no sweet sorrow

There was no sweet sorrow in parting as the curtain came down on Mark Morris' "Romeo and Juliet," which played over the weekend at UC Berkeley. Clocking in at nearly three hours, this was the iconic Shakespeare tragedy of young love, and it was set, as usual, amid Verona's warring clans. The difference? This "Romeo" has a happy ending. It also didn't know when to quit.

Morris' "Romeo" is an honorable, often sweet paean to the power of hope in the face of war and fear. He makes use of composer Sergei Prokofiev's original reworking of Shakespeare to remind us that violence has an antidote: love.

There is no choreographer in the U.S. who can compete with the Seattle-born dancemaker in his ability to put his deep humanist beliefs onstage in a highly legible way. But laudable ideals are no guarantee of good theater. By the end of Act 1, where we've been introduced to most all the actors, learned about the dangerous love between the adorable lovers, and are ready for the drama to intensify, "Romeo" was already reminiscent of an old-fashioned spectacle from 1930s or a shaggy dog tale, the familiar action piling on to the familiar music with near-biblical inexorability.

Entering the theater, one saw the stage screened by a fanciful partition of geometric patterns you might see in a kaleidoscope, designed by frequent Morris collaborator Allen Moyer. When that screen lifted, we were presented with a stage box lined with more partial walls, this time consisting of enormous blond parquetry, like outsize parquet flooring.

The set became emblematic of something fundamentally awry with the overall conception of this "Romeo." By contrast, the miniature Italian buildings that dotted the stage floor hinted at the small, pared-back and minimalist approach this ballet needed.

Morris, as always, did his homework, utilizing the dances of the traditional Romeo as a reference point, sometimes with superb ingenuity; other times, as during the ball scene or in the square, with far too little heft. He also brought his storehouse of humor to work. The battle of obscene gestures between the Capulet and Montague gangs that launches the drama was here a cavalcade of flip-offs — a veritable celebration of our capacity to invent insult. Cross-dressed Amber Darragh (Mercutio) and Julie Worden (Tybalt) as the fiercest insulters have rarely been so sexy.


Morris is not a narrative choreographer, though, and even though he is adept at telling snapshot stories, he has difficulty building movement arcs into his ballets. The reason has to do with his movement vocabulary, which lacks internal complexity and relies on horizontal pattern more than volume and varied use of the body's kinesphere to shape space.

This poses serious problems when he bites off a big work, especially one with a substantial story and lots of characters to carve out. It is even more problematic when a score, such as the Prokofiev, is full of big Russian shifts of temper and tempo. Between the massive set and the score, the dance, with its many instances of wit and beauty, was overpowered, and the dancing tended to look thinner than it even was.

But there were also the transcendent moments and movers, who fully embodied what Morris and his team, including always inventive and knowing costumer Martin Pakledinaz and lighting designer James F. Ingalls, were after. There was pint-size Lauren Grant, whose artistry grows by quantum leaps each time we see her and who, as Juliet's Nurse, nearly stole the show.

Strong-sweet Maile Okamura as Juliet and a compellingly boyish Noah Vinson both infused their roles with an energy and nuance that made small steps read big and made us believe in love as a redeeming power. And Joe Bowie as Escalus, Prince of Verona, offered us a view of Good Government — calm, kind, and open to compromise.



But in the end, the music and its length controlled the night, forcing the choreographer to create lots of incidental movement, and that itself led to a kind of oppression: dance was reduced to the handmaiden of its sister art. This was not the message Morris was attempting to impart in the drama, yet ironically it was precisely that message that made some of us dash up the aisle the instant Berkeley Symphony Orchestra fell silent.

studio art

There is a little-known story about a dance studio on the Berkeley/Oakland border, the kind of story that one day will be immortalized by dance historians, but for now is knowledge held by a small but devoted pool of dance lovers.

The studio is called Shawl-Anderson, named for the two trim, septuagenarian modern dancers, Frank Shawl and Victor Anderson, who set up shop one building away from College Avenue on Alcatraz 50 years ago. Both dancers had recently concluded their careers in May O'Donnell's company in New York City and they packed up and headed toward the Pacific Ocean. It was 1958, they landed in Berkeley, and then quickly got down to work.

Now, a half-century later, Shawl-Anderson as the studio is generally known, is a multifaceted center that blends dance studio, performance space and ad hoc gathering place. Since its inception it has been rooted in the ethos that has fueled the work of their mentor, May O'Donnell, an early principal dancer with Martha Graham.

How that philosophy translates is: warm-hearted independence mixed with a profound commitment to the group as it strives for always-elusive beauty, hard-to-nail truth and the body's fragile perfection. These are modern dancers for whom kindness is inseparable from hard work, and that makes them an unusual pair.

Back in the day, Shawl and Anderson began across the street, over a liquor store still in operation, before doing what so
many dance studios did then-move into a house where the living room, dining room and bedrooms all became open spaces filled with the panting breaths of sweaty, aspiring artists ranging from kindergarten on up. Those may have been quiet days in dance in the East Bay, but a lot still happened as the '50s rolled into the '60s.

Much of that activity was abetted by the shy Anderson and the ebullient Shawl, two wise men of counterbalanced temperaments. Renowned performers appeared at the studio to offer master classes. Charles Weidman was among them. He was the spirit who made modern dance safe for antic expression while his cohort, Doris Humphrey, pushed modern movement into stunning naturalistic abstractions. Such luminaries as Alwin Nikolai, Lucas Hoving and Bella Lewitzky, among others, also dropped in or stayed for a time to teach.

charles weidman

"If it hadn't been for Shawl-Anderson," French-Canadian choreographer Sonya Delwaide wrote in an e-mail, "I would never have found my place as a choreographer in the Bay Area dance community (when I arrived)."



"Frank invited me to teach at the studio, and he came to my first concert at the Bay Area Dance Series, even co-sponsoring me so I could apply for grants....When no one knows you, it is important to have one person who believes in you, and Frank was that person for me. "

Shawl, the extrovert, still has a capacity to draw talented young choreographers to him, to give them a perch as teachers, then a launching pad as choreographers. Rehearsal space has always been available at a reasonable price, and both Anderson's and Shawl's perceptive and knowledgeable eyes remain open to artists interested in being mentored.

It is quite a legacy, and this month, to honor the studio's 50 years, Shawl-Anderson's coterie of devoted studio-goers is sponsoring two salons. The first is at 7 and 9 p.m. Sept. 19, with performances by dancers and studio teachers, including past artists in residence. At 5 p.m. Sept. 20, the studio will throw a fundraising bash down the street at St. John's Presbyterian Church, where live performance will commingle with silent auctions, music and dinner.

Details: 50th Anniversary Salon, Sept. 19, 7 and 9 p.m. Sept. 19, Shawl-Anderson Dance Studio, 2704 Alcatraz Ave., Berkeley; $15. Gala Benefit, 5 p.m. Sept. 20, St. Johns Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave., Berkeley; $75-$125; 510-654-5921, www.shawl-anderson.org.

Shaping 'September'



Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco will present Robert Moses' Kin's staging of choreographer Moses' latest work, "Toward September," Thursday through Sept. 20. At press time, it still is being developed as the company gains access to the theater space. Moses, who has long mined social and spiritual concepts in a language of lush, often ferocious intensity, is letting the space bring shape to this season's premiere.

Chance historically has played a minor role in his work, but now, as the father of two young children and as an artist who likes to challenge his own tried-and-true solutions to making dance, he is letting in serendipity. "It's not much to give you," Moses said recently by phone, "but this time I'm not collaborating. I have ideas and I'm going into the space and will see what happens."

Details: Robert Moses' Kin, 8 p.m. Thursday through Sept. 20, Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F.; $25-$30; 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org.

verona gets happy

This short piece was part of the fall arts preview for CCT.
LOL: my editors overrode the term "democrats" in the phrase "fellow democrats" (not "fellow Democrats"). The area the paper serves is big on red (forget saying "true blue" in print)), and these are times when democracy no longer exists as a generic idea, owned by Republican and Democrat and Green and Independent alike. Despite my objections, followed by my suggestions of "citizen" and "traveler", "democrat" became "celebrantor." What a fine indicator of the zeitgeist.






Mark Morris is the obvious story of any season — audiences love the man's deceptively simple dance style, which is as easy to read as a 1930s cartoon, and often as clever.

Easy or not, the power of Morris' art is that people from ages 8 to 80 can imagine letting the urge overtake them, hopping onstage and joining the dancers as they gambol through space like a population of fellow celebrantors. Viewers have their urge to dance ignited, then satisfied, by Morris' band of movers. That very kinship, unthinkable with, say, the Olympian dancers of San Francisco Ballet or Merce Cunningham's troupe, is what makes the 52-year-old choreographer, after decades of success, such a darling still.

This September, the Mark Morris Dance Group offers the West Coast premiere of its "Romeo and Juliet," evocatively subtitled "On Motifs of Shakespeare." It is a work that premiered at Bard College in New York in June and constitutes Morris' latest stab at classical rep, where some of his most ingenious ideas have taken flight.

What lured him to the project was the discovery by Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison of a new version of the sweeping Prokofiev score for the original ballet. It had lain forgotten since 1935, and was gathering dust in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.



The find came complete with 10 pages of annotations by the composer, which Morris was left to interpret, and a different musical and narrative ending. Rather than a crypt, Prokofiev rebelliously sets the final scene in Juliet's bedroom and poses a romantically happy ending. Stalin's censors smelled subversion and kept the original from seeing light--love is a dangerous weapon to tyrannical regimes.

After Morris studied the score, he created a pared-down dance, which stands in contrast to the often-heavy Byzantine approach choreographers take to the Shakespeare tragedy. According to the Village Voice's Deborah Jowitt, Morris forgoes the pomp and cleaves toward a vocabulary of simple walks, clasps and iconic gestures. The result is spare yet hearty, and Verona is made a place where violence is not epic but ordinary, like love.

As a drama that celebrates passion, Morris's work is a love letter to our tribally violent world. But in its Berkeley context, it is even something more. It brings outgoing Cal Performances director Robert Cole a warm, optimistic goodbye. Cole, who made the Morris Dance Group Berkeley's closest thing to a dance company in residence, was an early adopter of the troupe who endorsed Morris' vision and could often be found in the orchestra pit, conducting. It led to one of the most productive partnerships between choreographer and presenter in recent decades.

It is a parting of sweet sorrow, and Morris' "Romeo and Juliet" is an apt "So long."

Details: Sept. 25-28, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $42-$94, 510-642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.


Also recommended: American Ballet Theatre II, a 13-member troupe of young performers affiliated with the famed classical dance company, comes to Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center's Bankhead Theater on Sept. 21, $30-$45,925-373-6800, www.livermoreperformingarts.org.



Meredith Monk, whose sheer experimental genius makes this dancer, singer, and media artist a peerless performer, comes to Stanford University on Oct. 18 in a program titled "Songs of Ascension," $13-$30, www.livelyarts.stanford.edu, 650-725-2787. And the Merce Cunningham Dance Company promises, once again, to blow our minds with cutting-edge installations, events and concert work at UC Berkeley, Nov. 7-15, $26-$48, 510-642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

text tiles

Ghanian artist El Anatsui’s wall hanging, emperor's coat, landscape and metal quilt

POW!

Joe Goode's themes haven't changed much since he began making dance theater in the Bay Area 22 years ago. He still trucks in such peculiarly American gender stereotypes as the cowboy and the cheerleader, and from his vantage point as a gay man he excavates the messy and often heartbreaking truths behind those icons. But what has changed is Goode's approach, which is at once more tender and compassionate than when he set out, as well as more elegantly rendered.

The two-week run opened Friday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Goode and group roiling the edges of the Yerba Buena Center lobby crowd. As the ticket takers ushered me in, I saw the choreographer strolling languidly through the lobby. He wore the fanciest cowboy shirt of the dancers, a black one with long white tassels streaming from each sleeve, and a cowboy hat pressed snugly on his head. He would have been at home as King of the Pendleton Round-Up.



The rest of the men (Felipe Barrueto-Cabello, Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, Andrew Ward and Alexander Zendzian) were dressed in varied cowboy garb while the women (Jessica Swanson and Patricia West) were in saloon-girl regalia. They were all toting guns, yelling "pow," or "gotcha" and taking aim at the concertgoers, breaking the boundaries not only of the proscenium-arched stage but of the theater itself. It was a scenario that reminded me of clever barkers outside a Broadway theater, bringing a bit of show to the streetsto lure in the passersby. It had little theatrical clout of its own, but it said, "follow me" with humor and follow we did.

This was how Goode launched his reprise of the 1996 installation, the "Maverick Strain," his wry distillation of the 1961 movie "The Misfits," which starred Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. Like a good architectural structure, the cowboy scenario provided the choreographer a skeleton on which to hang wry observations about and inversions of iconic gender roles that run through the American bloodstream like a virus.

The world premiere "Wonderboy" had a radically different tone that was at once more formal and far more intimate, thanks to the magic of puppeteer Basil Twist, a third-generation puppeteer and native San Franciscan whose puppets are renowned for their uncanny lifelikeness and delicacy.




Accompanied by singer/violinist Carla Kihlstedt and pianist/drummer Matthias Bossi, "Wonderboy" was rendered as a series of small awakenings expressed through a beautifully expressive "boy" in a window. Looking out upon the world, he feels too much, sees too much and, through lovely touches of Asian theatrical influences, recounts his experience with poignant urgency.

Like Bunraku practitioners, two dancers held the Wonderboy in his spot in a mobile window frame (set engineered by Dan Sweeney) between billowing curtains, while another dancer stood downstage and uttered the puppet's thoughts, the speaker's voice electronically manipulated to sound childlike.

Between these, dancers engaged in dance vignettes, from a beautifully tender male-male series of lifts to a comically awful solo enactment of near date rape. A quiet river of life seemed to pass, and out of it an epiphany surfaced for the young, fragile observer: from so much aching feeling comes a profound experience of life's suchness.

By contrast, "Maverick Strain," which unfurled as a series of conversational snapshots, was far from "Wonderboy's" earnest poetic terrain, choosing to wrap itself around ironic cliches, ironic feeling tones and ironic subtexts.

Wry aphorisms about men and women amassed sweetly, like a well-arrayed pile of shotgun casings ("A woman's got to be strong; it's all she's got when she stops being pretty.").

Although it held no surprises for Goode veterans, it was rendered with the endearing and comic appeal of an old gun holster on the hips of a Mae West impersonator.

WHAT: Joe Goode Performance Group: "Wonderboy" and "Maverick Strain"
WHERE: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, Third and Howard streets, S.F.
WHEN: 8 p.m. June 13 and 14, 7 p.m. June 15
COST: $25-$40
CONTACT: 415-978-2787, www.ybca.org, www.joegoode.org

summer in the city

For those who just moved to the area from Chicago, New York or other sites of blistering June-August heat, be forewarned: Summer in the Bay Area is a complex state of mind. Every day the weather swings from giddy freewheeling sunshine (Palo Alto, Orinda) to bone-numbing fog (El Cerrito, Berkeley, parts of Oakland and outer regions of San Francisco), gray plumes of frigid moisture stomping in with high drama and setting the teeth chattering.

This is no benign, balmy damp; we're talking fog that requires travelers to stuff their backpacks or trunks with extra clothes, down jackets included. While you may think the lovely Stern Grove or Ocean Beach look like estimable sites for a picnic, when the witching hour hits and the clouds roll in, early afternoon becomes indistinguishable from 7 o'clock, and what seemed bucolic looks suddenly like the cold and creepy setting of a Hitchcock pic.

So how does a presenter conduct an arts festival in a place that, instead of a steady climate, has a manic-depressive season with no appropriate name?

Answer: He skips Shakespeare in the Park, brings most of the art inside, and acts as if it's fall.




Andrew Wood, a rangy English arts presenter who launched the long-needed San Francisco International Arts Festival five years ago, situated it late in spring — right after the wave of graduations, at the tail end of the large presenting organizations' seasons, and before locals leave in search of real summer. His goal: to bring the world to the Bay Area and have the Bay Area see the rich arts in its midst.

"The city is a great incubator, and many young artists from all over the country come here to live and learn about their craft," said Wood. "But sometimes San Francisco is seen as being isolated from the world's major art centers. So, as artists mature, they feel they have to leave in order to fulfill their potential." In other words, don't blame it on the fog.

Wood is committed not only to keeping the artists here but offering them new laboratories in which to explore. "We are trying to create an international platform for local artists to present their work as well as to develop a model that promotes international relationships."

This year Wood has organized 40 international and local artists, closing with Afro-Cuban maestro Omar Sosa playing live in Yerba Buena Center gardens June 8, a Sunday event free to the public.

Between now and then Wood has lined up maverick dance collaborations, such as local company paige starling sorvillo's Blindsight in league with Los Angeles artist Lucy HG and Australian composer Susan Hawkins in a work called "thirty-seven isolated events" (through Saturday). The dancemakers' task is to explore the seam between the virtual and the real. Even if their goals read like a page out of a postmodern critical theory text, you don't need a philosophy degree to understand that the dance is gutsy and real.

Then, on Saturday and Sunday, Brazilian solo artist Cristina Moura presents the California premiere of "like an idiot." Here Moura plays on the univeral experience of being a fool and uses her eclectic Brazilian-European training to explore the experience we can all grasp.

In June, daring local movers Scott Wells, Kate Foley, Rachel Lincoln, Leslie Seiters, Leyya Tawil, Jose Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama are also given platforms to pursue multicultural conversations. The recurrent themes — themes that plague us all in an era of war, globalization and declining resources —— are about identity, place and what we can and cannot know.
Details: San Francisco International Arts Festival through June 8. Various dates and times. Venues include Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St. (at Mission Street); Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St. at Shotwell Street; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission St.; and CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission St. at Ninth Street. $20. 800-838-3006, www.sfiaf.org.

REGINALD RAY SAVAGE'S work may seem to have little to do with the experiments the San Francisco International Arts Festival
artists imbibe. But in reality, Savage and his Savage Jazz Dance Company have been quietly, radically questioning the parameters of dance since he founded his company in Oakland 16 years ago. At the center of his inquiry is the identity of "high" art and jazz's place in concert performance.



Savage was trained at the Katherine Dunham Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis and by the ballerina Ruth Page in Chicago, and he has a well-deserved East Bay following. This month he presents "OakTown: DownTown."

Music is the lightning rod for Savage, whether it is live or taped, and music keeps the company pushing the boundaries of its jazz-inflected movement style. For "OakTown: DownTown," Broadway hoofer and guest artist Alex Sanchez dives into jazz-tango fusion in his untitled premiere. Savage challenges himself with the experimental sounds of Alarm Will Sound in his latest work "Blue Calx," while Savage Company stalwart Maia Siani has choreographed a new work "Between Us" to the lyrical soul vocals of Maxwell.

Details: Savage Jazz Dance Company: 8 p.m. today and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland, $10-15, 415-256-8499 or 866-558-4253, www.inticketing.com., www.savagejazz.org.

OAKLAND DANCE: The Fifth Oakland Dance Festival on June 21 and 22 has a lineup reminiscent of the first Bay Area dance festivals, one that fearlessly ranges across the dance spectrum agglomerating dance styles. On the opening night, June 20, it will creating mind-bending juxtapositions in rapid-fire succession when 12 companies fly across the stage in brief forays.
On tap are groups that range from mixed-abilities dancers, wacky movement theater performers, butoh dancers, East-West fusion artists to neoclassical ballet dancers (including guest appearances by San Francisco Ballet dancers Courtney Wright and Garrett Anderson).

Saturday's and Sunday's programs are more stately, with Company C Contemporary Ballet joining forces with ODC/Dance. But all in all, Oakland Dance Festival leaves the aesthetic and existential soul-searching for the other folks and engages in an old-fashioned variety show.

Details: Oakland Dance Festival, 8 p.m. June 20 and 21, 2 p.m. June 22, Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland, $10 Friday, $20-$25 Saturday and Sunday, 925-708-0752.

kung fu fusion

San Francisco's Lines Ballet has never been a stranger to cross-cultural collaboration. Long before mixing idioms was commonplace in the concert hall, company founder and artistic director Alonzo King began to inflect ballet with fractured, zigzagging shapes that held echoes of Asia, Indonesia and Africa.

Such cultural surfing could be an add-on or a gimmick, and in some hands it would. For King, however, recombining Western classical dance with non-Western forms is a fundamental aspect of his quest to find new ways of expressing what is shared across cultures and through time.

This week's reprise of "Long River High Sky," his 2007 collaboration with the masterful Shaolin Monks, demonstrates how potent cultural partnerships can be, and may be King's most riveting collaboration yet.

Performed through Sunday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the evening-long work teams nine exquisite Lines dancers with seven kung fu practicing monks from the Shaolin Temple USA in Fremont dressed in robes of two shades of saffron.

Though not always transparent in its aims and overlong at times, the two-part work is a stunning exploration of energy, intention and communication through the body. The monks make the ballet dancers appear like gods and goddesses; the dancers reveal the monks' extraordinary earthy power both as warriors and masters of the physical. Together they create what, at moments, becomes a dreamscape of sublime and glinting movers.



The night opened on the serpentine limbs of bare-chested Brett Conway flowing through brash fluorescent-lit space downstage as Shi Yanliang watched from his crossed-leg position on the stage floor. Then the two movers changed roles and the monk slashed and squatted and burst through the air with fighting limbs.

This pattern of observing, then being observed, of standing apart, then partnering, became the rhythmic structure of the night's many extraordinary exchanges. Two languages were being spoken. Sometimes their grammar and syntax overlapped, or their intent — to communicate, to clarify — were the same.

Breathtaking Corey Scott-Gilbert appeared to embody a bird during one eloquent solo, and when Shi Yanzhong partnered Laurel Keen, King created a beautiful moment of touching, awkward humanity that reverberated through the night.



reprinted with permission

hard works

all photos copyright of erik tomasson

April 24, 2008. It may be the end of the 2008 San Francisco Ballet 75th anniversary season, but it felt Tuesday night that the year's festivities have just begun.

The night marked the gala opening of the much-anticipated New Works Festival, with the launch of the first three of 10 newly commissioned works by as many choreographers, and as disparate as local modern dance luminary Margaret Jenkins and little-known Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo.

A house overflowing with dancers' families, artists, press from the far coast as well as Europe, and a suffusing warmth underscored both the intimacy and intensity of artistic director Helgi Tomasson's undertaking. And while such an undertaking seems like it would be a snap for a large ballet company with great dancers and enormous resources at its disposal, in fact it is no easy trick at all. Bombing at the box office is not in any ballet's financial cards these days, and this means that artists' daring has to be tempered by success — people have to like the work enough to fill the seats in order to ensure the continuation of the company.

It is these implicit terms that can tamp down innovation. That was clear Tuesday — a night of exquisite dancing and pleasant beautifully dancey dances--but real dance daring was going on somewhere south of Market Street, not in the Opera House. One hopes that the next two programs shift the paradigm just a little.

On the bill for Program A was "Fusion" by Yuri Possokhov, "Within the Golden Hour" by Christopher Wheeldon and "Changes" by Paul Taylor — not a crowd-killing choreographer among them, and each a veteran of San Francisco Ballet commissions, which made them reliable choices. Ukrainian-born Possokhov, a former principal with the company and now Tomasson's choreographer in residence, is an inventive dancemaker with a strong sense of sculptural space, while British-born Wheeldon incises space with line, crisp musical pattern and a bag of intricate moves. Both handle music ably, and both on Tuesday employed their scores with sophisticated verve. Taylor was a maverick in the 1960s and '70s, but settled into self-parody some time ago.

Possokhov's beautiful "Fusion" suffered most from a kitschy Turkish male quartet stationed in a row in white billowing clothes and fez (reminiscent of harem guards from 19th century ballets), doing jazz isolations set to Rahul Dev Burnam's Bollywood music. Their phalanx was repeatedly ruptured by magnificent dancers in dusky-hued leotards who paired up gloriously, darting and diving to Philip Glass-inspired compositions by British composer Graham Fitkin. The whole looked as if it was meant to hold timely geopolitical allusions, but when one tried to add them up, it was just a mirage.



Fusion seemed equally to be on Wheeldon's mind. Oversaturated colored backdrops and all, he presented "Within the Golden Hour" to the work of Ezio Bosso's wryly global lounge music.



The result was sexy whimsy and novel and mesmerizing male/female motifs that seemed to talk back to Possokhov. His vocabulary included Graham floor positions, Japanese flexions, decorous Via Veneto lounge dancing, box steps and waltzes, but like Possokhov, he broke no real new aesthetic ground. The cast danced joyously.



So did Taylor's group, shimmying and boogalooing to a medley of the Mamas and Papas and John Lennon and Paul McCartney's lyrical '60s songs that was lost on half the crowd and elicited wary stillness from the other half. Nowhere in this sweet choreographic agglutination with its banal take on the counterculture of the '60s was there a hint of relevance or a shred of contemporary consciousness, no matter what claim the program notes made to an eternal social impulse for change.



This was a trite and empty cartoon of the dope-smoking '60s portrayed as trite and empty. Taylor has produced such fatuous work for his own troupe. To share it is not only unkind, but a waste of an opportunity for a once-great choreographer. (Because they would look divine reading the phone book, the dancers were glorious anyway.)
The festival continues through May 6 with choreographers Stanton Welch, Julia Adam and James Kudelka on Program B, and Margaret Jenkins, Val Caniparoli and Jorma Elo on Program C.

reprinted with permission

Harry made the NYT, Newsday, the Daily News, the Voice etc., and has the men in blue turning red

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xgrqThagkrE&feature=PlayList&p=28E691012EDFBE46&index=8http://

www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/nyregion/30about.html?pagewanted=print

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nymari0430,0,1720357,print.story

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/04/29/2008-04-29_racial_slant_in_pot_busts.html

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0818,kelly-for-mayor-a-voters-guide,427148,4.html

eating sushi on the eve of May Day a Free Tibet demonstration marched by

Journalism as Literature:
A Lost Art
by Christopher Hitchens


The generic British word for journalist — now unofficially adopted by all English-speaking foreign correspondents — is “hack.” This represents an effort to draw the sting from an insult by annexing it to oneself. Other self-descriptions, such as “reporter” or “correspondent,” represent an attempt to professionalize what began as a craft or trade. One hack of my acquaintance used the word “writer” as his official occupation on his passport because, as he said, it could by the stroke of a pen be changed to “waiter” if the officials at the frontier post looked menacing or uncooperative.

Yet to be considered a “writer” is the highest aspiration of the hack. It is something that can only be said of you by others, not something you can lay claim to yourself. In the course of this spring at the school of journalism, I have been attempting to highlight those moments in American history when mere journalism rose to the level of literature. I thought this might be good for morale.

“Unacknowledged legislators” was Shelley’s term for those poets who raised the moral and political temperature. The United States Constitution does not mandate an opposition party, but its First Amendment does grant unprecedented liberty to the press. And very often, in periods of crisis, it has fallen to the wielders of the pen to fill the void or to set the example. By what I consider to be a nice coincidence, the most luminous moments of “journalism as literature” have also been the moments of courage and dissent.

Indeed, the American idea is the product of a clash between rival journalists and pamphleteers, who in pre-revolutionary days conducted a vigorous argument about the first draft of the United States. In my J-school course, therefore, we began with the work of Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush, and continued with the tussle over the Federalist Papers as conducted in, among other places, Alexander Hamilton’s New York Post.

The crisis over slavery, another institution which enjoyed “bipartisan” support, was largely precipitated by the work of a few outstanding journalists and editors, principal among them William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and — first martyr of the American press — Elijah Lovejoy. Of special interest is the way in which the anti-slavery movement cross-fertilized, especially through Douglass’ personality, the movement for the enfranchisement of women. This, too, was largely conducted through journals like The Revolution.

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (written for serialization in a paper called The Appeal to Reason), Mark Twain’s almost Swiftian writings on the Spanish-American war, the lonely but beautiful writing of Randolph Bourne during the “Great War,” and the huge one-man journalistic and literary efflorescence of H.L. Mencken in the 1920s and ’30s — these all help to establish a certain tradition.

There remains the question which I have been, in my own mind, slightly postponing. What has become of this great tradition today?

come what MAY

TERPSICHORE
the muse of dance, and Thalia (comedy) and Melpomene (tragedy) , the muses of drama, are going to have to duke it out this month, because I'm claiming Canadian writing/directing wonder Robert Lepage as one of dance's own. To my delight, Lepage, after a three-year absence, is bringing his Andersen Project to Cal Performances late in May, to be performed by Yves Jacques. Lepage's fans have missed him.



Dance, as you may know, is the real mother of Western drama, an art form that evolved in ancient Greece from Dionysian ritual performed in remote groves by raucous women who chanted, danced, worshiped, sacrificed animals and are said to have engaged in a fair amount of screeching on behalf of the god of wine and the underworld.

The goings-on apparently gave men down in the valleys a bit of a fright, and before long, the Athenians were building amphitheaters and employing participants in far more stage-managed rituals, ones that excluded women altogether. That tamed practice is the precursor to our sitcoms and daily soap operas, as well as our Broadway plays, while Jerry Springer may be the one putting us back in touch with the bestial aspects of the arts' roots.

Dance and drama are intertwined in other ways. Both depend on the body as their instrument —— the primary language for each is the physical expressiveness of the human form.

This is Lepage's metier. But the guy from up north likes to create disruption in the landscape. Lepage breaks down boundaries and injects surprises, while keeping the body at the center of his story. Perhaps that is why he calls his production company Ex Machina, from drama's "deus ex machina," meaning "god from a machine" (referring to the ancient method of using a crane to deposit actors on the Greek stage).

Although based on two tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the Andersen Project is a postmodern quest and a pensee about a solitary man confronting identity, art and history.

As usual, Lepage's visual mastery is paramount, the stage a dreamscape of projections, of movement and static figuration, and of layered light on the solitary body that at times creates a loneliness so beautiful it no longer counts as mere loneliness. And if that isn't enough, the landscape is pierced by hilarious monologues that dance their own dance.



Details: Robert Lepage's Andersen Project, 8 p.m. May 28-30, 3 p.m. June 1, Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way at Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, $62, 510-642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.

THE BODY POLITIC: This month, ODC Theater in San Francisco continues the series called "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic" in its temporary digs at Theater Artaud. May 1-3 spotlights veteran choreographer and the unsung Bacchante of Bay Area experimentation, Sara Shelton Mann, who founded Contraband in the mid-'80s, a dance troupe that often seemed to double as a social movement.


jim bostick, the reclining bacchante

This month, she completes her three-year work-in-the-making, "Inspirare," reprising part one, "Telios Telios," from 2006, part two, "Inspirare" from 2007, and debuting part three, "RedGoldSky." Shelton Mann incorporates the "total theater" principles of her mentor Alwin Nikolai, the long lines of Cunningham dance style, with ritual elements and collage (for a sneak peek, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=Php7hayunLU).

Mann is followed at Artaud May 8-10 by ex-Bay Area resident Miguel Gutierrez, who is now a fixture in the Brooklyn, N.Y., dance scene. He is a dancer who has invited viewers into his living room to watch him with an intimacy rarely possible in traditional spaces.

For this run, Guttieriez presents "Seduction of Order," a work that contends with the beauty and the politics of the body and is set up as a diptych that is said to address both the act of performance as well as the experience of the performance. (It sounds a little like looking into dressing room mirrors that reflect each other without end.)
Details: Sara Shelton Mann, 8 p.m. May 1-3; Miguel Gutierrez, "Seduction of Order," 8 p.m. May 8-10, Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida St., S.F., $20 advance, $25 at the door. ODC Box Office: 415-863-9834 (2-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays). ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., S.F.

THARP PREMIERE: For pure dance, dance without a bow to ritual, to words, to allusions to grand drama, Company C Contemporary Ballet's world premiere of a Twyla Tharp dance, "Armenia," at the Dean Lesher this month is a paean to nothing but the genius of a body in motion. Tharp's 14-minute elegantly floor-skimming work has all the carefree ease of signature Tharp with Rubik's Cube intricacy hiding inside. Director Charles Anderson includes his own "Echoes of Innocence," the late Michael Smuin's "Starshadows" and former Taylor dancer David Grenke's "Vespers" on the bill.
Details: Company C, 8 p.m. May 23 and 24, Lesher Center for the Arts, Civic Drive at Locust Street, Walnut Creek. $40 general, $25 students/seniors, 925-943-7469, www.companycballet.org.

THE "IZZIES": And finally, a fine way to usher in May with Terpsichore on your arm is to sample the Isadora Duncan Awards, where more than 40 dancers, dancemakers, technicians, composers, dance companies and ensembles have been nominated for an Izzie in recognition of their outstanding achievement during 2007. It is the one time a year when the dance community turns out in all its wacky splendor to celebrate itself on the eve of National Dance Week, the week when free dance classes are held in studios, universities and colleges all around the Bay.

It's free and open to the public, reception at 6 p.m., awards ceremony at 7 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, 415-920-9181.

Ann Murphy's In Step appears monthly in Weekend Preview. Reach her at writingdance@yahoo.com.

hope. spring. eternal.

The Oakland Ballet as the Comeback Kid drew a big crowd full of tulle-bedecked children, jeans-wearing teens and casually festive families Saturday to see director Ronn Guidi's 1996 production of "The Secret Garden" at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland.

Even some of the seats at the back of the cavernous movie palace were occupied by people other than ushers, and for the first time in decades, Oakland Ballet seemed to have corralled a broad audience.

What was particularly exciting was that some of the ticket holders seemed never to have seen a live theatrical show before, like the teenage boys who laughed at what, to them, sounded like a real-time mishap backstage (the taped sound of a tree falling).

Moments later they realized their mistake when the woman who disappeared into the wings was next seen in her stage husband's arms.

Exposing people to the excitement of live performance can make restagings such as "The Secret Garden" wholly worthwhile, especially when live music is there to bolster the action, as the Oakland East Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan was. Although their playing was uneven, they supported the story with the sweeping, plaintive music of Edward Elgar and it transmitted the physicality of dance as canned music rarely can.

But it would inspire people a whole lot more if they could understand the narrative action without having to read the story. Even people who knew the tale had trouble placing the woman in the sari (danced by Michelle Brown) who tended and seemed to spiritually shelter a lonely young girl named Mary. Was the sari-clad woman real, someone wondered, or a ghost?

And the brevity with which, in the dance, the story's omnipresent housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock, appears (danced with hilarious imperiousness by Oakland Ballet alum Joy Gim) also brought confusion. A synopsis would have offered some help. In its place the program listed the titles of the more than 30 scenes and read like a Morse code — "Morning, a week later" or "Mary, in India and her parents' deaths."

During intermission, one mom marched up the aisle telling her daughter that she hoped by Act II to have figured out the story. But even a synopsis wouldn't have solved all problems. Wave upon wave of fast-moving scenes read across the footlights as endless backstory. Not only did the narrative frenzy get exhausting, but the point to it all seemed a long way away. It was.


Based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 classic "The Secret Garden," the ballet revolves around the orphaned and feral Mary and, in echo, her crippled cousin Colin, both damaged by loss and adult neglect. Mirroring them are a few even sourer adults like Colin's father Archibald Craven and Mrs. Medlock. A maid, Martha, and a gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, offset the neglect with attention and care.

The garden surrounding Craven's manor that Weatherstaff tends holds another, secret garden where Colin's mother's accident occurred. Both physically and metaphorically, the garden is the heart of the story, linking love and persistent care to rebirth.

Much about Guidi's "Secret Garden" was valiant 12 years ago and remains so, embodying some of his strongest talents for mise-en-scene, for precise, commedia-style characterizations and for heartwarming story.

Seventeen-year-old Claire Lewis portrayed a captivating Mary and brought her character to devilish life with perfectly pitched gesture, strong dancing and narrative flourish. Longtime company member Michael Lowe as the rheumy Weatherstaff managed to be gently doddering and smoothly funny.

Sensuous Jenna McClintock as the wife Lilias and crisply distant Joral Schmalle as the husband Archibald Craven each brought mature depth to their roles, although Guidi's choreography never rose above the ordinary.

Guidi's greatest strength has always been as a dramatic master of the small detail. Here, as in his "Romeo and Juliet," he uses his acting knowledge to carve out characters we care about. What is missing amid Rod Steger's still-captivating scenic decor and Ariel's warm costumes is a feel for condensed meanings, dance that is sculpted as well as flowing through time.

"The Secret Garden," for all its narrative accuracy, sentimental care, strong performances and kid-friendly flourishes, never moves us. Minus that, I expect that those teenage boys won't be back in the theater anytime soon.



reprinted with permission of the Contra Costa Times

east of eden

On the heels of last week’s celebration of the great populist, Jerome Robbins, San Francisco Ballet continued its romance with romance Friday. Four works were on the boards for program 5, three of them paens to Robbins-style lyricism, and one about as romantic as a day in divorce court.

Christopher Wheeldon’s 2002 Carousel (A Dance), which opened the program, is beloved in certain sectors for replicating the dreamy dance pairings that Broadway made famous. Taking his cues from the 1947 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, he stages the budding love between a carnival worker and an unknowing girl. It’s romance on the other side of the tracks, where, in the original, tragedy comes calling.

Jerome Robbins is dance’s lyric poet, and his archetypes—sailor, dreamer, gang member, dancer—transform dance into popular folklore. Although talented, Wheeldon is not in the same class –he can’t pull off the kind of musically stunning, characteriologically perfect distillations that make Robbins Robbins. Overstating characters, packing too many steps into a phrase to make a point, he gives us top-notch sentimentality and likable prettiness rather than essences.

So while Sarah Van Patten as the girl and a too-nice Pierre-Francois Vilanoba as the carney danced lusciously and proved they were in full command of their material, their yearning was fraught with clichés of innocence, breathlessness and surprise. Through no fault of their own, rather than dangerously mismatched lovers they seemed like middle class teens on a blind date at a local amusement park.

Wheeldon fared better in his evening’s second work, the Pas de deux from After the Rain. If the Richard Rogers score was a shower of melody and waltzing, Arvo Part’s radically slow, minimalist piano/violin duet from Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in a Mirror) was a call to sustained restraint, and Wheeldon met it.

An angularly thin and iron strong Yuan Yuan Tan in a sleeveless leotard and bare legs, and Damian Smith in bare chest and p.j. pants engaged in unspooling movement that defined relationship in often awkward, interesting patterns of vulnerability and surprise. This was a pair of lovers who explored rather than wallpapered love.

Helgi Tomasson’s On A Theme of Paganini, which followed, gave love numerous, beautiful shadings that veered from the individual to the group and back again. The sparkling quintet of Maria Kochetkova, Vanessa Zahorian, Joan Boada, Davit Karapetyan and Pascal Molat married the zest of Robbins to the purity of Balanchine. Rachmaninov’s lush score was pulled from the brink of excess by Tomasson’s Calvinist cool, while the whole was delicately designed by Martin Pakledinaz in Apollonian shades of white, twilight grey, Prussian blue and lilac.

Then, like a mutant gene, Eden/Eden (2005) crashed the love fest. What a welcome jolt.





Wayne McGregor’s dystopic ballet, which premiered at SFB last year, posits two edens—past and the future--and an anti-heroine named Dolly, the sheep cloned in Scotland in 1996. The resulting relentless, multisensory work is set to Steve Reich’s onrushing music for Three Tales plus video artist Beryl Korot’s visuals.

De-gendered dancers begin decked out in beige unitards and skullcaps, performing extreme undulations, matings and recombinations at reckless speeds in a dance language that is Cunningham squirmingly recombined. Overlaid with harsh and anguished discourse about cloning, the body, and the nature of life, it is one of the most provocative ballets in memory—frightening as well as riveting, beautiful as well as hideous. While it isn’t exactly about romance, it is, indeed, about life and our love of it.
all photos copyright of Erik Tomasson

flaming the fans

all photos copyright Erik Tomasson

Jerome Robbins' fans cheered San Francisco Ballet when the curtain came down on the company premiere of "West Side Story Suite," and leading the pack was Rita Moreno, the slight, tough-minded Anita of the 1961 film "West Side Story," who was the first to leap out of her seat.

The lineup on Thursday consisted of three eminently fluent and deeply pleasing Robbins dances, each fueled by a sexy, casual-looking elegance worn either by upper-crust characters or, more often, by likable proletarians. All of the works sailed into and through the music like well-made boats.




All also knew how to wear their angst near the funny bone. Even in a work as traditional-seeming as his 1970 "In The Night," the choreographer insisted on making us laugh. Here Robbins presented three versions of Chopin-girded love--young, settled and falling apart--and it was the deteriorating kind that flared bigger, louder and wittier.

Lorena Fejoo and Damian Smith erupted repeatedly from their silken reverie to balletically feud, which was as irresistible as it was apt. In Robbins' world, the stunning idyll performed by Yuan Yuan Tan and Ruben Martin and the beautiful accommodations elegantly exacted by Elana Altman and Tiit Helimets are the foil to Fejoo and Smith's messy, comic unraveling.



The night got off to an old-fashioned start with Robbins' very first ballet, "Fancy Free" (1944). Rendered with slapstick sweetness by Pascal Molat, shapeshifting humor by Davit Karapetyan and boyish physicality by Garrett Anderson, it is a tale of three World War II sailors on shore leave soft-shoe-ing, clowning and competing for drinks and love. When two "Passers-by" materialize, the girlish Vanessa Zahorian and a sultry Erin McNulty, trouble of the charming kind ensues.

This was tender small potatoes, giving the audience a taste of the big stuff to come in "West Side Story Suite," which is a mini "Romeo and Juliet." Packed cleverly into 35 minutes, "Suite" required half a dozen forms of dance, five solo singers (one of them from the company), a street rumble and gangs breaking into song. In place of Officer Krupke, a police whistle repeatedly trilled.

Straddling Broadway theater and abstract ballet is a demanding stretch, yet the corps tenaciously rose to the challenge, capturing the competing New York street punk styles-- one white (note: needs more grit and sex), one Puerto Rican. They also inhabited the broad characters and sang tunefully enough after relentless dancing. Pierre-Francois Vilanoba was a hunk of a Bernardo and Shannon Roberts was the pistol-hot girlfriend Anita. Garrett Anderson's Tony was aptly sweet and loyal.