society, and has a deeply humanist point of view, it is only in the last half dozen years that he has become increasingly eloquent about the enduring values of a Republic. In this current program he meets us with both images of sweet, balanced society and of stirring visions of unhappiness, war and death. Iraq is never far from consciousness, nor are all the follies of the war makers and their war machines, not to mention internal extremists and the rabble.

In the night’s most stirring piece, “Empire Gardens,” with deliciously bright parade costumes by Elizabeth Kurtzman, Morris does what he does best—draws from early modern dance to interpret contemporary conditions, the way a modern musician might take a phrase of an old master and reconfigure it.



Set to the dissonant, multi-layered Trio for piano, violin and cello by Charles Ives, played brilliantly in the pit by Michi Wiancko, Wolfram Koessel and Colin Fowler, Morris dresses the corps in whimsical military stripes, moves them in angular semaphoric patterns, and evokes early German modern dance, military bandstands and commedia dell’arte all at the same time.

Like Ives who layers melodies and dissonant tonalities, including snippets of “Rock of Ages,” Morris is fearless in knitting together disparate elements—an Edvard Much scream and a Martha Graham frontier tableau; marching action and the mechanical style of Oskar Schlemmer. In the sheer jumble of conflicting impulses both aurally and visually, he presents a portrait of a childish, silly, but destructive brood unable to see their own folly.

“V,” choreographed to Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for piano and string, which closed the evening, has some similarly arresting visuals, especially when the dancers scrabble along the ground like athletes/beasts/soldiers trying to escape the battlefield while elegantly attired in deep blue shorts and sexy hopi coats

Avian formations abound, and flocking V patterns appear and reappear, as do beautiful couplings between the dancers dressed in white pants and tops and those clad in blue. As Schumann veers from the elegiac to the funereal and back, Morris follows; late into the piece, Morris seems to run on automatic, his ideas thinning before Schumann’s music runs out.

“Visitation” set to Beethoven’s soul-searching Cello Sonata No. 4 in C Major began the evening. Here Morris offers up another, quieter dance of loss and attachment populated by ghosts and memories in which partners are sucked away from one another as by a soft gravitational pull. From loss and dream of loss, the figures repeatedly assert a heroic response, one leg angled over the other, hands together on a hip as Beethoven lets the French song of revolution, the "Marseillaise," leak into the flow.

The company danced like a democratic tribe, moving with unaffected athleticism and joy, embodying through their attack, their commitment and their joy the humanism Morris so deeply prizes.

morning becomes eclectic

May/June preview

Eclectic best describes the dance that will be hitting the theaters in the upcoming month. The other word that comes to mind is profusion—so much is going on in between now and the end of June and so much of it is intriguing that it’s easy to see how a dance lover might yearn to double (or even triple-book) a Friday or Saturday evening. Fortunately or unfortunately, the limitations of the space/time continuum--not to mention city traffic and grumpy ushers--mean that most of us are subject to the one-night-one-dance limit. There is, however, no reason not to pack in several dance concerts a week.

For those of you who love your dance big, cheeky, humane and, ultimately, married to the music, you won’t want to miss the tribute to outgoing Director of Cal Performances Robert Cole, when Cal Performances winds down its 09 season with a bang--Mark Morris’ choreographic Big Bang, to be precise—L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato (The Cheerful, the Pensive and the Moderate).

This is a dance of ardent invention and charm set to, even, some would say, illustrating George Frederick Handel’s oratorio L’Allegro and created at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Belgium where the Mark Morris Dance Group was in residence from 1988 to 1991. As an elegant, indefatigable, and often bawdy music-driven pageant on states of being, it includes 24 dancers, singers from the UC Berkley Chamber Chorus and the glorious Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

L’Allegro is not only a capo lavoro for the dance maker but is also a winning tribute to Cole, who recognized Morris’ talent in the late 1980s and worked diligently over the ensuing years to bring the choreographer to the East Bay again and again. The partnership has paid off for Cal Performances, and also for Morris, who has found a welcome home in the East and West Bay and a world of top-flight musical talent here, from the late Lou Harrison to John Adams and the musicians of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.
DETAILS: 8 p.m. May 29-30, 3 p.m. May 31, Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $36-82. 510-642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Big goes not only for MMDG but for the Bolshoi, who appear the following weekend at Zellerbach Hall. The ballet company’s name means “big” or “grand” and the Bolshoi the first weekend in June is doing the big, little-seen La Bayadere by Marius Petipa, an exquisite ballet of classicism and exotica with some of the most spellbinding ensemble work in the dance canon. And music being Cole’s first love, the Berkeley Symphony will be in the pit playing the score by Ludwig Minkus.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. June 4-6, 2 p.m. June 6-7, Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $50-125. 510-642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

There is a tiny space on Howard Street in San Francisco that is one of the latest fringe dance spaces to emerge. It calls itself The Garage, and on May 17th it presents one night of sublime conceptual art improvisation in a program called “The Absence of Sequential Thought” by Non Fiction, so named because everything they do they do from life in the moment on stage. The group includes former Trisha Brown dancer Shelley Senter, who moves like water, conceptual artist and dancer Andrew Waas, and dancers Kelly Dalrymple-Waas, Adam Venker and Rosemary Hannon, with sound and video by Jerry Smith.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. May 17, The Garage, 875 Howard St. at 6th St. $10. 415-885-4006

After decades, you can still hear patrons of San Francisco Ballet grumble that the Smuin days were ever so much better than the SFB fare of today. I wonder if they know that Smuin Ballet lives on? If they’re serious and want to stop grousing, they should get themselves over to Walnut Creek or San Francisco to see what Cecile Fushille, Director, and Amy Siewert, Choreographer-in-Residence, are building for the company in Michael Smuin’s honor, and how they are keeping the showman’s flame burning. This season, the company premieres a work by Smuin and another by ballet maker Trey McIntyre.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. May 15-16, 2 p.m. May 16-17, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 3rd and Howard, SF. $18-55. 415.978.ARTS (2787) www.ybca.org/

8 p.m. May 22-23, 2 p.m. May 23-24. Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, $40-55. 925.943.SHOW (7469) www.lesherartscenter.org

We see far too little of Brooklyn-based Ronald K. Brown in the Bay Area, a choreographer who has pushed the dance vocabulary of the African diaspora to a new level of meaning and purpose on stage. This month he moves into performance art as he collaborates with nothing less than Nick Cave’s sound suit installation at the Yerba Buena Cener for the Arts galleries. Sound, costume and movement become one in this exciting experiment.

DETAILS: 7 p.m. May 28; 3 p.m. May 30-31, YBCA Galleries, 3rd and Mission, SF. FREE with Gallery admission.


The San Francisco International Arts Festival this year hosts German dance theater maker Sasha Waltz, who employs the flat visual style of television, the theatrics of stage, and the physicality of late 20th century dance to create often disturbing dancescapes. Sasha Waltz and Friends restage her “Travelogue I—Twenty to eight” about five combative roommates, a quintet you hope never to have to live among.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. May 27, 6 p.m. May 28, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, SF. $20. 415-399-9554. www.brownpapertickets.com/


Contra Costa Ballet, scaling nothing back no matter what the national trends or economic indicators are, is mounting Swan Lake, a new, two-hour production under the direction of school founders and renowned dancers Richard Cammack and Zola Dishong. What better way to give a youth company a demanding forum to test and hone their skills and a platform to mix with seasoned professionals? Wall Street could learn something from such humility and daring.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. May 29 and 2 p.m. May 30, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. $30-20. 925-943-SHOW.

When Julia Adam was a principal ballerina with San Francisco Ballet, audiences awaited her every new role with almost breathless anticipation. They asked: what will Julia be dancing? What will she open and how will she adapt the role?

Whimsical, lyrical, dramatic and witty, Adam was a musical dancer who was never content to just dance to the beats but instead filled out her assignments, whether the Ice Queen Myrtha in Giselle to Hans Van Manen’s drunken partygoer in “Black Cake,” with her large and generous personality. The Canadian-born ballet-and-modern-dance-trained ballerina is part a long but ignored tradition of brainy classical dancers capable of expounding on topics far outside of pliés, developées and pirouettes. She took on Marshall McCluhan’s communication theory when she choreographed “The Medium is the Message” in 1993 for the San Francisco Ballet’s Choreographic Workshop, where she was the only woman to join the roster of dancers to make their own work during a layoff when the ballet didn’t tour. She later gamely toyed with Newtonian physics when she choreographed “Newton: Three Laws of Motion” for the Lawrence Pech Dance Company in 1998.

High-octane, incisively crafted play is the simplest way of describing Adam’s style. She takes an idea like the three laws of motion and out of it makes a dance that is awash in an insouciant descent of apples and bodies, moving and at rest. Her beautifully shaped but misunderstood contribution to the New Works Festival, “a rose by any other name” brought an offbeat, modern humanism to the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale in which symbols and bravura deconstructions of ballet effortlessly unspooled to give the work enduring power. Next month Diablo Ballet premieres her latest venture in story dance with “The Little Prince,” the tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, with a cast of 30 dancers. The exquisite story is about a little prince whose home is an asteroid, B612, a distant place with three volcanoes and a rose. (Adam seems to like numbers, and clearly has a thing for roses.) And while it is inspired by a story whose first audience may be children, Adam once again constructs her tales the way all the best tales are built—for all ages, but with special poignancy for those of us old enough to understand subtexts and innuendo.

DETAILS: May 8-9, 7:30, and 2 p.m. children’s show Saturday. $18-48 (2 for 1 at 2 p.m. Saturday), Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. 925-943-SHOW or www.lesherartscenter.org

In its continuing nod to dance classics of the 20th century, Company C Contemporary Ballet rolls out Twyla Tharps’s dreamy “Little Ballet.” This dance was made in 1983 for then director of American Ballet Theater, Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose technical prowess enabled Tharp to play luxuriously with the forms, traditions and conceits of ballet. Here, most notably, it’s the conceit of an older male choreographer finding his muse in a young ballerina. Not seen in the area for 25 years, “Little Ballet” is another in Company C’s admirable stagings, offering audiences exposure to long-shelved work and affording talented Bay Area Kevin Delaney a chance to test himself against Tharp’s diabolical combination of rigor and ease. Also on Company C’s upcoming bill are Nikolai Kabaniaev’s premiere, “Dioscures,” the witty “boink!” by San Francisco Ballet’s Val Caniparoli, and Charles Anderson’s “Akimbo.”

DETAILS:
April 18, 2:30 and 8 p.m, $21-24, Spreckels Performing Arts Center, 5409 Snyder Lane, Rohnert Park. 707.588.3400 www.spreckelsonline.com; May 2, 8 p.m. May 3, 2 p.m. $20-30, Cowell Theater, SF. 415.345.7575 www.fortmason.org/performingarts/cowell.shtml; May 15-16, 8 p.m.. $25-40, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. 925.943.SHOW

Cal Performances gives us a dizzying array of dance as its season winds down, starting with the soap opera sudsyness of Russia’s Eifman Ballet in a modern take on “Eugene Onegin,” followed by Mark Morris Dance Company’s “L’Allegro, il Pensiroso ed il Moderato” (the joyful, the pensive and the moderate man) to Handel’s pastoral ode to poetry by John Donne, and concluding with the Bolshoi Ballet in the hauntingly beautiful 19th century “La Bayadere” (The Temple Dancer).

DETAILS: Eifman Ballet, May 1-3, 8 p.m. and 3 p.m., $36-62; Mark Morris Dance Company, May 29-31, 8p.m. and 3 p.m., $36-82; Bolshoi Ballet, June 4-7, 8 p.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. $50-125. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way. 510-642-9988. www.calperformances.org


And finally, if you care about dance originals and have yet to feast your eyes on one, Anna Halprin, now 89 and as vivacious as a fiery 50-year-old, is staging her latest creation, “Spirit of Place” at the beloved Stern Grove Concert Meadow, designed by Halprin’s renowned landscape architect husband, Lawrence Halprin. Few living couples have changed their respective fields as much as these two have. Anna Halprin digested the lessons of the Bauhaus and brought deep experimentation and play to dance, becoming the inspiration behind postmodern dance, while Larry Halprin took the Bauhaus ideas of democracy and simplicity and invested them in the contour of the landscape, where nature and civilization engage in a lusty and complex dialogue. In two performances on one day, Halprin and her cast of over 50 movers will embody ideas about the human form in conversation with nature and place. Or, as Larry Halprin put it, they will attempt to “create a mystical place where one would be inspired to reach into oneself."

DETAILS:
May 3, 11:30 pm and 2 p.m., FREE, Sigmund Stern Grove, 19th Ave. and Sloat Blvd., San Francisco. 415.252.6252 , www.sterngrove.org

marvelling at andrew

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

liable to prosecution

the stars of the john japserse evening came in constellations. the first on my list, since it shaped the entire production, was the hanger-tapestries that spilled from the flies, spectral and beautiful, a beauty heightened by bright crackling lights that ascended and descended during the 90 minute performance. i wondered only late into the evening what bizarre array of clothing the donated hangers might have held before the show. they carried few ghosts with them.

Second was the magic of Zena Parkinson 's music, which was as much a partner to the evening's performance as the dancers were to the movement. Harp wizard, winsomely dressed in a stylish confab of fed ex tyvek envelopes, the NY based musician plinked and tinkled and droned and otherwise gave life to the air and brought layers of sensation and thought to the action on stage that deepened and heightened it.

Then there was the group of elastic, protean movers who, combining fixed patterns with the danger of improvisation, wove their own tapestry. It was full of raw sensual energy and elegant physicality, not unlike the hangers themselves-isosceles triangle topped by a definite hook--the dancers' legs, which protruded repeatedly to stop and block onrushing action stuck out in space like the hangers' necks.

Jasperse is wry and profoundly ingenuous, his lithe body still expressive of the gawky kid, his balding head at odds with his delicate bone structure and nasal voice. He looks like he should always get to be a boy, although he has a man's concerns--the state of the world, for one.

"misuse liable to prosecution" didn't bill itself as a funeral, and clearly it was much more than simply a rite in honor of a species determined to move toward extinction (the very act of dancing defied our end); but the big issues were on the table--corruption, piracy, values that lead to pillage and plunder, obstruction and deflation. and with the bleating wail of a bagpipe as its player processed down the aisle at the night's close, and jasperse's fantasy of blowing the walls of the theater sky high to create otherwise impossible intimacy between his audience and his players, the terrible contradictions of living in the 21st century were upon us. this is, afterall, the century where the mad outcome of a world economic program of endless, manufactured need that dries up the earth's bounty and despoils what's left is upon us: large portions of the planet are starving, plunged into auxillary wars, and, in some cases, about to go under water, while a small royal percent (us, at all income levels) live like tutankhamen's extended family. it's the same old story of greed and destruction now taken to levels that make our 1960s fear of atomic annihilation laughable.

Jasperse is not didactic, though he's silly in a charming, almost daft way. He talks to us through the megaphonic portal of an orange traffic cone poised on a broom, his high whine of a voice telling us at that peculiar but apt remove what we already know and nevertheless need to hear, again.

thank you, john. thanks, too, to the dancers.

musings on discourse project

(what follows is my counterpost on the subject of last week's discourse project at counterpulse....all viewable on their blog....)

I've been dropping down in front of the tv lately since i came down with the flu. I've been trying to endure the spotty HD signal, looking for juicy news or entertainment but discovering over and over how dreary the pickings are without plug-ins to the great television transmission gods in the sky/ground.

ironically, making do has its rewards because i watch what i might otherwise pass up. last week i saw bill moyers interview parker palmer, for instance. Palmer is a man whose piety irked me but whose thoughtfulness was galvanizing, the founder of something called the center for courage and renewal. He specifically addressed the recent crop of newcomers to politics, people who shed their past disinterest or disillusion because of the obama campaign's careful and emotionally connected organizing strategies. the essence of the strategy was to connect individual stories to a larger purpose, then keeping that purpose alive. parker talked about the need as citizens for a constant dialectic between what is and what might be, between the material and ideal; without that, we fall into narcissism and cynicism on the one hand, and delusion on the other. in either case we end up out of touch with the flawed realities of everyday life and disconnected from the changes that can arise from leaps of imagination and belief in the future. my own metaphor for this is making a tortilla: on one side is the real and on the other the ideal. you have to turn the masa harina ball over and over, patting one side then another, until you have something that holds together and can nourish you.

i came away from the discourse project thursday knowing that the parker palmer/tortilla notion seemed to be missing from the house. Perhaps the dance community is still in need of a place and means to tell individual stories, because virtually every voice seemed to be engaged in a separate and private conversation. What struck me as unfortunate about this is that the days of complaining about not being covered or crowing about how much you don't care about being covered are so over. That conversation was robust 25 years ago, when the papers were full of music critics doubling as dance writers (some of them quite good), the Bay Guardian and the other weeklies were yet to cover dance regularly, and no one much liked what was written about them but still desperately needed to be reviewed to qualify for grants or to gain a footing in the community among other dancemakers. Complaining actually had some traction, but even then only a little. Now, the problems are more stark and, in a way, more interesting. Rachel is a strong dance advocate, and although she isn't, as Paul Parish has noted, given the leeway to do the job she might do, she still makes a silk purse out of a sow's very small ear. She helps drive attention to dance from people close to and far from the art's inner circles, and this enhances the ecology of Bay Area dance culture whether the individual dancemakers feel the impact or not. The rest of us--Rita, Paul, Mary Ellen, Mike, Kitty, Janice, Aimee, me and others I don't even know of--each in our respective venues and in our distinct ways, attempt to do something similar. What distinguishes all of us from the past writers is we do it because we love dance and for little other reason. Certainly not the freelance pay, which is as negligible as it was 15 years ago. Some of us will write for free, simply because we need to.

Implicitly, some of those who spoke seemed to deny the importance of the shared or centralized conversation (despite being there to engage in it), even as some of those same people bemoaned being ignored by the press. Maybe the problem is how how we define the problem.

What I want to offer is that we think of an ecology of dance writing, a system that is complex, interwoven, and includes the generalist review down (or is that up?) to the esoteric phenomenological debates by philosophers on the nature of presence. We should be able to create a form that can hold and honor the myriad species of thinking and talking and writing about dance without having to diss one facet of the ecology. This might keep the collective from wrangling over false hierarchies and let us avoid the equally misbegotten divide between "real" dance writing and putatively inconsequential writing. The only inconsequential dance writing I can think of is the badly written and inarticulate stuff or the raving screeds that reveal the fractured mind of the writer. Dance writing is hardly new, but it only became worthy of academic study in the last handful of decades as the culture's relationship to the body and to women has changed. And some of the most exciting recent dance books are by choreographers and not by scholars. As wonderful as a lot of dance scholarship is, there is also scholarship that is wedded to theories that the other fields moved away from 20 years ago. Some writing is divorced from facts on the ground, making these works a form of intellectual gamesmanship that is hard to square as theory of dance practice or history. Sometimes dance and the body seem to be regarded as "unmarked" territory ripe for "inscription" the way the Brits regarded the desert lands of Arabia.

Dance reviews create a vital historical record--someone was actually there, strived to describe what happened and by whom and why or why not it matters. At its best it is to dance what participant observation is to anthropology. It may not lead the discipline into juicy self-assessment, and it may not be a distinct art form, but I think that it remains vital to the ecology of the whole. It asserts that the cultural phenomenon needs and deserves to be noted. As Rachel alluded to, book reviews inform us of books many of us feel we ought to hear about, even if we have no intention of reading them. That's my relationship to science. I want to know about stem cell research, or genetics and race debates even though the last science class i took was chemistry in high school and I don't know the difference between cytosine and thymine. I read Jill Johnston in the Village Voice when I was a teenager about the downtown NY dance scene even as I schlepped to ballet classes. I looked forward each week to what she had to say because in her writing I found an inventive, iconoclastic and highly personal voice for a world view and a way of being that i was struggling to find for myself. I also learned what Trisha Brown's climbing the side of buildings looked like (even though I never witnessed it in person) and what Meredith Monk's work was about, and this was long before I saw either artists' work.

A healthy dance ecology would embrace as many modes and vehicles for discussing, noting, notating and responding to dance as possible. We need the critic, the memoirist, the historian, the diarist, the practitioner and the scholar. The internet can incubate all kinds of dance writing; good quality daily/weekly monthly journalism should continue to be among them.


this is what the comment in the comment box below, written in chinese, seems to mean

"Ilan is the best Aurora-style Bed and breakfast Bed and breakfast \n Required to your home lighting LED吗? \n LED is the future mainstream merchandise you know! \n LED energy saving and environmental protection, I would like to buy one to try! \n Fitness will be lost before the United States and the United States of \n Taoyuan to find the company you move them \n Designed by Beijing Design view of ads out of something really great! \n Taiwan Railway train schedule \n Chingjing Minshuku very suitable place for leisure \n Really annoying"

by reflecting on

I want to begin.

I want to begin by reflecting on what has happened here this evening

Title:

Is Criticism

Dead?

Gathered before a crowd of dancers and dance goers at
counterPULSE on Mission Street

critics Rita Felciano, Rachel Howard and Ann Murphy

dancemaker activist Keith Hennessey

a panel discussion on the future

of criticism.

The evening was part 5

Introduced by counterPULSE artistic director Jessica Robinson and

choreographer Mary Armentrout

We agreed that

the evening opened with

a summary of the dire state

arts writing.

As the economy reels from cutbacks,

print journalism foreclosures

dance writing has slowed to a trickle.

Reviews are
particularly vulnerable
under these new market conditions.

Panelists agreed.

Panelists disagreed.

Feature coverage continues to be available
in some papers
frequently written by arts editors

(soon to clean the office toilets).

The move is defended
Advertisers might still advertise coming events;
readers might still use the newspaper

Reviews, which have no perceptible market value
increasingly regarded as superfluous to the goals of print

journalism

a narrow digest of news and events.

The panel of freelancers represented varied views and opinions

Some felt lucky to be paid
freelance work is itself endangered.

The group noted the long list of lay offs among arts freelancers.

A moment of silence....

Controversy between the audience and the panelists
flaring over the dangers and opportunities provided by the usurpation of journalism by the internet.

No one knew the future

For more details visit www dot


I want to begin by saying we are here tonight attempting to forecast the future of criticism

I think the best place to start is with a definition of criticism. We might also want to define forecast. I recommend we think of that as throwing a fishing line out ahead of the current.

Criticism often signifies unkind communication that delivers a putative truth laced with barbed wire or soaked in acid. We distinguish good criticism by qualifying it as “constructive criticism.” Criticism also means a serious examination of something, coming from the Greek word “kritikos” meaning one who discerns. I find this definition beautiful, suggestive of an ability to scrutinize what is, the more refined the better. This is a far more appealing definition of critic than that of “appraiser,” which is what critics frequently become, and is interchangeable with the jeweler on the corner squinting at your grandmother’s ring with his loupe.

Criticism is like fly fishing. The critic is the fisherman, the art the fish. The critic’s job is to bring the fish in. She has the greatest chance the better her flies, the smoother her casting and the longer and farther she’s willing to wade out in her hip waders.

The fish is the beauty sought, the mystery to uncover. It is another form of dance.


I want to begin by talking about something Keith wrote to Mary. It was in an email conversation they’d been having--something I skimmed the other night. It was designed to spark conversation. This is proof that it has:

Keith argues that writing about dance is translating across a language divide that fundamentally cannot be traversed.

I say nonsense.

Dance is not wholly inscrutable. Dance, like words, music , painting and sculpture, provoke thought and feeling that arise out of the same sea of concepts, emotion and memory that we rely on to formulate verbal language. I can say things in Italian that cannot be said in English, but that doesn’t mean that I had no concept for stronzo or ingambe. The fact that there’s no exact corollary in English doesn’t make the word untranslatable. There may be no one-to-one correspondence between them. It may take me several words to do the work of the single Italian word. The question is: do I have a concept for that word? If I do, I can find a means to express it in English, no matter how clumsy.

The same with dance. An arm floating behind a dancer’s back as she looks down at the floor may have no obvious correspondence to a single word. But that doesn’t mean I can’t capture the conceptual sense of that moment. The deeper the dance is, the richer each movement, and that usually means that phrases, even paragraphs, are needed to capture the poetry of the act.

The essence of criticism as the pursuit of some shared notion of truth and beauty and transcendent values is to engage our shared language to generate and expand discourse in the public sphere. As flawed and imperfect as that discourse is, without it we would be hostage to the solipsism of every faction, social movement, political leader and dance practitioner who claimed to be above or beyond language and mutual conversation.

The word, or logos (which the Bible claims brought the world into being when clearly it was movement) has its limits, and words are often used in a brutish and two-dimensional fashion. But so are dances. Words are signifiers capable of carving out great meaning and haunting beauty about the things they signify. When they fail it’s often the messenger and not the message system that’s lacking.

Is writing a substitute for dance? Hardly. But most of us can agree that, at bottom, it is vital that we have people writing about dance with vivid intelligence. Dance leaves no artifact behind; wrapping words around the vanished moment becomes a means to transform the ghostly experience through an emulsion of words into something we can partially see again. In our culture, a written record is also proof that you exist.

As for the inability to translate across the divide: For those of us who hold Plato’s idealism in one hand and John Dewey’s pragmatism in the other, everything is both an act of translation and nothing more than itself. I am a translation. And I am only me. My dance writing is a translation and it is itself. My name is a translation. My body and my presence here tonight are translations.

My dance writing translates to paper my experience of the dance I watch, and it always does so through my imperfect writing skills and the limitations of my understanding—and I don’t only mean my understanding of the work but the understanding of my own thought.

My name is a translation of my father’s urge for continuity, passing on his love for his mother by giving his daughter her name. It is also a translation of my mother’s lost battle to name me something else. My name is not me, and still it’s inextricable from who I am and have become, forever translating me to the world.

My body is endlessly mediating my soul, and though it often seems to have little to do with anything noncorporeal, this body is, for better and for worse, the mouthpiece of what I am.

My presence here tonight is a translation of my ideal presence, which I can only imperfectly imagine and can’t attain.

So what of the future of dance criticism?

The future of dance criticism is an unknown. I find that exciting because of the endless possibilities of the internet. I find that terrifying because of the tyrannical cacophony of the internet. The mob rules yet out of the chaos can come structures we haven’t dreamed of. The mob rules and that can be very ugly, as some of us know first hand.



Dismantling printing presses, newspaper infrastructure and intelligent journalistic culture worries me. The internet isn’t alone to blame. Remember that corporate raiders bought up papers, pirated their assets then left near empty shells to totter into the 21st century. Libertarians consumed progressive weeklies around the country and divested them of their political and aesthetic content. We need to beware of how vulnerable to oligarchies and corporate elites centralized information is. Countries like China and Russia are all too happy to control news and suppress opinion; corporations like ATT would prefer to sell bandwidth to the rich. The end of family run print journalism and the destruction of the old information infrastructure, with it ideals and ethical standards, challenges us to insure that information remains free and freely shared. It also cries out for discipline and purpose. These were the hallmarks of the best 20th century journalism. May they become them for the 21st.

spring fever

Almonds and cherries, magnolias and hardenbergia, cyclamen, tulips, lilies and roses are in bloom again. The plant world is heating up and, with dance fairly dormant during the winter, so is the dance scene. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Novellus Theater appears to be leading the profusion, hosting one-night-only appearances, new companies from far-flung continents and artists from another part of the state.

This weekend, for example, the YBCA curators continue their recent exploration of contemporary Japanese dance, training the spotlight on Hiroshi Koike's dance-theater company, Pappa Tarahumara, in "Ship in a View." The work, combining dance-theater spectacle with formalist abstraction, centers around a facsimile of a ship that traverses the stage during the evening, carrying dancers as it moves from a 1960s townscape to a mysterious, silvery future.
On March 3, French conceptualist Jerome Bel makes a single appearance on stage with Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun, together blurring the boundaries of formal presentation, casual inquiry and cross-cultural exploration as each attempts to understand how the other one dances.

Then, from March 5 to 7, David Rousseve, professor in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures as well as artistic director of David Rousseve/Reality, presents "Saudade" (meaning "yearning" in Portuguese), described by one reviewer as a "sprawling, chaotic patchwork of cultures, stories and dance forms." Rousseve toys with time and place and character in an effort to capture our contemporary condition.

Details: 8 p.m. today and Saturday, March 3 and 5-7, Novellus Theater, 700 Howard St., at Third Street; $15-$30; 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org.




ODC's spring

When ODC launches its bountiful spring season at the Novellus Theater for two weeks, co-directors Brenda Way and KT Nelson will deliver up new works and a rash of poignant and sensual rep pieces. In Program 1, Nelson presents her latest, "Grassland," with live music to a commissioned score by Brazilian pianist Marcelo Sarvos. In Program 2, Way gives us "In the Memory of the Forest," a work about her fearless mother-in-law, Iza Erlich, who walked out of Warsaw in 1940, as the Nazis were walling up the ghetto, and went east in search of her husband. (The choreographer has enlisted David and Ha-Jin Hodge to create video, Jay Cloidt, who uses some of Erlich's narration, to create a sound score, and Elaine Buckholtz for lighting design.)
The company also reprises an array of its deeply humanist dances, including Way's 2008 "Unintended Consequences: A Meditation" and Nelson's sexy, energy-packed "They've Lost Their Footing."
Details: ODC Dancing Downtown, 7, 8, 8:30 and 2 p.m. March 12-29, Novellus Theater, 700 Howard St., at Third Street; $15-45: 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org.


SF Ballet's 'Swan'

Reimagining ballet classics for our time, San Francisco Ballet's Helgi Tomasson floats a new "Swan Lake," his second since he took the company's helm in 1985. "Ballet at its most beautiful," Tomasson has called this fairy-tale dance, and who could disagree? In "Swan Lake," story serves poetry; the steps themselves are what's truly sublime, telling a story through the body steeped in the heartaches of 19th-century Romanticism. While Tomasson says he has chopped some dances that might strike us as comparable to overstuffed furniture in a modernist palace, he promises to leave the iconic dances alone.
Details: San Francisco Ballet, Saturday through March 1; 8 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Feb. 27 and 28, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, 2 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., at Grove Street; $20-$255; 415-865-2000, www.sfballet.org.

More Hope

Bay Area native Hope Mohr, who has danced in New York with Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Douglas Dunn, among others, presents her fluid dances at Theatre Artaud next weekend in her company's second season in San Francisco. The Stanford grad and recent mother plumbs space, the environment, and the listening body.
Details: 8 p.m. Thursday through Feb. 28, Project Artaud Theater (formerly Theater Artaud), 450 Florida St., San Francisco; $18; 415-626-4370, 800-838-3006, www.artaud.org.

Alvin Ailey company at 50



Decades ago, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with Judith Jamison, arrived at my suburban high school for a residency. It was at the point in my nascent dance life when the Ailey was the alpha and the omega. It was not just a dance institution but an embodiment of a different way of life — integrated, streetwise, devoted and beautiful. During their stay I prowled the edges of the company, chauffeuring around three dancers in my parents' old Impala. I drove in mute adoration as these divine beings chatted about nothing.

Then there was Jamison herself. The goddess, about 6 feet tall, had one of the most supple backs in the field, and she rolled her furious head as though it were a ball spinning freely on a flexible pole, blending Africa, the blues and youth culture in a glorious profusion of movement. It caused a hall of affluent Puritans to leap to their feet stomping and singing — the spirit seizing them as it, perhaps, had never seized them before. That night I experienced the transcendent power of art in a high school auditorium.

Jamison left the company in 1980 but reappeared as the artistic director in 1989 when Ailey died, as he had wanted her to. With the same kind of feline majesty and moral clarity she manifested on stage, she set about the task of reanimating Ailey's vision, turning a troupe that had lost itself in the wilderness for a while into a company that has been treating dance as a celebration of life for 20 years.

For its 50th anniversary, that devotion manifests in a number of ways. One is in its two West Coast premieres, a collaboration with the glorious vocal ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock on March 3-4 in dancer Hope Boykin's "Go in Grace." The other in Mauro Bigonzetti's "Festa Barocca," to music by Handel. It also comes through in Jamison's tribute to the past in Program B, with its range of Ailey work from "Blues Suite" and "Lark Ascending" to "Hidden Rites" and "For Bird—With Love." Jamison retires in two years. One wishes the best for AAADT after she's gone, but don't miss it now.

Details: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 8 p.m. (with 2 and 3 p.m. matinees) March 3-8, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Way; $36-$62; 510-642-9988, www.calperformances.org.

ALERT! THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TAGGED BY GOOGLE FOR CONTAINING DANGEROUS CONTENT. LOOK FURTHER AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

when lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd

San Francisco Ballet opened its 76th season this week with the quiet elegance artistic director Helgi Tomasson has been carving into the company's character for more than two decades.

With three big, structurally complex works Tuesday evening in Program 1 and three bittersweet studies of romance in Program 2 Thursday at the War Memorial Opera House, Tomasson showed us again that he is a director who shapes his programs with understated yet fierce curatorial care. As admirable as this is, the result is often uneven — sometimes sublime and at others uptight. This week produced a bit of both.

Program 1 offered a lineup of big dances that happened also to be subtle color studies, which is where they were most interesting. Opening the program was Tomasson's "Prism," a grand ballet he created for the New York City Ballet Diamond Project in 2001. Alternating between sweeping blocks of ensemble dancing and duets and trios, it was warmly bathed in apricot and red tones and set to Beethoven's Concerto No. 1.

At its heart "Prism" deployed an array of triangular formations, essential to some prisms, danced boldly by Kristin Long, Ruben Marin and Hansuke Yamaoto and later by Sofiane Sylve, Ivan Popov and Tars Domitro, the puckish wonder of the night. Still, emotionally, none of it quite struck home.

George Balanchine's "Four Temperaments," was Prism's bookend. This is an ascetic ballet but it can pack a wallop when
performed with the right quality of ironic austerity. Built from jazz-inflected, hip-thrusting movement and set to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith in 1946, the ballet Tuesday was ably but too squarely and decorously danced. Lacking the elegant edginess Balanchine intended, "Four Temperaments" devolves into a series of impressive academic exercises.



In between was the night's delicate premiere, "Diving into the Lilacs," by Yuri Possokhov. This ballet not only seemed to tremble with designer Sandra Woodall's lilac hued costumes, Benjamin Pierce's color-shifting lilac flower projection, and lighting designer David Finn's dusky lighting, but allowed the exquisite lineup of dancers an emotional depth missing from the other two works. It hardly mattered that the sum of the parts didn't add up to more.



Thursday was altogether cheekier. The night wrapped with William Forsythe's still-sexy and wonderfully defiant "in the middle, somewhat elevated," set to Thom Willems' brash industrial music score. The dancers, in what looked like practice attire, thrust their legs and checked their hips, while the still extraordinary Katita Waldo presided, alternating between pedestrian and virtuosic movement.

Stanton Welch's "Naked" was just as elegantly cheeky. It opened the program with the choreographer's signature wit, elaborating on the pinpoint precision of Italian ballet technique, classical form and modern insouciance. Like Forsythe's work, "Naked" upended the classical idiom, though its effect was sweet rather than Promethean.



Val Caniparoli's "Ibsen's House," the centerpiece, was a beautifully disappointing study of five of playwright Henrik Ibsen's gothic couples, danced sublimely by each one. Ironically, the very propriety Caniparoli set out to attack seemed to keep his cast from the entanglements — the lies, syphyllis, and suicide — that Ibsen fearlessly portrayed. This suggests that a little less propriety would do San Francisco Ballet a lot of good.


all photos ©erik tomasson


DANCE REVIEW
what: San Franciso Ballet, Programs 1 and 2
WHERE: War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave. (at Grove Street), S.F.
when: Program 1 repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday and Feb. 7, 8 p.m. Thursday and Feb. 7; Program 2 repeats at 2 and 8 p.m. today, Tuesday and Feb. 6, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, and 2 p.m. today and Feb. 8
tickets: $20-$250; 415.865.2000, www.sfballet.org

2009

H A P P Y N E W Y E A R

slumdog coalition

"slumdog millionaire" will make you rethink your childhood fantasy of being the orphan who gets taken in by kind strangers. if you haven't seen the pic yet, i expect when you do you'll sit speechless before the vertiginous, often sickening evidence that at the bottom of the great ponzi scheme of world commerce is either hard slavery or soft slavery, the first embracing total control of a human being by another and the second complete economic control. then perhaps, like me, you will be equally mute before the magic, whether of love, loyalty, or beauty, that nevertheless asserts itself the way flowers arise in dung heaps or rainbows arc over a battlefield.

pay close attention to the remaking of bombay into mumbai, and the suave marriage of crime to commerce, which has become the sine qua non of modernizing cities everywhere. the process overtakes the players, too. for instance, we watch how the beautiful girl is made to become a traditional dancer to be a better whore, and then as though lifted from an early suffragette's primer, how, later, the woman in her sleek kitchen in her gated estate is no more than a courtesan, well dressed but still enslaved. the hierarchies in "slumdog" are vicious and deadly, and boys fare only slightly better than girls.

yet hope triumphs. it arises out of a belief in a transcendent future, or an immanence that brings wisdom and beauty to hardship ("it is written"). this is where dance has its say. at the end of the film, as a kind of theatrical coda, bollywood-meets-philly/oakland hip hop is unleashed by the stars and a crowd of young dancers in a train station (metaphor of so many 19th century novels, and fitting for the subcontinent). it is far from the mudras that bring us krishna or shiva, or the numerology that translates into pattern the elements of the universe in indian dance. still this frontal, unison, collective number manages to merge ancient rites with modern eros and liberation. more than english, hip hop is made the universal language, and through this slice of global culture, youth counter the ponzi scheme. together, they are jacked up with a life force so fierce and sweet and fast that, at least in movies, it seems powerful enough to scare even a piratical status quo.

fold open

The arts fold like a losing poker hand during financial downturns. Ticket sales plummet, casts are pared back, shows and concerts flare and dim almost overnight. It's never easy to be an artist, haunting the margins, unsure of one's path or its value. In dire times, though, many of us are relegated to the margins, and the arts are often more widely recognized as the unpretentious translator of collective hope and distress.

They also can take us out of ourselves, give us relief and remind us that nothing is forever — even war, even economic depression. Fun is fundamental, no matter what the Dow is doing.



Dancers across the country are taking that to heart.

Consider Miguel Guttierrez (that's him at right).
The dancer-choreographer doesn't live in the Bay Area any longer, so there is no chance of seeing him dance during his 24-hour performance piece, beginning midnight Dec. 31 and running until midnight Jan. 1. But he has sparked a national-performance effort to acknowledge and protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and, locally, dancer Jesse Hewit will be engaged in this performance/protest/ritual "freedom of information 2008" at the Garage in San Francisco.

Across the country, each in his own time zone, dancers will be blindfolded, their ears plugged, moving without rest during the 24-hour period, meditating on the dislocation that Iraqis and Afghans endure in their efforts to flee violence and stay alive. Witnesses are invited to attend at any or all points along the way. Reminiscent of the ordeals religious pilgrims still endure, whether climbing up a rugged mountainside to honor Huitzilopochtli in Mexico, or shuffling on knees for miles to a holy shrine outside Rome, "freedom of information 2008" is a self-reflective act that asks all of us to think about the human cost of war.

DETAILS: The Garage, 975 Howard St., S.F.; midnight Dec. 31-midnight Jan. 1; free.

S.F. Ballet Gala


helgi tomasson's prism, photo by erik tomasson

At the other end of the artistic spectrum — where glitter and good times are as integral to the experience as overpriced but delicious sweets — is the San Francisco Ballet gala, this year named ICONic IMPERIAL, followed a week later by the season's opening. Every year, the parade of high rollers mirrors the state of the economy with its gowns and tuxes. This year, expect the average ball gown skirt size to shrink and the jewels to shine less brilliantly. Now that Bernie Madoff has taken thousands of people to the cleaners, the orchestra seat holders may resemble mourners at a funeral.

Fortunately, there is nothing funereal about San Francisco Ballet. Its "Nutcracker" this season was its meatiest, most comprehensible production yet, coming together with narrative magic and running at an almost leisurely pace ("Nutcracker" runs through Sunday). This is the inestimable Tina LeBlanc's last season, so even moderate fans of the ballet might want to catch the tiny ballerina's enormous artistry before she leaves the Opera House stage. The 2009 season begins Jan. 27 in a mixed-rep program that showcases a new work by choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov; and reprises Helgi Tomasson's elegant "Prism" and George Balachine's jazz-inflected modernist masterpiece, "The Four Temperaments."

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Jan. 21, S.F. Ballet gala; 8 p.m. Jan. 27-Feb. 7, S.F. Ballet Program 1; War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., at Grove, San Francisco; $20-250.


Lar Lubovitch Dance Company

The renowned modern troupe that combines the weightedness of early modern dance with the elegant expressionism of postwar ballet, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company comes to San Francisco for one night only at the Jewish Community Center, now a vital Bay Area magnet for important dance performances by both local and national artists.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Jan. 15, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California St.; $28-36; 415-292-1200.

Company C

Company C Contemporary Ballet of Walnut Creek opens its new-year run with new and old works. These include "The Envelope," the divinely crafted dance by David Parson; and premieres by company artistic director Charles Anderson.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Jan. 23-24, Lesher Center for the Arts, Civic Drive at Locust Street, Walnut Creek; $25-40; 925-943-7469.

against the comically vacant surface of our lives, a dying planet

October 23, 2008 at counterPulse

In “My Hot Lobotomy” by David Szlasa and Sara Shelton Mann the audience knows within moments that dancer/choreographer Erin Mei-Ling Stuart is one adroit actress. She sits alone for long minutes in the small black box theater wearing a quizzical, nearly blank face, playing a lobotomized guy named Joey, her eyes the single alert organ in her frozen form—and we can’t stop looking. Later, when a beatific expression takes hold of her features and her eyes disappear into her head as she plays part of a Bach cello concerto, we also discover that she is an equally accomplished violist.

We see Stuart decked out in a suit sitting in a bright orange chair. It is a color that gives an Impressionist touch to the scene, accentuated by a plump and contented looking blue sky and white cloud projection behind. The world we are entering, though, is a post-post-post Impressionist dreamscape, the kind of place where Cezanne, Matisse and even Van Gogh exist as happy Brave New World distractions against disaster, where peaches, apples and starry nights are fake and there is no depth of field or horizon line to look toward. In fact, this is an absurd and dystopic reality, a weird claustrophobic place in which 19th century innocence is supplanted by psychosurgical disconnection.



The cornerstone of that zombiehood is Stuart’s gentle, blank mask. In the first minutes, we scour her face for shifts and changes as we would the transfixed face of a clown. Finding none we begin to take in a barrage of small details. I noticed how, for instance, her khaki jacket and nicely pressed khaki pants were distinctly different shades of the same dun color. And how the circle of blue beefy recycling arrows surrounding a heart on her tee shirt was a variant of the blue of her turquoise shoes. During the long time in which we got to pay attention to her crookedly arranged mouth, I wondered if our gaze had heat and, if so, whether or not she could feel it on her face. I also noted activity in seemingly stationary hands. The fingers were slowly crawling along the khaki pants. Not quite like spiders. Like zombie hands awakening. Like the hands of someone dying making a monumental effort to move in their waning hours. Shelton Mann’s butoh-inspired action was laced with such sweet, dark humor.

Because this was theater, and because it was absurdist theater, somewhere between Beckettian koans and Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater, the proverbial knock at the door came as it had to come, and it was both a shock and wholly expected. Stuart’s eyes leapt in the direction of the door behind the audience and our skin leapt with her when the hard rap arrived. It was a well-timed joke that got the charming, somewhat rambling hour-long absurd-apocalyptic dance-theater piece moving in earnest. Rather than the FBI, the CIA or the KGB, the man knocking is the pizza man, Spencer Evans, the night’s catalyst, decked out in a neo-Aussie-cowboy look, a guy who also sings and strums his slightly out-of-tune guitar to tell us about Joey. Joey, it seems, plunged an icepick into the orbit of his eyes and scrambled his brains.


The messenger Evans feeds Joey, offers instructional tapes, and leaves behind a mountain of garbage. His role is much less ominous than a government agent and far more insidious. Evans drops an audio tape into the boom box to keep Joey company as he eats. “I’m really glad you’re here,” a warm female voice croons. “You’ve met the delivery guy. He’ll bring you everything you need. No need to tip him….It’s going to be great…it’s going to be really great. It’s going to be great….” Like a vacationer in Hawaii fanned by tropical breezes, Joey drifts off into contentment and soon sleeps the sleep of the lamb.

Against this somnolent waking world, Szlasa creates Joey’s dream zone where truth appears in the form of images and messages. These are played out as projections overlaying the sheep-like clouds and happy blue sky. But this is where the not-quite sharp symbols of pizza, pizza boxes and oozing mind-control tapes that are nevertheless wacky and fairly apt become the all-too literal images of National Geographic or Time magazine, devoid of the kind of transpersonal terror that could spur even the lobotomized to action. Apocalyptic dreams tend to be far more archetypal than baby polar bears struggling in water and vast acres of automobiles, smog-clogged skylines and Al Gore from “An Inconvenient Truth”. A friend recently described her “hot lobotomy” nightmare: There’s a room full of guys, all lolling on chairs and sofas like teenagers. The house is on fire. The fire is approaching. I am screaming at them to leave, to hurry, to get out immediately, the house is on fire. They look at me casually, unperturbed. None of them moves. I’ve got my leg out the window. I can see the flames approaching. She has since bought herself a fire extinguisher and talks about selling the house.

But back to Joey. Joey wakes, repeats the process, following Jane Fonda’s workout one moment, and a musical instructional the next, each unit sweet and wry although ultimately tame and slightly disappointing, since with a bit more probing Szlasa and Shelton Mann might have disturbed our own somnolence more. Because how does the Fonda fitness craze compare to the psychotic quackery of a Star War’s missile shield, the dissemination of humvees as family transport or the embrace of conspicuous consumption as a form of religious obligation and patriotic duty? And how do the beauty of Bach and the expertise of musicianship figure in to the modern plague of papered-over consciousness? Finally, Stuart shoves off the pizza and begins to build something with the pizza boxes, and although the resistance is welcomed, the reason for it is unclear.

Since many of us are asking these days where resistance should and can go, we also wonder how we “become the change we need” without turning into an infomercial for the apocalypse or a self-parody that points to our inevitable post-post-everything absurdity. Many have begun to believe that each personal act is crucial, that awareness and responsibility are inseparable, and that reforming ones own habits is the beginning of profound and widespread socio-economic, political and spiritual change. Others are figuring out how to migrate—to Canada, or, preferably Paris, more preferably the Marais or the 5th arrondissement.

Joey, too, is planning on going somewhere. He scores boxes with scissors, folds, builds, folds and builds some more. First he constructs walls that fall (oops, can’t hide) and then he builds a space ship. A wonderful kids’ spaceship, with each box carefully puzzled together with its neighbor, the last box his hat doubling as the ship’s nose. Joey holds the true religious symbol of our time, the steering wheel, in his hands, gripping tight. He is happy. Delusion has no limits, afterall, and can project itself into outer space and new, unlit frontiers. The instructional purrs: “…It’s going to be great…it’s going to be really great. It’s going to be great….”
\

no caviar to the general

Saturday, October 25, 8pm at the Paramount Theater, Oakland
reprinted by permission

While most of us are watching our investments wither or our 401(k)s tank, Ronn Guidi and Oakland Ballet are plumping up the company's bank account with $200,000 from Bank of America's Community Builders Award. The prize, announced Saturday as an Oakland Ballet performance began, is given nationally each year to honor organizations that contribute in significant ways to their community, and is the kind of support the struggling company needs to move out of convalescence and into full recovery.

Accepting the honor, Guidi appeared before the curtain all in black, looking a decade or two younger than his 73 years. After promising to say little, he was as loquacious as he was relaxed, discussing the company's commitment to works that portray the human condition. "I'd love to bring back the 'Green Table,'" he said of the iconic German anti-war work choreographed in 1932 by Kurt Jooss, who was to narrowly escape a Nazi dragnet in Germany a year later.

Although the day when Oakland Ballet is able to remount such classics still appears a long way off, the troupe is able in the meantime to make seasonal forays onto the stage, presenting a limited sample of its repertory. Saturday's included three scenes from the ballet's "Romeo and Juliet," with music by Sergei Prokofiev, Ron Thiele's whimsical, beautifully crafted "How'd They Catch Me?" to a score by Igor Stravinsky, and Michael Lowe's charming fusion ballet "Bamboo" to traditional Chinese music. The evening was well-constructed if overlong; the dancing, far stronger than it had been in Guidi's several years before his abrupt retirement in 1999, was occasionally sublime; and the warmth and sweetness among the performers onstage and in the audience was palpable.

Guidi's "Romeo" is a modest work, its choreography often little more than classroom exercises that speak to the potent music in a desultory way. But it has its strengths, including the rich Italianate motifs, the humanity of its characters and, for Saturday viewers, the depiction of Juliet by curtain-stealer Jenna McClintock, especially in the pas de deux, which soared with lifts, arches and darting leg work. She has become a gorgeous and generous dancer.


If there was a significant disappointment Saturday it was that Guidi didn't pair the lithe and elegant Ikolo Griffin (a former corps member of San Francisco Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Joffrey Ballet and now with Smuin Ballet) with McClintock. With the best technique of the men onstage by a mile and a sweet demeanor to match, Griffin, who is mixed race, was the one dancer among the men who could have been able to meet McClintock's liquidy passion with his own ardor, her precise dancing with his.

Although there are often reasons for casting choices the public never knows, the upshot was that Guidi appeared once again to stumble into one of the ballet world's unfortunate stereotypes, putting the handsome blond Ethan White in the Romeo role when little but his looks were truly princely. Had Guidi cast Griffin instead, not only would the choice have added complexity to the dancing, but both Paris (African-American Omar Shabazz, who embodied the role with deep kindness and decorum) and Romeo would have been men of color. This, in turn, would have broken down some tired racial boundaries. Until the best movers are offered the choicest roles in ballet regardless of skin tone, the form will remain inhospitable to the broadest pool of talent and the broadest public.

Thiele's "How'd They Catch Me?" (1989) and Lowe's "Bamboo" are lovely indicators of the aesthetic that Guidi promoted in Oakland. Not only did he nurture local talent and encourage his dancers to choreograph, but he also spread his values about craft and gentle humanity, and these are clearly evident in both works.

"Catch Me?" set to Igor Stravinsky's Two Suites for Small Orchestra, veers through musical motifs in its eight scenes with wry gamesmanship, and yet is wonderfully personable and charming. Dancers march with playful bravura, mimic beach balls, flirt and folk dance. Although 20 years old, it has lost none its magic.

Lowe's "Bamboo" has weathered well, too, though as Asian dance has permeated both modern and ballet vocabularies and as martial arts is ubiquitous, the dance seems quainter than it did when it premiered seven years ago.

Nevertheless, Lowe's talent is clearly evident. He conducts the Melody of China in the pit, masterfully handles traditional Chinese motifs through ballet vocabulary and creates a world that is both recognizable and otherworldly.

they've got a ticket to ride, so hold on

October's Cal Performance calendar is full of timely events — muckraker Seymour Hersch this week, performance artist Laurie Anderson with her still-relevant "Homeland" at the end of the month, and Galway's Druid Theatre peppering lots of October's nights. For the balletomane, though, the only event of note is the nearly annual appearance of the Kirov Ballet accompanied by the famed Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theatre, which, not infrequently, is far more enchanting than the ballet company itself.

If that reads like faint praise, it would be if the company weren't populated with so many extraordinary specimens of dancerly clarity. For any ballet lover, to sit for a few hours and marvel at the precision of the corps de ballet — more angelic than militaristic — is nothing short of sublime. What does it matter if the dances (here, a choice between Act 3 of "Raymonda" and the whole of "Don Quixote") teeter between archaic and egoistic, fussy and antediluvian? Beloved Diana Vishneva and Leonid Sarafanov will knock our socks off again if we're lucky, and even if they don't, there are always other surprises. Whatever they are, we won't go away sorry for the experience.


Details: 2, 3 and 8 p.m. Tuesday through Oct. 19, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus near Bancroft Way; $50-$125; 510-642-9988 or www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.



Alonzo King's dances for his company Lines verge on the unclassifiable. Working at the leading edge of ballet where he fuses the asymmetries of African dance with the precision of pointe shoes and geometrically clear lines, King never thinks only of movement. Movement and music are always one, and, he says, "Dancers are musicians and musicians are dancers." That makes his audiences lucky again this season, as he is back collaborating with legendary tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, a member of John Coltrane's jazz ensemble in the 1960s. Together they will present a world premiere, joined by former San Francisco Ballet ballerina Muriel Maffre.

Details: 8 p.m. Oct. 17-18, 22-25 and 3 p.m. Oct. 19 and 26, Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F.; $25-$65; 415-978-2787 or www.ybca.org.




An annual event that gets grass-roots press but too little mainstream notice is Kim Epifano's San Francisco Trolley Dances. Trolleys, aka streetcars, are the mode of transport in Epifano's now-annual outdoor event, and with the purchase of a ticket you get taken for a ride, with little long-term damage to your bank account. A $1.50 ticket entitles you to an array of place-specific dances by the likes of Zaccho Dance Theatre and Scott Wells & Dancers.




Details: Begins at 11 a.m. Oct. 18-19 for a two-hour, self-guided tour. Trolleys leave every 45 minutes from the Mission Bay branch of the San Francisco Public Library, 960 Fourth St. (at Berry). Free with a $1.50 ticket or a Muni Fast Pass.


Back this season are two companies that keep on keeping on with the inexorability of the life force itself: Oakland Ballet and Smuin Ballet. Oakland Ballet returns to the Paramount in another now-you-see-them, now-you-don't appearance, reminiscent of a weak patient allowed out for a long walk once a season. On this occasion, the company will reprise excerpts from Guidi's lovely "Romeo and Juliet," Ron Thiele's "How'd They Catch Me?" and Michael Lowe's sensitive "Bamboo," accompanied live by Melody of China.

Smuin Ballet is also back, and with a new work by rising star Amy Seiwert, who has been steering the company in Michael Smuin's absence as he was priming her to do. Also on the program are Smuin's hot "Carmen," along with his much-loved "Dances with Songs."

Details: Oakland Ballet, 2 and 8 p.m. Oct. 25, Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland; $15-$50; 510-465-6400. Smuin Ballet, 8 p.m. Oct. 24-25, 28-30; 7 p.m. Oct. 26; 2 p.m. Oct. 25-26; Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyons St., S.F.; $18-$55; 415-567-6642.