Oh Anna

Parades and Changes Over the Past 43 Years:

an interview with Anna Halrpin

By Ann Murphy

This article was originally published in the January/February 2013 issue of In Dance, a monthly magazine published by Dancers' Group, serving the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. dancersgroup.org

When choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin and her husband Larry perched themselves on the side of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, they rooted their creative futures in a landscape of redwood, madrone, oak and berries. Little did they know that their choice would help revolutionize post-war dance in the United States. On five acres of wooded hillside Larry Halprin, a landscape architect, built Anna a stage in the trees—the now famous dance deck that hangs below a leafy canopy and an open sky—and this became an important laboratory for some of the most inventive artists of the last 60 years, including Terry Riley, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Simone Forti, Morton Subotnik, Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris. Anna began to create scored systems on the deck that were fixed yet fluid, echoing the structured improvisations of her forebearers Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Laban and Mary Wigman. Then, by applying ideas from landscape design, music, politics, film, psychology and poetry to the moving body in the environment, she formulated works shaped by the cultural concerns of the day, from war to the unadorned body to the sexual politics of family life.

Now, at 92, Anna is remaking for the last time what may be the most seminal dance “score” of her career. In mid-February dancers from as far away as Paris will stage a final iteration of Parades and Changes, the dance that caused the New York police to issue a warrant for the artist’s arrest, stunned East Coast audiences with its total nudity, but also prompted curmudgeonly critic Clive Barnes to marvel that in the paper- tearing sequence, “Fantastic shapes evolve, paper sculptures mingling fascinatingly with nude bodies. The result is not only beautiful but somehow liberating as well.” In the less provincial environment of Berkeley in 1970, Parades was the first art event in the concrete modernist building built for the new Berkeley Art Museum. The dance program was an event described as “a multidisciplinary art extravaganza, heralding a radical new building and an ambitious cultural enterprise.” Now, 43 years later, Anna and her dancers return to say goodbye to the concrete structure, which will be repurposed by the university once the museum shifts downtown. We will all say goodbye to a legendary dance.

For this last look at a dance that changed the terms of performance and public expression, Anna is striving to make Parades as timely as ever as it channels the uprisings around the world. She is including a new, rhythmically patterned stomping section devised by composer and long-time collaborator Morton Sobotnik designed to suggest protest.

She will add a falling section, that connotes sacrifice and death, and, most important to her, she is injecting a tender embracing section that signals our capacity for caring and concern. A few weeks ago I had the privilege of talking to Anna after a rehearsal about this final installment. This is what she had to say:

Ann Murphy: What does the title Parades and Changes refer to?
Anna Halprin: It’s the idea that there is a sequence of actions that go like this [she moves one hand after the other on the table top] that remind me of a parade, but they keep changing. So [in a dance] we might have a series of blocks going like this [demonstrates again] but they will change every time you do it, and that’s where the title Parades and Changes comes from. It was very hard to find a title [for a work that] keeps changing so much in its relevance to historic culture, so it has one connotation in one particular time. The first time I did it it was inspired by Picasso’s painting called “the Family Circus.” My family was like a circus, and the cast was all family. The second time I did it I did it with a group of hippies. Then the third time I did it was with the multi-racial company. So the cast changes as well, and as the cast changes the cultural overtones change.
AM: So your casting is in response to the cultural moment?
AH: Yes. And I want to say that with regard to the family cast, I had spent over 25 years working with children, so I was very used to relating to children. Rana was 10 and Daria was 14 and they were part of the children’s troupe. In those days children weren’t taken seriously in dance as members of a cast. I think Robert Wilson used a child in one of his pieces but that was very unusual. So that wasn’t an expectation— children taken seriously as children in a cast. And that was where I was—I was building a family at that time.

AM: Did you score the original Parades and Changes, and have you scored successive iterations, and if so what does that mean?

AH: You saw me scoring right now today. I get resources from the group I’m working with. Then I begin to see what they’re presenting to me, and then I begin to find the scoring element. So my first score is very open: here’s an idea; explore it. That’s a very open score, but still I selected the idea of the embrace because I felt I needed that in this piece—I needed this human factor that was missing. Parades and Changes until now was completely task-oriented and I wanted something more humanistic. Now, at the very beginning, it starts with people telling stories, so the task is: tell a story. I will take an ordinary task but unlike the Judson I want to turn it into a dance. I don’t want to leave it as a realistic task. So when people talk about task-oriented movement on the East Coast it’s very different from what I mean by it. The environment has been foremost in my sensibilities. I even do exercises with the eyes with my students so they learn how to look and see the environment instead of an object. I can look at Sue as an object, or I can look at Sue and be aware that there’s a fire going on behind her, and that she’s gesturing, and that there’s a man over there with grey hair, and a woman over there with a white blouse. I’m still looking at Sue but I’m looking at her in relation to the environment and not as an object.

AM: What does this relationship to the environment bring to your work?

AH: One of the first things is that it broke the barrier of the proscenium arch, because I worked on the dance deck that meandered in around the trees and is suspended in the air. I was aware of the sky and the animals that went by. So it had a huge effect on me to get out of the box studio or the proscenium arch theater and opened up a whole world of new possibilities that had to do with being more realistic about life. It’s as if the dances I’d been doing [earlier in my career] were little exhibition pieces in a box.

AM: What do you mean by being more realistic about life?

AH: It means that you’re contacting other people, which gives you a different relation to the audience, so it becomes more inclusive. At a very profound level it means working as nature operates. Nature operates according to processes. Nature doesn’t have an ABA and a formalistic compositional technique. Nature works in process—a tree grows, the sun comes out, the rain comes. It’s never a fixed form. That was so reinforced by my husband, because he built that deck and he’s the one who got me out of a box....[He] got that not from the Bauhaus but from going up to the Sierra for a month at a time every August and living there and sketching and drawing and writing and observing. He was my major collaborator and that had an effect on me. The deck itself had an effect on me.

AM: Did your and Larry’s choice of moving to the side of Mt. Tamalpais prefigure that? Were you already aware of the role of the environment?

AH: In an intuitive way. I was born on the Skokie Plains, and I was never comfortable in an urban environment. And Larry started a kibbutz in Israel working the land, and was originally getting his PhD in biology.

AM: So you both knew open space?

AH: Right. I remember something Larry wrote. He said: When I was a little boy I used to go to a tree, and I’d hide in the tree to get away from all the adults and their problems.

AM: So you went and hid in a tree in another way?
(Laughter.)

AM: Anna, I know that when you performed Parades and Changes at Hunter in 1967 you had to get out of town fast.

AH: Very fast!

AM: Tell me what happened.

AH: Well, when I did Parades and Changes originally, it was commissioned by a music festival in Sweden, and I knew ahead of time the cultural attitude about nudity—they took saunas together—nudity wasn’t a cultural taboo in Sweden. So when we did it there, the dressing and undressing scene was received with the following comment by a dance critic. He said that “it was like a ceremony of trust.” Then it was presented on national television. Well, 43 years ago imagine performing something like that on our national television. Then I got a letter from this farmer that said—oh it was so beautiful to see the naked bodies. It reminded him of his newborn calves—sacred and innocent.

Then when we did in New York I was a little naïve. I made an assumption that New Yorkers are very sophisticated, and it didn’t even occur to me that it was going to create a problem because it was so well accepted in Sweden. But I began to wonder when I saw a couple of policemen back stage. I’d never seen that before. Well, it turned out that they were actually security people who were supposed to keep the police out, because the Director of Hunter College anticipated something of this nature. So sure enough, they issued a warrant for my arrest at the hotel the next day for indecent exposure. But I wasn’t there.

AM: You were warned?

AH: Yeah, I was. And as a result of that I didn’t go back to New York for years, and it affected my reputation. At the time I had a group and we were touring but nobody would touch me. For years and years it was all they talked about even though it was one score amongst ten different scores, yet that’s all they ever talked about, so we stopped touring. But that was good, because then I could really focus on rituals, and ceremonies, and working with people and their issues, and AIDS and healing, and racial conflict. It gave me an opportunity to be completely liberated from any expectations. It was a disaster that turned into a blessing.

AM: So Anna, I know that you have changed Parades with the time, the setting. How is this particular context shaping the score for you and this particular moment in time?

AH: The theme––and this may sound a little Pollyannish––but the theme for me is peace. Peace with yourself, with your naked body, unadorned, unmasked--be real--and peace with each other. You are part of something bigger than yourself. I’ve incorporated into the score the shooting and the stomping and the anger and the rebellion of the Occupation Movement, and then a final Planetary Dance, which is hopeful. It has a sense of “if we can be one voice, this is what we would ask for.” Ultimately, as a grandmother and a great grandmother, if I leave any legacy at all to my children and their children, it’s an awareness of how to take responsibility to create peace in their lives and the lives of others. I feel that Occupy was an outcry by our young people to deal with the corruption, to deal with the 1% because it’s going to destroy us all, and it’s going to destroy the planet. Occupy was a very brave thing to do, and I feel bad that it hasn’t gotten the full support it needed to grow, and develop and cultivate its clarity.

AM: Do you think it still might? AH: Oh yeah, I do.

Ann Murphy is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Mills College Dance Department and a long-time Bay Area dance critic and writer currently writing for the Bay Area News Group. She has written for the East Bay Express, the New York Times, the SF Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, Dance Magazine, among other publications, and launched In Dance at the now-defunct Bay Area Dance Coalition and Young Dancer at Dance Magazine.
  

Review: Diablo Ballet delivers a stunning 'Pavane,' stumbles through
premiere of 'Swingin' Holiday'
By Ann Murphy, Correspondent San Jose Mercury News
Posted: ContraCostaTimes.com

Each time a 20th-century dance giant dies, fear runs through the dance world's collective veins. With another genius gone, where will the new crop of movement masters come from, and can dance survive without such legendary talent? It is a question that has been haunting the dance world for decades.

Friday night at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek that question hounded Diablo Ballet's opening program of its 2012-13 season. In an evening filled with talented and passionate dancers, the company mounted work that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Dance has endured, but the issues of legacy and revitalization haven't gone away.

The production of "The Moor's Pavane" threw the problem into sharp relief. The late Jose Limon's almost Kabuki-like depiction of the Othello story is a masterpiece of modern dance from 1949 and Diablo Ballet brought it to life with stunning depth. But the dizzy premieres bookending "Moor" seemed to have been intended for another program or a different company altogether.

In "Moor," two couples, Othello and Desdemona (The Moor and The Moor's Wife), Iago and Emilia (His Friend and His Friend's Wife), perform a taut, elegantly formulated web of decorum, corruption and desire costumed in sumptuous Renaissance garb. Every step, each gesture and every foot of stage space seem sculpted with narrative, holding visual and metaphysical importance and shaped by a fate that is still en route. The stately music by 17th-century composer Henry Purcell only ratchets up dramatic tension.

It was thrilling to watch how Robert Dekkers as the calculating and homoerotic Iago performed with some of the same slithery elegance that dancer Lucas Hoving brought to the role he originated in 1949, and how Derek Sakakura embodied the credulous Othello with power if not quite the willfulness of Jose Limon. Maria Basile was a nuanced Emilia; and Desdemona, Othello's wife, was captured by Heather Cooper with the soft innocence that makes her the prey in a quiet, evil conspiracy. Both women are on loan from sjDANCEco.

Although more than 60 years old, "The Moor's Pavane" is timeless as well as timely in its account of how politics, power and sex lace together to cause tragedy. Its ability to communicate something complex with compressed simplicity is a supreme example of the power of dance.

By contrast, Vicente Nebrada's premiere of "Lento a Tempo e Appassionato," which opened the program, was a demonstration of dance as a series of well-executed athletic tricks meant to denote passion. The program closer, the premiere of "A Swingin' Holiday" by Sean Kelly, with the Diablo Ballet Swing Orchestra in the pit, showed the desperation of an art form that returns to the Lindy, zoot suits and mashups of Christmas music with almost zombielike insistence.

Nebrada made hash of Alexander Scriabin's three piano etudes as the lovely dancers Hiromi Yamazaki and David Fonnegra, with the estimable Roy Bogas on piano, spun and entwined and punched each accent in a histrionic depiction of male-female love worthy of the over-the-top emoting of early silent films. Isadora Duncan performed a dance of simple gravity in 1923 to some of the same Scriabin etudes, but Nebrada seems as in the dark about that past as Kelly seems blind to the fact that Michael Smuin fully captured the '40s Broadway dance shtick decades ago.

For ages, dance commentators have noted that without an effective written scoring system, dance remains dependent on one generation passing down information to the next. But Youtube is quickly giving young choreographers access to dance archives that no other generation has had. Film clips can't replace the transmission between artists, but they put more history at young artists' finger tips. It is in their interest to use them. We will all benefit.

diablo ballet
Presents works by Vicente Nebrada, Jose Limon and Sean Kelly Page 1 of 2

26/11/2012 09:19 AM

http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_22017922/review-diablo-ballet-delivers-stunning-pavane-stumbles-through?IADID=S
When: 8 p.m. Nov. 17
Where: Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek Tickets: $36, $52, 925-943-7469, www.leshercenter.org

Page 2 of 2

26/11/2012 09:19 AM 

The DNA of Dance

Open publication - Free publishing - More ann murphy

Vegetarians Take Heart!

Vegetarians take heart-- Ashley  Trottier and Jochelle Perena have cooked up an hilarious and unsettling dish in their first joint production called Minced Meat staged in the shoebox theater space Temescal Arts Friday, Oct 21, 2011. Eating the revolting pinky-grey cocktail sausages  was optional.

If you arrived with an appetite, though, the production's barmaid, the comically déclassé, Lacey Carter, offered up cocktail sausages and  two buck Chuck, all with a dissolute air that suggested she might have spat in the drinks and let the dogs roll on the ground moments earlier.

Chowing down a plate of baby wieners and lousy wine helped implicate the audience in a raw night that was above all passionately curious about women and men as forms of meat, with our distinct, and distinctly bizarre, fleshy parts, and the relationship between our various forms of hunger. Most pointedly, the choreographers were interested in the vast swamp of carnal longings that either oozes from our bodies, or lurks in psychic closets. The id, as hulking beast, surfaced from the swamp and crept from its hiding place at almost every turn.

The dancers (the majority Mills College grads and current students, undergrad and grad both), despite little rehearsal time, danced with the collective intelligence of bodies that know each other and how to move as one, rather than a pickup company, which they were. (Disclaimer: I know many of the performers.) When the slip-clad Perena forced her way into a party scene, like an awkward but unstoppable backwoods child, the ensemble performed a familiar self-absorbed beauty queen meets mean-girl routine.While it was Perena who symbolized primal urges and barely-restrained civility, it was the group of men and women engaged in their social drama who had all the problems. What were they to do with this outlier force?

Katherine McGinity, for one, posed 40's pin-up style, while Elizabeth Morales' cocktail hauteur suggested that, when the moment was right, she would be in the closet with the apt available body in a heartbeat. Perena's raw presence unmasked the truth of the partyers' brittle preenings which were, in fact, far less about civilized engagement than about stylized expressions of barely contained insecurity and almost aggressive longing. When, as though by a spell, that longing was unleashed, everyone began hilariously gnawing and sucking on everyone else, tottering between the acceptable and raw transgression.

If Perena was the collective id, Trottier, who next appeared, embodied a poignant nightmare version of the psychologically imprisoned woman, like Coppelia's mechanical doll with a predilection for cutting and pain pills. Wearing a pink baby-doll negligee, she performed sorrowful, furious repetitions of fragmentary movement rife with vulgar sexual gestures that themselves were bursting with displaced anger, sorrow, and imploded passion. It was a potent etude of distorted desire through movement that was wonderfully fractured and comically lewd. Trying to break out of her mechanized state she expressed the limits placed not only on the modern female body but also on the sensuality of the contemporary self.

The female chorus that included Morales, McGinity, Magee Page-Stokes, An Hoang, Prudence Amsden and Judene Small, had meaty little starlet cameos (Gretchen Jude was responsible for the smart, irony-rich music mix), while the men had their own tropes, notably a table dance and a chair dance, in which they tried to use objects to bridge the myriad existential gaps in their path. As familiar as these clowning motifs were they were surprising and hilarious. The acrobatic chair play, particularly, and the men’s blend of unity and competition, brought pathos to this stunning first production. Brian Quackenbush's acting chops were especially fierce as he led his team, which included Lucas Buckman and Mario Gonzales, through their self-made trials. It was an ensemble act of awkward risk and dexterity that gave the post-modern struggle a comic, true-clown tenderness. 

This fledgling troupe deserves plenty of exposure and support. They blend an array of dance forms and performance styles into something far more delectable than any mince I've ever eaten.

























 

Oh Onegin at SFB

As the curtain fell Friday night at San Francisco Ballet's premiere of John Cranko's 1965 evening-long "Onegin," elegant Vitor Luiz looked spent, and petite Maria Kochetkova gasped for breath as her shoulders curved forward. Moments earlier, they had shot across the stage and spun through space like dervishes lost in the centripetal force of ruined love. Now Kochetkova and Luiz gazed out at us, exhausted. The audience leapt to its feet in a roar of approval. "Onegin" was a home run.



While not everything about this ambitious, nearly 50-year-old work is a success, Friday's production of "Onegin" gripped the audience tightly, because it is a modernist dance arrayed like 19th-century fairy tale ballet, rife with social context yet rich with the competing forces of individual desire. It is one of those iconic stories about passion and morality that has legs, because its themes never grow stale.

Then there is the dancing. The group action starts out heavy on the pantomime and the presentational, and even seems trite at first, but then grows more heated with every scene. The pendulumlike trajectories that begin to build and the almost impossible physics of the catapulting movement dazzle us. Before long, we are deeply committed to the core cast of characters and their story.

At its heart, Onegin is a dramatic quartet between two sisters and two male friends and evolves into a cat's cradle between the bookish Tatiana, danced Friday with transcendent
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and translucent purpose by Kochetkova, and her sister Olga, captured with coquettish clarity by Clara Blanco; Olga's boyfriend, the passionate Lensky, impeccably embodied by Gennadi Nedvigin, and Lensky's bored city friend, the aristocrat Onegin, danced with nuanced depth and hauteur by Ruiz.

Onegin, stuck among what he regards as the unsophisticated country gentry, trifles with Tatiana, and she falls hard. At a ball later, embarrassed and annoyed by Tatiana's evident passion, he punishes her innocence by dancing with flirty Olga, not only confusing Tatiana but inflaming his friend Lensky, who is overtaken by jealousy and humiliation. A challenge, a duel and a senseless death aren't far away.

As the ballet moves inward toward the duel, which takes place upstage in a seemingly distant place, it narrows to a series of dangerous trios. Narrowing further, the ballet culminates with a duet between a mature Tatiana, now married to a loving Prince Gremin and a mother, and a spiritually washed-up Onegin, a doomed version of the lovers' duet that Tatiana imagined earlier in the night when she was still an innocent girl.

Movements and motifs we saw earlier are echoed but transformed, and each time these messages worm deeper into our skin. This is the power of "Onegin": the movement itself, not the story line, becomes the potent messenger for the contortions of heart and mind.

Opening night, the principals took Cranko's intentions and shot them to the moon. Kochetkova was an almost translucently dreamy girl who startles awake, seeing Onegin. Her whole body seems to open in response, her face absorbing the world she had previously ignored as she read, and she makes us feel the force of love at first sight.

We know Luiz, too--the defensively callous egotist who takes shelter from emotions in arrogance. Blanco's Olga lets us feel both the insouciance and the shallowness of the soubrette while Gennadi, an elegant version of ballet's man in the shadows, embodies wounded pride, making us feel the moral purpose of Lensky's emotions.

Cranko's craftsmanship is obvious throughout. It appears in such motifs as the innocent game of surprise that happens early on, when Lensky sneaks up on Olga, who is preening at a mirror. This evolves into a motif between Onegin and Tatiana, then is picked up by Gremin.

Leaps defy the courtly trajectories of ballet, whether it is the breathtaking ensemble jetes that course from diagonal to diagonal or Tatiania's enormous bounding into Onegin's arms, or her extreme penche arabesques or her rippling bourrees that suggest a fluttering heart.

Many moments in the ballet, motifs echo the ballet canon, from "Swan Lake" to "La Sylphide" and even "Apollo." Catching the quotes isn't what matters. What does is how Cranko deepens the meanings of the dance phrases this way and alerts us that he is both working within tradition and pushing its limits. He lights a path that contemporary choreographers could follow but rarely do.

Where 'Onegin" falters is in Santo Loquasto's murky dappled décor and costumes, especially in the opening act, where the walls looked like bad sponge painting and the pastel hues undermine the modernist rigor of the storyline. The geezer dance that launched Tatiana's birthday ball was embarrassingly out of tune, as well -- a bit of coyness that had no place here. The music was also disappointing. While the segments are by Tchaikovsky, they are not derived from the opera but a series of well-cobbled shorter works that includes segments of orchestral and piano pieces orchestrated by Kurt-Heinz Stoltze for Cranko. If you wait for Tchaikovsky's signature musical flowering, you will be disappointed.

But the flaws seem trivial when the full heft of the evening is felt. They keep the night from being perfect, but that, in the end, may be most fitting.

Smuin Feb 4 2010

Review: Bouncy 'Miss Cline' buoys a mixed program from Smuin Ballet

By Ann Murphy
Correspondent



With spring in the air, Smuin Ballet opened its winter run last weekend at Walnut Creek's Lesher Theatre in a program of light, well-executed work that ranged from the sultry to the insouciant. The newest and most cheerful dance came at the end of the program -- resident choreographer Amy Seiwert's cheeky medley, "Dear Miss Cline," set to songs by the pioneering country singer Patsy Cline.

This was a ballet of apparent nostalgia, with the women outfitted in Jo Ellen Arntz's 1950s-style red and white shirtwaist dresses, middie blouses, the occasional neck scarf and low-slung pants, while the men were suited up in cuffed, short-sleeve shirts and bland trousers. In other words, it had all the elements to be temperamentally fitting for Smuin Ballet, where dance and sentimentality are inseparable.

But Seiwert is not the dewy, he-man-she-woman romantic that Smuin was. In fact, valentines' themes of loss and longing are canny ways for the choreographer to push against stereotypes and cleverly encapsulate life as invariably modern, humane and wry.

Part of Seiwert's power comes from her dancing women, who are potent, flawed actors, even when the tales she has to tell are full of heartache or longing. This sharply distinguishes her work from the Americana of choreographers like Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, not to mention Smuin, who too often replicate the weary stereotypes of strong men and weak or shrill and hungry women.

As this polished cast so cheerfully showed, especially elegant Terez Dean and Christian Squires, pistol-packing Erin Yarbrough-Stewart and John Speed Orr, both the men and the women do plenty of pushing and pulling.

While keeping the allusions of '50s playfulness alive, all the members of the cast incised the air as though they were etching glass. Underscoring the work's fundamental optimism, designer Brian Jones created a space of elegantly simple floating window frames and clean, bright lighting.

Nestled in the middle of the program was a lugubrious meditation, "Stabat Mater," a 2002 work by Smuin dedicated to 9/11 in which the late choreographer tried to wrestle the national trauma to the ground.

Set to Dvorak's "Stabat Mater" and danced with purpose and clarity by Susan Roemer and Joshua Reynolds, and with elegance by the company, "Stabat" alludes to the modernist ballets of Antony Tudor, which are at once grounded in the ordinary and weighted and tragic. But unlike Tudor, Smuin runs out of ideas midway and devolves into sentiment. With Reynolds as a ghost come to visit grieving Roemer, the work echoes Giselle, though twisted for an age of global terror.

And if "Stabat" is a nod to "Giselle" then "Eternal Idol" is a bow to a steamy Victoria Secret ad. In a work inspired by Auguste Rodin's sculpture of an amorous couple rising out of and pressed into a boulder, Smuin presents lovers, here the supple Robin Cornwell and elegant Joshua Reynolds, in beige unitards in a pas de deux of kitschy ardor. Relying on suggestive leg battements, basic turns and uneventful leaps -- all orgiastic exclamation points -- "Idol" is inarticulate enough to be right at home in a classy strip club.

By contrast, "Tango Palace" is the kind of ballet the late choreographer excelled at -- a sensual and occasionally comic homage to tango parlors via ballet that makes good use of Smuin's musical theater know-how. This is a dance that knows it is a show piece and sidesteps "Idol" tastelessness.

Smuin may miss the complex nature of tango leg entanglements -- they are a form of battle, not just of sex -- but artistic director Cecile Fushille has sharpened the dance's contours and made the eight-dance medley show off the sultry talent of the company, with a spotlight on Jonathan Mangosing and Mallory Welsh.

To Yvonne, 2010

January 30, 2010

Welcome to Yvonne Rainer

It is my great pleasure this afternoon to introduce you to Yvonne Rainer.

As many of you know, Yvonne grew up in the Bay Area and was one of the founders of the still-seismically important Judson Dance Theater, in New York City, where dance was subjected to revolutionary scrutiny from 1962 to 1964. She herself made history in 1965 with her now renowned No Manifesto, the famous document in which she said “no” to established dance and all its affectations and trappings. The following year she substantiated her ideas in movement with her work entitled The Mind Is A Muscle, notably the segment entitled Trio A, deconstructing and reconfiguring the physical language before you could say “Derrida.” She soon moved into filmmaking when the medium was still a solidly male domain, and in 1972 made her first feature-length work, “Lives of Performers.” She went on to make many more films meant, she says, “to confound in a certain way,” and always of political/feminist import and wit.

In talking about Merce Cunningham, Yvonne writes in her memoir Feelings Are Facts, “He just danced, and when he talked it was with a quiet earnestness that both soothed and exhilarated me….It was truly the beginning of a zeitgeist. You just “do it,” with the coordination of a pro and the innocence of an amateur.”

For over half a century, Yvonne has taken Merce’s ethos of “just do it” to extraordinary heights, as those of you who were here this morning had a chance to experience. Using such tools as task, game, speech and film in her dance, she moved decidedly closer not only to expression of authentic thought and feeling but also to embodiment of transparent authenticity.

In the 1970s she began her long and continued love affair with film and was only lured back to dance in 2001 by Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, which commissioned After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Trio A Pressured. Since the Yvonne has also choreographed a re-visioning of Agon by Balanchine called AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M. Her reinvisioning of Rite of Spring was presented at Documenta 12 and Performa 07.

Today she is a Distinguished Professor of Studio Art at UC Irvine in Performance and History of Experimental Film. She is the recipient of innumerable awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Award, the Wexner Prize and a Bessie.

In her poem “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing,” Margaret Atwood writes that “nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency,” and this seems truly apt today. Yvonne demands that we flex our mind’s muscle in order to meet her in the clear land of deceptively simple and unadorned dance. Visionary choreographer have been called mother, goddess, high priestess and pioneer. With Yvonne, we can now add poet philosopher to the list.

Please welcome Yvonne Rainer.

SF International Arts Festival

In Step: Two huge festivals bring innovative dance to San Francisco
By Ann Murphy
Contra Costa Times Correspondent
Posted: 05/24/2010 05:00:43 PM PDT
Updated: 05/26/2010 10:43:13 AM PDT


When the dance community first heard that arts curator Andrew Wood was laying big plans for a summer arts festival in San Francisco eight years ago, there was an audible sigh of relief. Someone finally had read the collective mind: if every provincial European town, from the exquisite Rovereto in Northern Italy to the stark white palaces of Avignon in the south of France, could mount important summer festivals, why couldn't San Francisco?
But mounting an arts festival is a massive undertaking, even in prosperous times. When the economy tanks, it seems either fatally naive or wonderfully visionary.

Now entering his seventh festival year, Wood is closer to the upbeat visionary, although his hyperactive, lanky frame and mile-a-minute patter exemplify a man hard at work to keep the dream alive. Wood believes if he juxtaposes local and nonlocal American artists with groups from outside the United States, we might see our own artists in fresh ways while being exposed to new material. And being placed in context with work from other countries gives local performers a chance to expand their own sense of the possible.

"Most of our audiences are artists who have told us that they don't need to see the Merce Cunningham Company for the 30th time," Wood said by phone. "They need to see something new, to see companies that perhaps haven't figured out the answers but are asking the same questions."

To that end, the San Francisco International Arts Festival plucks work from what Wood describes as "a whole world" of performance around the globe. It showcases some of it alone or puts it in collaboration with experienced local or U.S. artists to create new, provocative fusions. And each year the festival is able to build off the experiments of the year before, with the result that it celebrates Northern California's regional cultural diversity and nurtures cross-cultural and cross-genre experimentation that prods performance out of customary forms. This kind of daring isn't always successful, but no one can say it isn't exciting.

One of the more intriguing offerings this year is the genre-bending France-based company run by Vietnamese-French circus performer Xavier Kim. He brings his A.K.Y.S. (Always Keep Your Smile) troupe to Fort Mason this weekend to acrobatically tell the story of independent contractors roped to the high-tech industry.

Butoh with poetry
Another is a complex collaboration Thursday through Sunday between butoh dance master Ko Murobushi and local hybrid poet-performer Shinichi Iova-Koga, which aims to reach into our dream states.
Their premiere, "The Crazy Cloud Collection," combines Dada-like play and the curious paradoxes of butoh in an investigation of what they describe as the collision of a 15th-century monk's encounter with modernity.
DETAILS: May 28-29, 8 p.m., May 30, 5 p.m., $20 (advance), $25. Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., S.F.

On Saturday and Sunday, the SFIAF presents local ballet talent Amy Seiwert and Frederick Weiss of Nuremburg, Germany, whose video motion-sensing technology, im'ij're (imagery), enables Seiwert and her company to explore what it means to cancel differences in a new work titled "White Noise."
DETAILS: May 29, 9 p.m., May 30, 7 p.m., $25 (reserved), $20 in advance. Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason Center S.F.

A birth dance
Company Prototype Status takes technology somewhere very different in "Marvin (biomechanical birth of an android)." Choreographed by Jasmine Morand and performed by David N. Russo, "Marvin" is a 35-minute birth dance of an artificially intelligent android with a name that means "friend of the sea."

DETAILS: May 28, 9 p.m., May 29, 7 p.m., May 30, 4 p.m. $20 (advance), $25 general. Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., S.F.

A dozen other events run concurrently this weekend, from a performed improvisation by maverick Keith Hennessey to a performance of ancient and contemporary Chinese music by renowned guqin (a 7-stringed zither) player Wang Fei. For tickets to all the above events and complete festival details, call 800-838-3006 or visit www.sfiaf.org.
Cultures on display

As soon as the SFIAF packs its bags, the granddaddy of local dance festivals, the Ethnic Dance Festival, swings into action. Where the artists of the SFIAF draw inspiration from varied cultures and blend them in novel ways, the Ethnic Dance Festival showcases the dances of the cultures themselves, whether in their evolving, immigrant form or as indigenous art brought by newcomers to the United States.
Beginning June 5 and running each weekend throughout the month, the festival showcases Korean, Hawaiian, Indian, African, Uzbeki, Mexican, Chinese, Cambodian, Bolivian, Puerto Rican and Transylvanian dances, among many other dance forms, in what has become a world-renowned display of both the enduring nature of dance culture and its shapeshifting character over time.

Each show presents a succession of relatively short works, arranged in serious, variety-show fashion, not only keeping audiences engaged, but allowing us to see the common links between radically different ways of moving.

DETAILS: June 5-6, 12-13, 19-20, 26-27, Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m., Sun at 2 p.m., $22-$44, Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyons St., S.F. 415-567-6642, www.worldartswest.org.

an old review that's still news

The lives they lived: new biographies of Halprin, Farber, and Kirstein

Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance
By Janice Ross. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2007. 462 pp., illustrated. $34.95.
Dance Magazine, Oct, 2007

In 1959 when Hawaii and Alaska finally became states, the center of the United States shifted 464 miles toward the Pacific. With the arrival of Janice Ross' beautifully researched biography, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, it's time for modern dance to do the same: give the midpoint of the avant-garde dance continent a big shove westward.

With a tone of persuasive poise, Ross builds a strong case for Anna Halprin as one of the most potent if underrecognized catalysts in dance since the '50s. It's an influence that is more often felt than noted. In part that's because Halprin has done most of her work north of San Francisco in outdoor spaces, like her famous "dance deck" at her home on Mt. Tamalpais. But it's also the result of the fact that Halprin is an artist of context and process, not product.

Three forces helped to shape the young dancer. First came educator Margaret H'Doubler who, at the University of Wisconsin where Halprin studied, established kinesiology as the foundation for discovering and developing movement. Next were the artists of the Bauhaus in exile at Harvard University's School of Design. They infused Halprin and her husband, Lawrence, the renowned landscape architect, with a love of modernism's functional promise and a hunger for new egalitarian paradigms for life and art. Finally, there's Larry Halprin himself, who participated with his wife in forging an existence in which art and family intertwined.

While Halprin has only a few works in her oeuvre that are regarded as masterworks (Parades and Changes, most notably, is one), her genius, Ross suggests, lies in her ability to absorb social and intellectual experimentation and transform them into dance ideas. In the '60s she took her works to the East Coast and shook up tradition with nudity and Gestalt process. In the '70s she began to explore ritual. In the '80s and '90s, she pioneered movement for healing, dances for the earth, and dances for dying.

For decades, Halprin has sown seeds of change and enlarged the boundaries of dance. In the early 1960s, she introduced some of the soon-to-be Judson Dance Theater innovators (Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti) to improvisation, task movement, environmental dance, and freewheeling organic exploration of body states. And thanks to her defiance of the status quo, dance today includes movement previously not considered dance and people previously not considered dancers.--Ann Murphy

Maqoma's Magic

Dancer Gregory Maqoma, one of South Africa's leading choreographers, was cloaked in darkness in the soaring Forum Space at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Thursday evening when he took his place upstage at the opening of "Beautiful Me," a virtuosic solo performance about the search for identity that continues at 8 tonight. Four fine percussion and string musicians collaborating with the Johannesburg-based performer sat bathed in warm light upstage.

Slowly, Maqoma appeared in a narrow spotlight and began to talk as he moved toward the audience, flicking his fingers, flexing his hands and unleashing an array of Ping-Pong ball sounds from one of the click languages of South Africa. None of the words or clacks was comprehensible; not even his vocal tones let us in on what he was saying.

And in a sense, that became the central point and the true power of this compact evening of mesmerizing dancing. During most of the 55 minutes, Maqoma's ironic spoken words, even in English, were trumped by his sweet physical embodiment of movement traditions and fusions. While he enumerated a growing list of corrupt government officials and apartheid rulers who have riddled the continent with horror and violence, the names quickly drifted off like flotsam on a river of history. When he called on the ancestors, they, by contrast, seemed to channel centuries of African culture through him in timeless and beautiful body wisdom.

And what a clear channel he was, too. Maqoma's body spoke in a rich play of movement derived, in part, from the input of three distinct and highly accomplished fellow artists: contemporary Indian Kathak choreographer Akram Khan, political dance/theater creator Faustin Linyekula and Afro-fusion choreographer Vincent Mantsoe. But it was Maqoma's unifying spirit that brought coherence to what in other hands might have been a disparate mash-up of ideas.

When it came to African steps, Maqoma performed almost with an air of ritual, as though he were enacting what had been bequeathed to him rather than what best reflected his identity. His horizontally propelled steps conjured ancient ritual dance, while the isolations of the pelvis or the Africanized electric slide communicated pure late-20th-century reinvented dance steps.

Where Maqoma seemed most at home was in his lush Kathak stomping, to which he returned again and again. It had all the percussive clarity one would expect from a fine Indian master, as well as something more—earthy strength unafraid of softness and wit. What wasn't clear was whether this represented Africa's influence on Indian tradition or just the gentleness of Maqoma shining through.

Maqoma initially promised exotic stories — "I am an African dancer. I tell exotic stories to survive." The suggestion in such powerful rhetoric was that his very presence at YBCA was a form of African minstrelsy, but Maqoma couldn't make the idea stick, even briefly. "Beautiful Me" was the dance of a man who clearly knows who he is and wants to share it, exotic stories not included.

reprinted by permission
originally published in the
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 11/06/2009 09:27:06 AM PST

15 Days of Dance: The Making of Ghost Light

It was 2007. After two years of talks and planning, at the beginning of the new year, Elliot Caplan finally embarked on a daring collaboration with American Ballet Theatre. The renowned filmmaker, who spent 20 years at Merce Cunningham’s side as resident filmmaker of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and today heads the Center for the Moving Image at the University at Buffalo, commissioned and was about to film a new dance under construction. He had the support of the University––an unusual move for a public institution––and he had the support of the mayor of the city. It was an auspicious beginning.



On January 8, the project began in earnest. That day ABT choreographer Brian Reeder presented the first steps of his new work, Ghost Light, set to Aaron Copland’s “Music for the Theater,” to the 11 young dancers of the ABT Studio Company in the company’s Broadway home. Caplan and fellow cameraman Donald DuBois haunted the space for 15 days as Reeder built the work, shooting 68 hours of film using two production cameras and two microphones. They caught the choreographic process at different angles, in varying light, in close up and in long shot. New York City peered through the room’s large windows as they filmed, and inside a powerful intimacy reigned over the action.

The company then shifted to Buffalo where it was in residence for the week of January 27 to February 4. On February 3, the Studio dancers debuted Ghost Light in downtown Buffalo’s historic Shea’s Performing Arts Center to 3,500 Buffalo public school students and then to a general audience on the university campus, a night of blizzard conditions. The filming continued. In March, when the troupe appeared in New Orleans, they performed the work again, this time as a symbolic gift from the city of the Buffalo Shuffle to the storm-wrecked home of Dixieland jazz.



To an outsider, the venture might seem like a conventional documentary project about a dance. But what Caplan has produced slips those bounds. His idea was to establish with 15 Days Of Dance a new standard of filmed dance preservation and at the same time to capture the choreographic process from the first step to its staged showing. Sixty-eight hours of film have been edited down not to 1.5 or even 3 hours, or even 6, as documentaries at the outer reaches of the form might run, but to 18. While 15 Days Of Dance is a document, it is far more than that: it is an extended cinematic rumination on the making of art. Graciously, Reeder and the dancers allow us in to view their artistic process, a process closely guarded by most dance makers due, in part, to its intimacy but also due to its often discursive, improvisational nature.

If you rifle through the dance archives you will discover that a dance documentary was made with ABT and released in 1995 by Frederick Wiseman whose 170-minute film is called, simply and categorically, Ballet. Wiseman, who is best known for his sociological studies of prisons, hospitals and schools, trailed American Ballet Theater dancers and administrators for a period of nine weeks and over two continents. Ranging through studios, on stage, in offices and into rehearsals, Wiseman lets the viewer taste “life” at ABT. Trained in his youth as a lawyer, he has a gritty style and lurching lens of a court reporter. His method is to impose narrative on his material, making Ballet notable as a record of the dailiness of life among a troupe of thoroughbred dancers. There are the long hiatuses between classes, rehearsals and stage events, when dancers eat, sleep, read or knit, and there are the difficulties in running dance as a business. Time is distended, sometimes interminable. When exaltation does arise, it does so out of a sheer force of will that hauls undifferentiated experience into the realm of art. In Wiseman’s hands, the central miracle is that beauty and substance transpire at all.



Caplan, who trained as a visual artist with Elizabeth Murray and as a filmmaker with Bruce Baillie and Stan Brakhage, has a different starting point and a far different objective in 15 Days Of Dance. He begins with a single and complete work of art, taking its pulse at each step of the encounter. His role is rather like a canny detective attempting to discover the mystery of the process, sifting for clues as he uses his camera to study a rich, ever-moving, always-evolving tapestry. Like many important avant-garde filmmakers before him, he invites a story to surface, he doesn’t impose one. His particular approach is painterly, elegant, and discreet, and he peers into an apparent chaos of events knowing that there are patterns hidden amid the jumble. Nothing in his filmed universe is banal and nothing is insignificant.

It is a point of view that aims for depth within the frame while seeking an overall structure that both enlarges and mirrors that depth. Caplan achieves this by filming a complete event executed by a constant group of dancers, allowing not only the details of dance making to interest us but also the group itself over time, so that they become a choreographic study even as they learn and build a dance. This layers 15 Days Of Dance with apparitions of its dominant theme, making it a work of art about artists working to create a work of art.

The technical elements of the filmmaking are crucial to this process. The filmmaker’s camera, shooting with quiet magic, captures the action in almost constant wide full shot, typically on the diagonal, and sometimes in split screen. This lets us feel the dancers and choreographer working, thinking, and plotting pensively. It also builds an even clearer intimacy than if we were in the room with them, since our own egos are not part of the ambient experience and the camera can bring us a depth of field and multiple viewpoints that permit us to see the action fully. As a result, 15 Days Of Dance also has a central miracle but one in which beauty and substance are everywhere; one need only look closely, through the eye of the camera, to find them.

“I asked the question: ‘How does a dance get made?’” Caplan explained to the Buffalo audience during a panel discussion that followed the premiere. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be around choreographers for many years and I watch the process. I find it fascinating, and I was sure others would also….What I’m capturing is the series of decisions that Brian is making in the moment with the dancers….He is giving them instruction. They are listening to what he is saying.” They move as he moves, are silent when he is silent, Caplan adds.

And so they are. We watch the dancers quickly and easily translate the complex nonverbal material Reeder transmits from his body to theirs, a kinetic process that is animal and sublime, quotidian but never commonplace, and as old as culture itself. We witness the liquid creation of art out of seamless effort and inspiration. Time moves fluidly and occasionally seems suspended. There is no backstage, and with two cameras trained on the action, all the work occurs before us. The space of the studio also has stunning aural depth, making the quiet resonant and pendant rather than shallow and flat. For this Caplan is indebted, in part, to John Cage, whose exquisite handling of musical silence continues to influence the filmmaker’s understanding of the aural landscape. Sound lets us know the space and the space is the medium in which the dance transpires.

15 Days Of Dance is not a documentary, says Caplan. “If it ends up a documentary it will because it will have first been made [in] another form and remade into a documentary. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to find the form.” That form—of some essence of dance making itself, or of Reeder’s particular process of choreographing––will emerge.



And what of ghost light? Ghost light, as most theatergoers know, is the light left on in the theater. In Shakespeare’s day theaters ritually kept a candle lit. Later it was a gas lamp, and today an electric light stays illuminated through the night to ward off the ghosts of past performances. Reeder’s ballet honors the theater, the ghosts, the echoes that haunt a place like Buffalo, where the New York-to-Buffalo theater circuit once thrived. And Caplan is the medium, filming the seen to capture the unseen, bringing us a little closer to the beautiful patterns hidden in front of our eyes.


(Parts of 15 Days of Dance: The Making of Ghost Light are being shown in installments at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center and at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. with the filmmaker on hand. Check the institutions' calendars for dates and times. Caplan will release the multi-disc compilation of Ghost Light in limited edition in 2010. Visit picturestartfilms.com for more information.)

Nuts to All That

IT WAS A tough year for optimism until citizen Mary Strey of Wisconsin called 911 about two weeks ago. She told the dispatcher that someone terribly drunk was driving down the county road she was on. The dispatcher tried to get a bead on the location, then asked where Mary was relative to this driver. Was she behind them?

No, she said, "I am them."

"You am them?" he marveled.

Mary was making a citizen's arrest. It just happened that she was the one she wanted arrested.


Mark Morris is a little like Mary Strey, although the laws he breaks are the rules of 20th-century dance, not the highway, and where we meet him isn't on the shoulder of the road, it's in the theater. Also, as drunkenly campy as "The Hard Nut" first struck some when it premiered here, Morris' holiday romp, returning to Cal Performances for two weeks in December, is an honest remake of the Nutcracker with a core of modern, cockeyed optimism.



Nutcrackers are lavish, and this is a big, blowzy modern dance-inflected work replete with libation-fueled revelry and louche '70s dancing. It also revamps the classic tale in a way that steers closer to the strange story within a story of the ETA Hoffman original, with a result that is lovable and naughty. And though this is no sing-along dance-along Nutcracker, Morris lets us feel that we would be frolicking on stage alongside the tipsy Stahlbaums and dizzy Snowflakes with their sno-cone heads if only he'd give us the signal to leap from our theater seats.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Dec 11-13 and 17-20, Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way, Berkeley; $36-$62; 510-642-9988, www.calperformances.org.

Left Leaning

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts continues its provocative programming this month with the upcoming Left Coast Leaning Festival, an exciting collaboration among the likes of neoclassicist Amy Sweiwert and hip-hop postmodernist Rennie Harris, and others. Curated by spoken-word maverick Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the event is designed to create a collage of storytelling, music and urban dance that signals seismic shifts in the culture already under way in California.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Thursday-Dec. 5, YBCA Forum Space, 701 Mission St., at Third; $35 festival pass, $10 for ages 24 and younger; 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org.

All together now

Bay Area ballet veteran Carlos Carvajal, director of the Peninsula Ballet, joins forces with the dancers of Oakland Ballet to stage his Nutcracker at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and the San Mateo Performing Arts Center in San Mateo. This production is a sweet, homegrown interpretation of the classic, and live music, which gives any Nutcracker real magic, is being provided by the Oakland East Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan. (The orchestra, in order to be affordable to the cash-strapped companies, lowered the its fees for the occasion.)

For a fee, donors can climb into a costume and join the dancers on stage.

DETAILS: 4 p.m. Dec. 12 and 19, 2 p.m. Dec. 13 and 20, San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo, 650-762- 0258; 11 a.m. Dec. 24, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 26, 2 p.m. Dec. 27, Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakland, 510-465-6400, www.paramounttheater.com.; $50-$15 general, $40-$12 children 12 and younger (20 percent discount with food donation), $37.50-$11.25 seniors.

A Twirl with Twyla

Twyla Tharp, the Alice Waters of dance, is best known for putting high and low fare together in the same event. With an optimism about the world's capacity for change, she stormed the gilded halls of ballet's opera houses and steered her way into the heavily male realm of commercial theater to create revolutionary dance mash-ups blending classical and club dance. Next month, she appears in Words on Dance to discuss her latest book, "The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together."



Her newest volume is an homage to the art of working with others as much as it is to the famous folks she's worked with over the years, stars such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Milos Forman and Bob Dylan. But Tharp is a realist even more than an optimist. She understands that while collaboration may good for the soul, playing well with others is essential to get wherever one hungers to go.

DETAILS: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 8, Herbst Theatre, 410 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; $25, $10 off regular price for F. Dancers' Group members; 415-392-4400, cityboxoffice.com.

Lab special

It takes so much optimism to run a minuscule space in a miserable economy when so many storefronts are emptying like bird nests in autumn. Yet that's what Joe Landini dares to do at the Garage in San Francisco, a tiny black box theater with a red door. The venue hosts a lineup of interesting up-and-coming Bay Area performance artists in December, and if you're looking for the unsung or experimental, this is a good place to start.

In the middle of the month the Garage spotlights Field All-Stars, including Megan Nicely, Dan Carbone and Jen Marie. They are followed by a choreography showcase, "raw & uncut," with Liz Boubion; the group BodiGram in "For the Love of the Game!"; and FACT/SF, Charles Slender's year-old company founded with a group of collaborators, in "The Consumption Series, Part III." The run concludes with "Veils and Apparitions," two evenings of intermedia work with Janet and Raja Das, Amy Lewis, Sonsherée Giles, Agnes Szelag and Caroline Penward.

DETAILS: 8 p.m. Dec. 12, Field All Stars, $10-20; 8 p.m. Dec. 15-16 raw & uncut, $10-20; 8 p.m. Dec. 18-19, Veils and Apparitions $10-15, The Garage, 975 Howard St., SF. 415-885-4006. www.975howard.com.

Nuts to that

The King of the Nuts is San Francisco Ballet's Nutcracker, and despite its detractors, this beautifully revamped holiday spectacle is held together as few are by the comprehensible story of a girl's transformation from childhood to young adulthood, set in San Francisco early in the 20th century. It's a story that dashes forward breathlessly, magically, as spellbinding as a sleigh ride in moonlight.


DETAILS: 7 p.m. Dec. 8-27, 2 p.m. Dec. 11-13, 17-23 and 26-27, 11 a.m. Dec. 24, San Francisco Opera House War Memorial House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; $18-$236; 415-865-2000, sfbtickets@sfballet.org.

reprinted with permission (print date 11/27/09)

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