Smuin and Gershwin
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Catching up--my review of Smuin Ballet in yesterday's Chronicle:
"Michael Smuin was a ballet showman whose slick dances his fans loved, and plenty of critics - this one included - loved to hate. But watching his Smuin Ballet carry on after the gleefully populist choreographer's sudden death one year ago, it's hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Perhaps that's largely because Smuin's 2001 "Dancin' With Gershwin," which opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Friday, is one of his tamer packages. It's inoffensive, undemanding entertainment that will keep Smuin devotees happy - and likely win some new fans.
This suite of ditties set to George and Ira Gershwin is not as theatrically outre or teasingly testing of the boundaries of good taste as some Smuin creations. True, there's a blond-wigged Marilyn Monroe (Robin Cornwell) shaking her moneymaker to Monroe's rendition of "Do It Again" as men with Vegas feather fans tremble with lust - a classic Smuin moment. And true, "Dancin' With Gershwin" is suffused with Smuin's love of razzle-dazzle showbiz and crazy cartoon effects. In "Swanee," to a recording by Al Jolson, the dancers wear white gloves and spats; their shirt cuffs suddenly glow in the dark, flying like birds as Jolson whistles. In "Ain't Necessarily So" (Cher's version), lithe Kevin Yee-Chan slinks through acrobatics while dancers in larger-than-life shadow projections act out the Biblical episodes behind him. There's full-company tap dancing and old-fashioned cane twirling. In one of the less-inspired gimmicks, to "By Strauss," two women in French maid outfits get twirled around on rolling office chairs.
But the bulk of "Dancin' With Gershwin" consists of pleasant, mostly indistinct, romantic pas de deux. In "I've Got a Crush on You," the man in a suit takes off her hat and turns out to be a woman - a vintage Smuin twist. "Someone to Watch Over Me" is set in the tropics, with Ethan White in a Tommy Bahama-style shirt partnering light-as-air Jessica Touchet. In "They Can't Take that Away from Me," Matthew Linzer moves through a ballroom dream with Cornwell, and in "The Man I Love," sultry Erin Yarbrough-Stewart lavishes herself upon a bare-chested Aaron Thayer.
I can't say I found either the steps or the emotional arc of any of these duets to be terribly notable, but I'm also not sure that matters. "
Click here for the rest.
May 06, 2008 · 12:37 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
New "Swan" at SF Ballet in 2009
My write-up of the San Francisco Ballet 2009 season in today's Chronicle:
"San Francisco Ballet will unveil an all-new production of "Swan Lake" by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson in 2009 as the centerpiece of its 76th season, along with a world premiere by resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov, the return of George Balanchine's full-evening "Jewels" and a program dedicated to works by reigning modern dance master Mark Morris.
The new "Swan Lake" marks an investment in the classics after the forward-looking New Works Festival that crowned this year's 75th anniversary. Six of the 10 ballets unveiled during that festival will return next year, including Christopher Wheeldon's intimate "Within the Golden Hour" and Jorma Elo's blood-pumping "Double Evil."
But Tomasson said the time was right, 20 years after his first staging of "Swan Lake" for the Ballet, to revisit the Tchaikovsky/Petipa classic with subtle new ideas and a larger budget. The sets and costumes will be designed by Jonathan Fensom, acclaimed for his work on Broadway but doing his first work for ballet. The production will put no major revisionist twists on the iconic story, but will use video projections and other multimedia effects to create more theatrical spectacle than the old staging.
On the contemporary side, the all-Morris program marks 15 years of his association with San Francisco Ballet with three works created for its dancers: the intricate and Baroque "A Garden"; the daffy "Sandpaper Ballet"; and "Joyride," to commissioned music by John Adams, which premiered at the New Works Festival. The other New Works Festival ballets returning are Possokhov's "Fusion," Stanton Welch's "Naked" and Val Caniparoli's "Ibsen's House." "
Click here for the rest, including Tudor, Robbins, and Forsythe on tap.
And click here for a podcast interview with Helgi Tomasson. I say about five words total over the course of it. Most of the interviewing you'll hear is deputy arts and entertainment editor Leba Hertz.
May 06, 2008 · 12:31 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Bay Area Dance Awards
My report in today's Chronicle:
"Sometimes radical inclusion creates curious exclusions. One of the great strengths of the Bay Area's booming dance scene is its wild diversity, a spectacle the Bay Area Dance Awards captures in its striking spectrum of nominees. From the elegant LIKHA-Pilipino Folk Ensemble to the Contract Improvisation-inspired stunts of Scott Wells and Dancers, seemingly no style and no genre was out of contention Monday night at the robustly populated Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, where the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards bestowed its 22nd annual honors in a joint production with Bay Area National Dance Week.
And yet some absences were conspicuous: The only mentions of San Francisco Ballet were in the restaging category. And you have to wonder about priorities when the performers of a heavily costumed Chinese lion dance, no matter how vigorously dispatched, win out against an MVP-worthy array of movement artists from some of the city's finest ensembles: Lines Ballet, ODC Dance and Janice Garrett & Dancers.
Yet the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards' championings are often the kind well worth cheering. Jess Curtis and his bi-continental company Gravity haven't lacked for praise in recent seasons, but his provocative, heady postmodern experiments should be even better known. On Monday, Gravity's raucous "Under the Radar" took the choreography, company performance, and music/sound/text awards. That sweep might seem to come with a biting irony: Curtis spends half his year in Berlin because of the more generous arts funding there. But Curtis had only gratitude for his native dance climate. "The different styles of dance, the combination of the personal and political here is something special in the world," he said. "There's a kind of heart in this community that is sometimes missing [in Europe] and I appreciate calling this place home." "
Click here for the full story.
And the winners:
Choreography: "Under the Radar," Jess Curtis/Gravity
Company Performance: "Under the Radar," Jess Curtis/Gravity
Individual Performance: Ibrahima O. Diouf in "JUSAT," with Diamano Coura West African Dance Company
Ensemble Performance: Danny Luong and Peter Luong, in "Lion Leaping through the Plum Blossom Mountain to Reach the High Green," with Leung's White Crane Lion and Dragon Dance Association
Visual Design: Jo Kreiter, David Fredrickson and Stephen McCaffery/Figureplant, and Sean Riley for Flyaway Productions' "Live Billboard Project"
Music/Sound/Text: Two awards: Abbos Kosimov for "Shodiana," and Jess Curtis/Gravity and the collaborators on "Under the Radar," with musical direction by Matthias Herrmann
Restaging: Miguel Santos, for "Misa Flamenca," for Theatre Flamenco
Special Awards: Gabriela Shiroma, for her full-length theater piece "Diaspora Negra," which brought together companies representing the dance forms of Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
Pandit Chitresh Das, for leading the international festival "Kathak at the Crossroads"
Sustained Achievement:
Pam Hagen, co-founder and former executive director of Lines Ballet
Miguel Santos, former artistic director of Theatre Flamenco
Pick School of Ballroom Dancing, founded in 1961
Bay Area National Dance Week Dancers' Choice Award
Jessica Robinson, executive director of CounterPULSE
April 30, 2008 · 12:04 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Politics and Dance at ODC Theater Fest
My review in today's Chronicle:
"One of our city's most important dance spaces, ODC Theater, is closed for a major rebuild this year, but director Rob Bailis isn't sitting idle. He's teamed with the historically beleaguered, heroically persevering management of Project Artaud Theater just a few blocks away in the Mission for an ambitious series of festivals.
"For the Record," which opened last weekend, will be followed by "Local Heroes/Big Picture" in June and July, and "Off Book: Stories That Move," a partnership with the wildly popular local literary festival Litquake, in October. In the meantime, "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic" unfolds in phases, too: Legendary local rabble-rouser Sara Shelton Mann will unveil the full triptych of her "Inspirare" next weekend, and homegrown choreographer Miguel Gutierrez returns from a burgeoning international career with two works about the intersection of politics and the body the weekend after.
It's treacherous territory, politically inspired dance, but Bailis has never shied from taking chances and "For the Record's" opening weekend displayed the risks and the rewards. The two works made an unintentional case study in the pitfalls and poetic potential of overtly making art about social issues.
Aerial choreographer Jo Kreiter's "Lies You Can Dance To" took an obvious message - American history is full of deception - and beat it into the ground with simplifying visuals. Butoh artist Ledoh and his creative collective Salt Farm used a heated topic - immigration - as a jumping-off point for wildly suggestive, metaphorically expansive images that spoke not just to our times, but to the challenges of the human condition."
I could have written so much more about Ledoh, and one small line on his "Color Me America" got cut, probably for space. Here's that section of the review with the tiny cut restored:
"Ledoh and Salt Farm's "Color Me America" was stunning antidote. Though you can point to the work's trappings to explain its success, with its hip and ear-teasing electronic score by Matthew Ogaz, and its gorgeous video by Perry Hallinan, the heart of "Color Me America" is in the movement. Ledoh, born in Burma, is trained in butoh, that apocalyptic post-World War II Japanese form where focused physical intention is all, where the performer's roiling facial expressions expose the emotional inauthenticity of our typical existence. Here, he channels butoh's essence without ever falling into its cliches.
The symbols are simple but used in beguiling combination: a row of four chairs that suggests endless bureaucratic waiting, placed onstage, and in the vast Interstate 5-like landscapes onscreen, and a red-tape-like ream of gauze with which Ledoh finally strangles his fellow performer, the excellent Iu-Hui Chua. For that final scene, the broad-chested, bald Ledoh wears a red corset and skirt and tasseled Spanish hat, an absurd foreigner; he fetches a bone in a way that suggests our dog-eat-dog mindset about “aliens” (the video even shows a real dog gnawing on another dog’s skull)."
Click here for the full review.
April 28, 2008 · 10:32 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
New Works Festival C
My review in the Chronicle:
"Jorma Elo, where have you been all our lives?
The Finnish choreographer's "Double Evil" proved the unqualified hit of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival on Thursday, crowning Program C's final slate of world premieres with a ballet so effortlessly innovative, fresh and blood-pumping that it seemed, excepting Mark Morris' "Joyride," to occupy a different plane than all before. "Double Evil" is a thrill on its own, but a festival of 10 new ballets invites comparisons, and to my eye the most fruitful was with Stanton Welch's "Naked" from the evening before. Though different on the surface, on a deeper level they play the same game: using classical steps as a base for startlingly modern departures. So why, in the Welch, does the exercise seem stilted, studied, merely academic, while in the Elo the results are visceral and vital?
True, Elo has the benefit of in-your-face music: two movements from Philip Glass' pounding, primal "Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra," alternating with Vladimir Martinov's achingly beautiful "Come In!" (Roy Malan excellent on solo violin). And true, the Bay Area has not experienced a large body of Elo work upon which to hypothesize: Aside from "Double Evil," his first San Francisco Ballet commission, we've seen only his "C. to C. (Close to Chuck)," which American Ballet Theatre brought here last year.
But the confident style of "Double Evil" made clear why Elo, now resident choreographer at Boston Ballet, has zoomed to ballet's fore in the past five years. It's a question of attitude. To Elo, just as to Balanchine and William Forsythe, it seems that classical ballet is not some fusty, precious tradition to be violated by bringing it up to the present day. It's not - as in the Welch - an anachronism: no preening jewelry-box ballerinas here, despite Holly Hynes' wonderfully provocative Petipa-style tutus.
Instead, when Sarah Van Patten takes a slightly skewed tendu in "Double Evil," she looks just as 21st century as when she's standing turned-in, winding down like some "Coppelia" doll-cum-street-princess. "
Click here for the full review.
April 28, 2008 · 10:27 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
New Works Festival B
My review in the Chronicle:
"One of the great opportunities of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival is the chance to consider - or reconsider - your personal ballet aesthetic. What qualities do you value in new ballets? What speaks to you and why? And if you appreciate a ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality, that takes classical attention to form and channels it into a modern ethos - if you cherish a ballet sure to show you something new every time you see it - then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris' "Joyride."
With its commissioned score by John Adams, "Joyride" was the PR coup of the Ballet's 75th anniversary season, and Wednesday, with Adams himself conducting, it lived up to the buzz. But it also capped a second-night slate that fulfilled the festival's larger potential: revealing the many faces of ballet today. No one who sees Program B's premieres by Stanton Welch, Julia Adam and James Kudelka could fail to marvel that ballet speaks in so many tongues.
If Morris' is the work that looks built for the ages, score one for complexity. With its shifting beat and crazy layers of rhythm, Adams' music must be a devil to count, and Isaac Mizrahi's sleek costumes make a joke of this, adorning metallic bodysuits with LED screens that continually flash random numbers. But cleverness is far from Morris' only game. There's a cool sex appeal in how these eight dancers efficiently shoot through and regroup. And there's a panoply of feeling in Morris' motifs, from a kung fu kick to a sweeping backward reach that turns into neck-clutching chaine turns.
The vocabulary looks more seamlessly integrated with a plainspoken classical virtuosity than any previous Morris ballet commission I know. Unlike works like his "Sylvia," where the ballet steps feel merely pared down in flourish to fit his aesthetic, in "Joyride" I felt Morris pushing from within ballet's language and conventions. Elizabeth Miner has a solo of fouette turns that seems to spin right out of everything she's done up to that moment; Rory Hohenstein blasts through a variation of spectacularly ticktocking legs.
But the drama of "Joyride" is its slower middle movement. Here, Morris has his couples (led by Sarah Van Patten and Gennadi Nedvigin) dance their pas de deux both facing front, side by side, the man standing slightly behind, the woman quite steady on her own, thank-you-very-much. The immediate effect is a smoldering mystery, as Morris manipulates the spacing. The larger possible influence is as an antidote to the current rave for twist-and-toss partnering that has grown not so much politically offensive as artistically bland."
Click here for the full review.
April 25, 2008 · 02:42 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
New Works Festival A
My review in today's Chronicle:
"It's tempting to treat San Francisco Ballet's gargantuan New Works Festival as a sporting event: 10 choreographers unveiling 10 world premieres over three days. Who will win? Who will lose?
But Tuesday the real winner was clear, and it was the Ballet audience. Throughout the War Memorial Opera House, veteran critics and newbie fans alike fervently debated which ballets they'd loved, and why. Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's daring onslaught of fresh work invites a heightened, even heated dialogue - and this, more than the sheer number of premieres, is what the ballet world needs now.
Between the two busily inventive ballets by Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Wheeldon, it seemed, viewers tilted toward one or the other. With Paul Taylor's "Changes," set to blaring music by the Mamas and the Papas, I'm guessing people either loved it or hated it.
I tilted toward Possokhov, whose "Fusion" was the improbable triumph of the evening. How's this for a formula that shouldn't work: A quartet of dervishes in flowing white, juxtaposed with four couples in sleek pantsuits (costumes by Sandra Woodall); Graham Fitkin's jazzy music with its crazy time signatures, sandwiched between Rahul Dev Burman's Bollywood-esque Indian compositions (kudos to the hard-driving musical ensemble under conductor Martin West); hip-swirling and lightning-swift movement that seems to borrow from anyone and everywhere.
But Possokhov pulls it together with theatrical flair, aided by Benjamin Pierce's scenic design of floating fabric panels. Those dervishes keep intermingling with the contemporarily clothed dancers like spirits or angels. The heart of the piece is a pas de deux for Yuan Yuan Tan and Damian Smith, the four dervishes standing as a wall that she runs through, then over, then rolls beneath before her increasingly clinging coupling. Were those dervishes her block to transcendence, or her gate to it, or both? When the pantsuit-dressed men take on the dervishes' kneeling chest pumps by ballet's end, have they found a piece of nirvana on earth? The metaphorical possibilities were rich.
Wheeldon's "Within the Golden Hour," on the other hand, looked like much invention to little cumulative effect. "
Click here for the full review.
April 24, 2008 · 10:06 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
