Posts filed under 'Dance'
I had the extraordinary privilege of attending last night’s performance of THE MOVEMENT at the UCSD Wagner Dance Studio (June 17, 2007).
This terrific evening, amazing from top to bottom, was produced by grace shinhae jun, CRW Enterprises, and Rebecca Bryant and Don Nichols [past)(modern performance duo].
THE MOVEMENT was an evening of dance theater. Or was it poetry dance? Or was it a play, masquerading as dance-poetry-slammin’ hip-hop? THE MOVEMENT was all of these, featuring a Greek chorus of twenty-something urban poets, rhythm sections of dance duets, trios, and quintets, heart-stopping and gut-wrenching poetry monologues, full-on jazz choreography, and a percussion soloist (Don Nichols) who could comfortably have shared the stage with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Miles Davis, or Muddy Waters.
I’ll begin at the beginning – “In this piece, something will be revealed and something will stay concealed” – choreographed and performed by Rebecca Bryant. “In this piece … ” is a brilliant theatrical creation, combining dance, graphics, sound effects, narration, film-like cuts and transitions, a treasure-hunt sense of adventure, and a killer postmodernist story line. Wow!
Onstage, Rebecca informs us she is investigating “how people construct reality”. I straightened up in my seat and took notice. Then she regales us with a cautionary tale of a fifth-grade production of “Macbeth”, letting us know this is when she became a postmodernist. “Reality is subjective” Rebecca declaims, and proceeds to exit stage left. A moment later a new performer appears, dressed as Rebecca was dressed and continuing the dance and monologue as if she IS Rebecca, but “reality is subjective”. This was a great moment.
Throughout “In this piece … ” Rebecca was contrasting, for our edification and delight, the objectives and goals of the “Performer” and the “Audience Member”. A chart takes shape on the scrim, with axes and labels. We’re told that audience interest is based on how well the performer tells her story, and Rebecca concludes forcefully, “by good I mean effective, and by story I mean lie”. My jaw literally dropped.
What about the choreography? Well, in such a dance event − really performance art − the actual dancing is a sidebar. Not inconsequential, certainly not, but serving the overall design, purpose, and message (subjective, of course) of the performing artist. The dancing was strong, graceful, supple, and attractive, and most of all, extremely intelligent.
“In this piece … ” incorporates a lot of script. The performer has a lot to say, all of it provocative and of great interest. Importantly, Rebecca Bryant is a very well-rounded stage artist, both a terrific dancer and a terrific actress. When she speaks, she speaks truthfully. She is in and of the moment. What she has to say may not be the “truth”, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
“On the Fly” was a unique multimedia performance event featuring poetry, live percussion, and dance. The poets – Ant, Rudy, and Kendrick – each possessing a commanding yet caring stage presence – drifted purposefully across and through the stage space, singly and in a group, interacting with the dancers – Rebecca Bryant and grace shinhae jun – in a graceful, loosely constructed pas de cinq.
The poets – spoken word artists – took the audience on a tour of American society, focusing on the mid-1960s and the now. They gave us a painful, shattering overview of Black History in America, as told by those only a generation removed from the water hoses, beatings, and murders done in those places and during those times.
At one early moment in “On the Fly”, on a darkened stage, the three poets stood in an open triangle, the apex forward, with right arms upraised and fists clenched – a tribute to the Black Power salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. I gasped in recognition at this living glimpse of history. I had tears in my eyes then and now, as I write this.
Martin Luther King. Coretta Scott King. Betty Shabazz. Gordon Parks. Gil Scott-Heron. The Black Panthers. And back through history to Sojourner Truth. As each honored name was spoken, echoing across time, visions of those troubled yet glorious days raced across my memory. My Dad and I Marched on Washington in 1963. I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in real-time, in 1965. In 1968 I read “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the Black Panthers. I was there. I remember. And I’m very grateful to Collective Purpose for reminding us what our collective purpose was, is, and needs to be.
“The Movement”, the final piece of the evening, was choreographed by grace shinhae jun in collaboration with bkSOUL dancers Lauren Dockweiler, Amir Khastoo, Jacqui Lang, and Lavina Rich. grace’s dynamic, powerful, intensely rhythmic choreography provided the perfect energizing, uplifting, and hopeful conclusion to the evening’s rollercoaster ride. Deep pliés, tight, fast turns and spins, karate-style leg kicks, modern ballet arabesques, and super-strong partnering propelled bkSOUL along sharp diagonals and up, down, around, and through the available four dimensions of space and time. The house was rockin’ and we all were feelin’ the love.
So, THE MOVEMENT was not only a brilliant creative collaboration. THE MOVEMENT sets a new standard for performance art, really a new standard for what it means to be a performer and what it means to present a performance. We had the joy of experiencing dance, poetry, and music of the highest order. And, by being present at THE MOVEMENT, we were enabled to share the deeply human experience of memory, pain and loss, and the joy of creation. The discovery, heartache, and blessing of striving to be human.
My great appreciation and thanks to each and every artist of THE MOVEMENT.
June 18th, 2007
City Ballet of San Diego presented “BALANCHINE” at Spreckels Theatre on May 11-13, 2007. This gorgeous program is the highlight of the Spring 2007 San Diego dance season, and would be a peak dance-lover’s experience in any city, including New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.
City Ballet is a top-tier dance company. The Artistic Director, Steven Wistrich, and the Resident Choregrapher, Elizabeth Rowe-Wistrich, really know what they’re doing. And the company dancers and apprentices – all of them – really know how to dance.
City Ballet of San Diego dancers are well-trained and well-disciplined, and as a group are very musical. They dance with flair and élan. They dance with grace and great energy. And when the dancers appear as a corps de ballet, they work seamlessly, beautifully, and with magnificent precision. No dancer lags behind in the phrasing. Everyone is where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be there, doing what they’re supposed to be doing at every musical moment.
Watching the City Ballet corps dance is very, very satisfying.
BALANCHINE presented three outstanding masterpieces from the Balanchine repertory – “Serenade” (1934), “Agon” (1957), and “Divertimento No. 15” (1956). “Agon” of course is one of the iconic Balanchine works.
George Balanchine. Martha Graham. Merce Cunningham. These are the giants – the geniuses – of 20th-century choreography. As it’s been famously said of Homer, all dance language is based on what Balanchine, Graham, and Cunningham have done. They are the founders of all that we know as dance.
I was forcefully reminded of this during “Serenade”. The music is by Tchaikovsky, and yet in one surprising moment, Balanchine introduces a jazzy, syncopated movement. Three women are upstage center, their arms over their head in fifth position. Suddenly their arms open in a staggered sequence – one, two, three – in phrasing that would be right at home in any jazz dance class. 1934! My jaw literally dropped – I’d never known that these jazzy arms – a move I’ve done hundreds of times over the years in class and on stage – were originally introduced by George Balanchine in 1934. Remarkable.
So, being in the audience at a Balanchine performance is always like being present at living history. It’s as if Picasso’s Les Demoisells d’Avignon came to life before my eyes. Or Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. Or Pollock’s Full Fathom Five. It’s very much like meeting – in person – Ernest Hemingway or John Coltrane or John Ford – and witnessing their process as it’s unfolding.
When the curtain rose on the renowned opening tableau of “Serenade”, a shock of recognition swept through the audience. The recognition that this was going to be a great evening of dance. The majesty of a dozen ballerinas, dressed in white, motionless in a closed first position, their right arms outstretched, raised on a downstage diagonal. The still, vibrating energy of these dancers was so compelling that the audience burst into sustained applause.
“Serenade” begins as a beautiful, lyrical dance for women in white. But well into the piece, just when you think you understand what’s going on, enters the mystery. Amid a mass of twirling, swirling ballerinas, a male dancer – in blue – enters upstage left. He’s almost unseen, hidden among the women. Very much like a wolf in the fold. And so the sex begins.
With Balanchine, sex – the male-female dramatic relationship – is always right there, and if it’s not right there it’s right beneath the surface. Later in “Serenade” a second man comes onstage. He’s blindfolded by a woman draped across his back. Her right hand covers his eyes, and her left arm holds him close. They dance an erotic, complicated pas de trois with another woman. Both women have their long hair hanging free. A third woman joins the group. Her hair, too, is loose. It’s a heck of a party. And it’s 1934!
“Agon” was choreographed in collaboration with the composer, Igor Stravinsky, and premiered in 1957. By 1957 Balanchine had created an entirely new ballet vocabulary. Turned-in hips. Complex rhythms. Unusual and highly unexpected partnering. And by now the signature Balanchine black-and-white costuming had been introduced – white scoop-neck, short-sleeve tops and black tights for the men, and black swimsuit leotards and white tights for the women. Black and white have never looked so good.
“Divertimento No. 15” is a beautiful, intricate work set to music by Mozart. The Theme and Variations and Andante sections featured the bravura dancing of the City Ballet soloists – Arianna Samuelsson, Janica Smith, Megan Coatney, Mira Cook, and Alexis Risi, and Alex Bielik, Richard Bowman, and Gerardo Gil.
The City Ballet partner work is noteworthy. The City Ballet men understand very well their role as partners – to frame the ballerina, to provide a stable base for her turns and extensions, and to emphasize her beauty, lightness, and grace. This is so rarely done well – being a good partner requires a lot of sacrifice by the man. The City Ballet danseurs are terrific partners, and deserve much praise.
And, the City Ballet women are magnificent dancers. Ballet, and particularly Balanchine choreography, is all about technique. City Ballet dancers are sure-footed, precise, and lyrical. Their arms and legs create beautiful curves and long lines. Their chests are open, their turns are crisp and clean, and their pointe work is strong. City Ballet’s talented, beautiful ballerinas have the skill to present any work from any repertory.
This was a great evening of dance. As for what’s next, personally, I’d love to see a mixed program featuring George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.
May 14th, 2007
City Ballet of San Diego presented “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” at the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre in La Jolla on Friday, March 30th and April 1st, 2007. This well-conceived, beautifully executed, thoroughly entertaining evening of ballet was enthusiastically received by the lucky audience, which included, of course, former professional dancers who are now dance reviewers. :-)
“Tchaikovsky Spectacular” included “Swan Lake, Act II”, “Black Swan Pas de Deux”, and the world premiere of “Tchai Celebration”.
Presenting “Swan Lake, Act II” and the “Black Swan Pas de Deux” could be a daunting task for any ballet company that is not American Ballet Theatre. The tradition is so rich, the music so iconic, the sense memory so strong of Margot Fonteyn and Natalia Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev and Tony Dowell, and all the other beloved premiere danseurs and prima ballerinas, that dancing these ballets seems almost pointless. How could a company succeed when the renowned comparisons leap immediately to mind?
Well, City Ballet of San Diego succeeded marvelously. “Swan Lake, Act II” in 1996, with staging by Kimberly Roberts after the original choreography by Lev Ivanov, featured a radiant Ariana Samuelsson at Odette, supported by her excellent partner, Ivan Bielik, as Prince Siegfried.
Ms. Samuelsson dances with beautiful precision and terrific focus. She is very strong on pointe, the line of her legs is long and clean, and her arms are light and lovely. She embodied the essence of a swan, even in human form. Ms. Samuelsson’s liquid arm movements reminded me of Maya Plisetskaya’s “Black Swan” and “The Dying Swan”. Ms. Samuelsson’s technical mastery – her arabesques, extensions, and crisp petit bourées − combined seamlessly with her superb musicality. Her Odette was magnificent.
Ivan Bielik provided solid, strong counterpoint as Prince Siegfried. There’s not much for the Prince to do, dance-wise, in Act II, other than be a sturdy partner for Odette. And, partnering is precisely what’s called for. The Prince must be a rock, providing strength for the emotional, fluttering Odette. And of course, it’s very difficult to be a good partner. He must be right there, every moment, completely focused, and at the same time his effort must be graceful and transparent. We mustn’t see the partner sweat or strain. Mr. Bielik did all this very well, using his long legs, clean lines, and graceful arms to provide a clear background for the story of Odette.
The “Black Swan Pas de Deux” is part of our dance collective unconscious. We always know it, the choreography is always right there as soon as we think of it. So this pas de deux is one more Everest for an intrepid dance pair to climb. Janica Smith and Gerardo Gil presented a bravura performance as Odile and the Prince. Their strength, musicality, grace, and energy were thrilling, and the audience gave this terrific pair a loud and long ovation.
“Tchai Celebration”, a world premiere, is choreographed by Elizabeth Wistrich, City Ballet’s Resident Choreographer. “Tchai Celebration” contains 12 sections – one for each month – and offers a complete theatrical experience. Each section’s dancers were costumed uniquely, the 12 sets of costumes matching the season and sensibility of each companion month. The dancers and choreography transported viewers into a rapidly spinning time machine of human experience – love, loss, family, friends, happiness, pain, and joy. Each section was prefaced by Narrator and Vocalist John Nettles, creating an effective multimedia framework for the beautiful dancing.
City Ballet of San Diego dances very, very well. The company members vary greatly in height, and this creates excellent visual interest for the audience. The work of the corps de ballet is particularly noteworthy – I have rarely experienced a corps that was so well-trained, so on cue, and so musical. And, all the partner work was of a high order. The men presented their women beautifully, each danseur aware that his job was to create a frame in which his ballerina could shine. Very, very well done. “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” was a great evening of dance.
May 14th, 2007
4X4 kicked-off the New Year with a bang! There was dancing. There was singing. There was martial-arts-as-performance-art. And there were special guests from L.A. who brought down the house.
Let’s start with the special guests, Casebolt & Smith. In its initial few moments, “After Words” looked like two actors breaking down a scene or performance, giving notes to each other. It became clear they were actually dancers, and they’d danced a dance that was supercharged with sex, relationship angst, and concerns about identity-in-the-world.
There were layers-upon-layers in this richly metaphorical piece. And, it wasn’t all words. Intervals of dynamic dancing, recreating extended moments from the work they were rehashing, provided a powerful counterpoint to the dialog. The partner work as dancers and actors was strong, complex, erotic, and at times, very funny.
Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith are intelligent and talented dancers-actors-performance artists. “After Words” presented a marvelous aesthetic and thought-provoking worldview, offering terrific dance-theater insight into the human condition. And, the piece was tremendously entertaining with laughing-out-loud humor. For me, “After Words” was very much like a movie, with all the elements of motivation, character, conflict, and resolution. Watching a “movie” as a live performance piece was a remarkable experience.
Leslie Seiters presented “Incidental Fear of Numbers”, danced by herself, Amanda Waal, Dina Academia, and Justin Morrison. Although described in the 4X4 program notes as “an early-in-progress showing”, this deeply satisfying piece could stand proudly on its own as a completed work.
The piece opens as the four performers seat themselves around the sides of the 4X4 stage, each placing a fat phone book nearby. We notice they’re each wearing multiple large, clunky, pastel-colored rings — mini-cars, trucks, and assorted vehicles. The dancers flip through massive amounts of pages, giving the sense of concentrating but not-reading, and their arms begin to flop around, Gumby-style, slapping down on the floor. And then they begin to really move.
These very talented, lithe artists slithered through the 4X4 space, using the floor around the stage and expanding the volume in all dimensions. The phone books morphed from mind-numbing, meaningless collections of data into mini-platforms the dancers used to elevate, levitate, and contemplate new vistas of experience.
The partnering among the four dancers was intricate and physically challenging, requiring great strength and technique. At the close, Amanda Waal was alone, half on and half off the raised stage, hands and feet on the floor, in a supremely elevated convex arch that could not possibly have been any more extended. One by one, the others returned and successively placed the very heavy phone books on Waal’s stomach. With remarkable control, using only her center, she reversed the arch and settled in an elongated posture with her knees still bent and calves on the ground. The audience went wild.
Jillian Chu performed a solo work, showing us “myself at 24” and “now that I’ve turned 25 . . . ” This was a bravura piece of great beauty, both physically and choreographically. Early on, Chu appeared to be exploring her own anatomy, and these actions segued into sweeping arm, leg, and torso movements that whirled her around the stage. This mostly allegro work contained wonderful adagio counterpoints, and clearly demonstrated how lyrical, organic, centered choreography can be, simultaneously, dance of great vigor, power, and force. The dance ended to thunderous applause.
Greg Lane and Chris Luth glided into the performance space in the deep plié of liquid Tai Chi forms, and it was as if two warriors had entered the combat pit. We were thus privileged to witness a Tai Chi demonstration as dance–performance art. And, what Lane and Luth did was much more than Tai Chi — the program notes describe the expression of Tai Chi “in its highest form through the partner play of Pushing Hands”.
Lane and Luth maintained a fierce, yet fluid connection throughout, tethered together by palpable, yet invisible lines of force, very much like Space Shuttle astronauts but with the 4X4 stage as the Mother Ship. They flowed powerfully around, across, and through each other, balancing and unbalancing. Erotic images flickered into existence, followed seamlessly by battle scenes, followed by Picasso- and Braque-like abstractions.
The formidable concentration required by this very challenging performance was gracefully matched by the highest levels of skill and expertise of the dancers.
Monique Fleming danced “Careless Summer Clothes”, a rocking performance interpreting “Hang Me Up To Dry” by Cold War Kids. Fleming’s costume included beige culottes and a torn shirt, and her partner was a big piece of fabric which had some pretty human characteristics. There were striking images — including a desperate hangman’s noose and intense percussive syncopation — as Fleming took us through a pretty rough day-in-the-life. Fleming’s clever choreography showed us the “muck and mire” of daily striving for order, self-respect, and dignity.
Victoria Robertson performed an inspirational coda to this remarkable evening. Standing proudly at center stage, wearing a white shirt, short red jacket, and an American flag scarf, Robertson sang “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” as these patriotic anthems were meant to be sung. Her rich, operatic voice reached the farthest corners of the packed house, and she encouraged the audience to join her in singing “God Bless America”, honoring our great nation, particularly poignant in our present crisis of national mission and identity.
Robertson’s bold choices were especially welcome as we begin a new year of freedom, hope, and sharing in our beautiful country and in our wonderful world. Anything goes at 4X4. Freedom of expression is the watchword. The courage, fearlessness, and talent of the performers are inspirational. And the appreciation of the very savvy audience is boundless. We are always honored to be at 4X4 — Bluefoot Bar and Lounge, North Park, San Diego, CA.
4X4 is curated by Liam Clancy and presented by Sushi Performance and Visual Art.
January 14th, 2007
The 4X4 performance series at the Bluefoot Bar & Lounge in North Park (San Diego) is simply the best thing since chocolate chip cookies. Liam Clancy and Jeremy Gaucher of SUSHI Performance and Visual Art have cooked up a slate of evenings in which the entire event is a continual surprise. And, having staged only three shows, 4X4 is the hottest place to be in town.
The December 12th 4X4 spectacle was the third in the series, and you couldn’t have crammed one more body in the beyond-packed back room at Bluefoot. The November 14th event was very crowded with about 120 people (at the time the room looked filled), and last Tuesday’s show was seen by possibly 170 dance-and-performance lovers — people who knew what they were there for. Thunderous applause followed each of the ten acts.
And exactly what were these I-don’t-care-how-long-I-stand-as-long-as-I-see-a-great-show viewers viewing? Only the most vibrant, compelling, dynamic, alive, and fearless dancers and performers anywhere. Period.
Guts. It takes guts to be in a dance class. It takes guts to sing or write or act or play an instrument. And then, it takes more guts to go to an audition or submit your work, guts to go to a callback, guts to lay it all out there, guts to rehearse and do it over and do it over again, and then even more guts to perform for an audience. Guts are what’s on view at 4X4.
And much more than guts. Creativity with a capital C. Talent with a capital T. Fun with a capital F. And joy with a capital J.
4X4 is extreme performing. 4X4 is smashing through your limitations and experiencing the boundless joy of the possible. By so severely constraining the stage and everything we usually think about when we think about the theater, 4X4 performers are in fact set free to create works of remarkable newness. Within these severe limitations, freedom is found. Freedom of creativity. Freedom of exploration. Freedom of sharing.
Sharing because 4X4 redefines up-close-and-personal. At 4X4 the boundary between dancer and audience is fluid. The first row of seats is only two or three feet away from the tiny stage, and it’s very possible for these audience members to become part of the physical space of the performance. Audience members as props. Audience members as a barre. And, too, audience members as random performers, casually included in the unfolding of a piece.
So, all-in-all, 4X4 is pretty Zen. And, 101 years after Albert Einstein introduced special relativity — revolutionizing our thinking about space and time and the universe — 4X4 offers a radical new tool for investigating the universe of performance.
The ten acts presented at the December 12th 4X4 were staggeringly diverse. And uniquely wonderful. In order —
The past)(modern performance duo (Rebecca Bryant and Don Nichols) presented a humorous, subtle, and provocative take on “the specificity of time and place”. This complex piece used movement, text, and props — a tall stool, bullhorns, coins, and tableware — to investigate the metaphysics of experience. Portions of the live performance were rerun and re-edited before our eyes, and the audience was instructed to “reference the videotape”. Likewise, the text would stop and restart, Rebecca and Don serving the dialog to each other like tennis balls. I was strongly reminded of Italo Calvino’s brilliant novel, “if on a winter’s night a traveler”.
Eric Geiger presented an “experimental work in progress”. In this very human exploration, Eric wore a monkey mask throughout. The choreography changed levels, changed directions, used all the available space of the 4X4 stage. This strong, well-trained dancer presented a powerful piece with swirling turns, in arabesque and attitude, his arms and legs describing an emotional space that was both energetic and contemplative.
Kimberly Gregg performed in a little black dress whose intimacy was enhanced by the inherent proximity of the 4X4 environment. In 4X4 you want to cover the space, because you really don’t have much of it, and Kimberly used nearby audience members to expand her choreographic space. This was a lyrical, sensual dance, a bold and beautiful exploration of closeness.
Grace Jun and Ant Black presented “A Lifetime Writing”, a “collaboration of poetry and movement”. Grace Jun, wearing a white midriff and white sweat pants, provided a movement counterpoint to Ant Black’s poetry. It quickly became apparent that Ant Black was presenting much more than generic rap, that we were being privileged to listen to a live performance of a highly original, searing, gripping poetic narrative of young people in love and in pain. The saga focused on pregnancy, possible abortion, and the dangers and difficulties of raising a child. He would name his son, “Sky — he would be the only limit on how high he could fly”. Ant Black’s imagery, dialog, and narrative were heroic, and I was reminded of both Odysseus and Eldridge Cleaver (co-founder of the Black Panthers and author of “Soul on Ice”).
Next, in remarkable contrast (and this is part of the richness and beauty of 4X4), three guys dressed in black strutted onto the stage. Greg Lane (choreographer), Daniel Marshall, and Eric Geiger performed “Objects of Desire”. And when I say performed, I mean “brought down the house”. If you can imagine Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” performed by guys, that’s what this piece was all about. Three super-hot guys, all terrific dancers, with blank expressions, dancing killer, sexy moves. Total dancing. Total fun. Totally the best.
And then, if you thought things couldn’t possibly get any better, there was Mira Cook. Five — FIVE! — gorgeous dancers glided onto the four foot by four foot stage. Four gorgeous women and one handsome guy, all wearing short shorts and tops. All tall, all with long legs and arms. And, they began to dance, backed by driving, rhythmic, primal music by Preston Swirnoff. If you had thought the 4X4 boundaries couldn’t have been expanded any further, you were wrong. Five dancers! Complex combinations exploded the space. Beautiful dancers with great technical excellence and skill boldly performed as if they were dancing on the stage of Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, not a micro-stage in a bar in North Park.
I’m loving this dance, loving being so lucky to be seeing it, and then with a jolt I recognized I was watching jungle scenes. These were wild animals whose natural movements flowed and occurred in perfect unison with the natural music of primal Nature. We were watching the give-and-take and play of a pride of lions or a leopard pard or a pack of wolves. Each dancer would emerge from the pack and perform a solo, expressing his or her truth, supported and nurtured by the pack. Long legs extended in all directions, beautiful arms flowed through the space. The strength, beauty, and grace of the world as it was, could, and can be was revealed for those who could see.
Next, Bethany Lockhart presented “Spread”, a performance piece using exposition, movement, a telephone, a birthday gift, and fortune cookies. For me, “Spread” was about communication — the pain of failed communication, the loss of withheld communication, the hopes and dashed hopes of the words we use with others and ourselves. This piece had darting currents of subtext and was performed powerfully and bravely.
Amanda Nora performed an extraordinarily unusual and physically challenging “dance piece” which “takes only the space of one’s stationary kinesphere”. The kinesphere in this case was the solid cylinder described by the dancer standing on her head and the width of her extended legs. Amanda entered the stage space and assumed a head-standing position, remaining on her head for the duration of the piece. She cycled through an amazing assortment of the most difficult yoga poses, with legs fully extended diagonally and then fully extended overhead. And, she was singing the entire time!!! The performer demonstrated remarkable strength, control, and poise. Doing these things alone is already super-difficult. Doing them in front of hundreds of people, gladiator-style, is fantastic.
Bridget Rountree performed “Collections”, a “hybrid of visual art, performance, dance, and theater”. Bridget’s props were a wonderful collection of hats, ranging from black bowlers to a Clint Eastwood–style Stetson to a Pierrot-style clown hat. One hat had a marvelously long, curvy feather, which Bridget used both to tickle a guy in the audience and to accompany a beautifully described arc of movement. The hats not only supported the performer’s character changes, but also contained rich content within themselves. The well-written text of this very smart piece ranged over the topics of money, credit, and insurance, and pointedly asked, “do you understand English?”. Importantly, Bridget used a remote mike and headset, which not only was an interesting costume element, but also allowed the valuable text to be heard clearly and easily.
Jakey Toor presented “Conversations with a Poet”, a solo piece uniting poetry and choreographic movement. The poem was terrific, telling a story about “a young girl and a homeless man”. Jakey’s strong, gestural, organic movement provided emphasis, highlighting, and new directions to the flow of the poem. This was a bravura showcase incorporating a lot of text and a lot of movement, wonderfully performed by one person.
All of us so-lucky members of the very crowded audience at the December 12th 4X4 are grateful for the generosity, humanity, and very hard work of the dazzling array of so-talented performers that graced the stage that magical night.
December 17th, 2006
I attended ONE TO ECHO at San Diego State University on Saturday night, December 2nd, 2006, the second of two performances. ONE TO ECHO was curated by Jillian Chu, Founder of BOUNDcontemporaryDance, and Alicia Peterson, Founder of A.S. Peterson Dance.
Jillian Chu and Alicia Peterson created an extraordinary evening of dance theater, presenting a wide range of events, pieces, and styles. ONE TO ECHO was a tremendously entertaining production. For me, the overriding qualities of the evening were invention, intelligence, and vision.
“everyone turns into birds”, by Amanda Waal, was a startlingly original creation, a compelling symphony of mixed media. This kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic piece included, at various times and in various combinations, dance, music, voiceover narration, film, stroboscopic lighting effects, and little white parachutists falling from the flies.
It’s not that “everyone turns into birds” was so good because it contained all these elements — merely dripping paint on a canvas doesn’t result in a “Jackson Pollock”. The piece is brilliant because of the talent, taste, and vision of the creator, Amanda Waal.
For me, “everyone turns into birds” was a continual surprise. It began prosaically with a single dancer upstage right, and yet interestingly, because the dancer had a red strobe attached to her left shoulder blade. Unusual. The assault on the viewer built gradually. It became clear during the first film segment that what was being offered was deep and rich and suggestive, relating strongly to some pretty important aspects of human experience, such as “how do you tell the living from the dead?”. And, what is living? and what is dying?
In the face of these critical issues, “everyone turns into birds” was warm, humorous, and engaging. The second film, from the early days of cinema, featured cavorting celestial beings, gods and goddesses flying about on their planet-chariots — Venus, Mars, the Sun. Jealousy, vanity, war, love. Just like us, really.
The second series of voiceover narrations were literally voices from the dead, dead people relating in single sentences or sentence fragments how they died. The impact and the tragedy continued to build, the weight increasing, and then the parachutists came down. This was a heartbreakingly funny, painfully bittersweet theatrical moment.
And, importantly, for a while the dancer was dancing in darkness. Other things were happening onstage but she was dark. This was very new, for me. At first, I didn’t get it. “Hey,”, I’m thinking, “that’s wrong. She’s not lit.” And then I realized this most unusual approach was well thought out, was very sophisticated. It made a statement — the dancer in a “dance” is not necessarily the only important thing that’s going on. And, “dancing in the dark” is a powerful metaphor, particularly in the context of the piece as a whole.
“everyone turns into birds” breaks new ground in dance theater, extending the poetry naturally inherent in dance by incorporating additional media and creating something new and valuable.
Dance is sufficient in itself. And, as Amanda Waal has so brilliantly demonstrated, dance can become part of a collaborative multimedia effort — very much like film, in this case incorporating film — in which something entirely new emerges.
“Why I move”, concept by Jillian Chu and performed by Sarah Keeney, and “How I move”, choreography by Jillian Chu and performed by Jillian Chu, Sarah Keeney, and Yvonne Hernandez, were small, gemlike etudes. These graceful studies contained many interesting moments. “How I move” was most powerful when the three dancers would find each other, forming a synchronous trio, and then breaking out into new combinations supportive of the music.
“A separate piece entirely”, choreography by Alicia Peterson, performed by Alicia Peterson, Jillian Chu, and Vanessa Tipon, presented a river of movement, like a horizontal waterfall. My impression was of liquid choreography.
“The Commitment”, choreography by Elizabeth Swallow and performed by Alicia Peterson, presented a lone dancer caught in a literal and metaphorical maze of her own personal tragedy and the never-ending demands of daily living. Four dynamic elastic bands angled across the stage from right to left, a spidery meshwork creating simultaneous traps and openings for movement, struggle, pain, and possible redemption. Having explored [for now] the phase-space of darkness and potential light, the dancer walked free of the maze and offered a wistful, half-hearted smile, a desperate attempt to prove to herself and everyone else that she was really all right. And then the stage went black. This was a great, truthful moment.
“Knock Knock”, a cinematic collaboration by Hassan Christopher and Monica Gillette, choreographed and performed by Hassan Christopher and Marissa Labog, was a genre-defining dance film. Not merely dancing captured on film or a film of dance, “Knock Knock” fused the dynamism and showmanship of jazzy choreography with the time/place/perspective shiftability that is the natural power of film.
First of all, the dancing and dancers were killer. And, the choreography was killer. Utilizing virtuoso film editing, a movement sequence would begin in one locale, in one season, with a certain costuming, and would conclude seamlessly in a radically different locale and season, and with different costuming. A spin move would begin in New York’s Central Park with snow on the ground and the dancer would come out of her spin in the brilliant summer sunshine lighting the mean streets of Compton in Los Angeles.
The quick pace of the choreography was complemented by the fast pace of the editing, creating a rich compositional effect. And, the choreography fully integrated the various environments, including solitary park benches, fluttering sheets of newspaper, snowy Manhattan streets, and the rocky shores of the Pacific Palisades.
These very talented dancers were doing very difficult things and they were totally committed to what they were doing and to each other. “Knock Knock” is a high-octane love story, a potentially award-winning film breaking new ground in a relatively new genre.
Likewise, the curators of ONE TO ECHO, Alicia Peterson and Jillian Chu, have set a new standard for what an evening of dance theater can be.
December 5th, 2006
LaDiego Dance Theater presented Nutcracker—Land of the Sweets on Saturday night, November 18th, choreographed by Daniel Marshall (LaDiego Artistic Director and Founder), Aliyah Hassan, and Natasha Ridley. The Educational Cultural Complex in downtown San Diego was packed — all 275 seats were filled and additional seating had to be added in the back.
This was a completely reinvented Nutcracker, with music by Duke Ellington rather than Tchaikovsky. LaDiego’s Nutcracker is a modernized, bluesy reinvention of the late–19th century ballet, and provided a thoroughly enjoyable evening of dance.
The LaDiego Dance Theater Nutcracker creates a wonderful 1940s and 1950s nightclub atmosphere, reminiscent of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and the legendary Cotton Club. A full-scale ballet, presented in two acts, LaDiego’s Nutcracker delighted the lucky audience with more than a dozen wildly diverse pieces.
The panoply of dance styles included classical ballet, jazz ballet, tap dancing, swing dancing, and Arabian Nights set pieces. Several of the ballet sequences included terrific partner work. Several of the jazz sequences included very difficult allegro sections, often with triple counts (“and-a-one”) extended for eight measures or more.
Nutcracker—Land of the Sweets opened with a nightclub party scene, and the dancers conveyed a real sense of party. This is one of many great things about LaDiego Dance Theater. LaDiego dancers have a strong sense of what they’re doing on stage. You don’t see them “acting” — they simply inhabit their characters, and the result is believable performances.
And, delightfully, most of these dancers have extraordinary charisma and theatrical instincts. The range of technical ability varies, yet everyone is dancing full-out and having tremendous fun. LaDiego dancers know how to put on a show.
A few words about technique — LaDiego Dance Theater puts dancers with varied skill levels on stage at the same time, a remarkable method I’ve never seen elsewhere. Dancers with only a handful of years of training are thrown into the deep end of the pool, and the result is fast-forward on-the-job training. And, owing to the skill of the choreographers and artistic director, the dances are seamless, inventive, and highly entertaining.
Overall, the company technique is thrilling. If they were in New York, the three principal dancers, Aliyah Hassan, Danika Pramik-Holdaway, and Natasha Ridley, could all be members of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Likewise, the LaDiego men are very strong. Justin White, Vincent Hardy, and the guest artists, Aaron Ellis and Jason Marks, performed with boldness and vigor, and all were excellent partners. And, of course, there is the electrifying Daniel Marshall.
Soloists Taylor Hogg and Liz Mantalas, and company dancers Lindsey Bach, Stephanie Breining, April Cortes, Lucy Duck, Sulijah Learmont, Lauren Pasqual, and Jenny Peterson all performed beautifully and well. LaDiego dancers are musical dancers with great stage presence.
LaDiego Dance Theater is all about dance theater. When I watch this company perform, I see an embodiment of two of New York’s greatest jazz dance troupes, the Fred Benjamin Dance Company and the George Faison Dance Company. When word would go out that one of these companies was planning to have a season, the entire New York dance world took notice.
I’m very happy to witness this tradition being continued. Well-trained dancers reveling in the joy of dance, skilled performers having so much fun and creating terrific drama at the same time. Choreography that uses the whole stage, set to music that makes you want to jump out of your seat. Powerful emotion, the highs and lows of human experience, and the thrill of being alive. These qualities make great dance theater great.
LaDiego Dance Theater is traveling this noble road.
November 26th, 2006
Last Tuesday night I had the extraordinary good fortune to attend 4X4, presented by Sushi Performance and Visual Art at the Bluefoot Bar and Lounge in North Park (downtown San Diego).
This wildly thrilling rollercoaster ride was the second in a projected monthly series of 4X4 performance events at Bluefoot. More than 120 dance/theater/performance art fans crowded into Bluefoot’s back room. It was like a rave, but with structure. 
People were standing three deep at the edges of the room. I felt like I was at the Lapin Agile in Montmartre on a particularly busy night. Attention was rapt, everyone drinking in the vibrating shared energy between the performers and the audience. For me, this 4X4 evening was one of those life-affirming moments.
Eight acts were presented (I say “acts” because they weren’t all dance). In addition to the creativity, inventiveness, and showmanship each performer brought to the very small stage, the overriding quality was bravery. All performers need a healthy dose of courage, and yet performing on a four-foot by four-foot stage with audience members a mere two feet away (truly redefining up-close-and-personal) requires courage of a wholly new variety.
4X4 defines in-your-face performing. Exhilarating. Exciting. Intimate. Personal-in-the-extreme.
And, of course, there are the radical performance requirements and technical considerations of developing a piece capable of being done on such a micro-stage. There’s physical danger, too. The stage is narrow, with tight borders. There are no flies, no off-stage area. You’re on the stage, or you’re falling off the edge. All the performers succeeded beautifully in this way — everyone managed the space and made the extreme restrictions work. These were bravura performances.
Sadie Weinberg presented “Boxing the Female”, choreographed by Terry Wilson. “Boxing the Female” is a gorgeous, fully realized work, very much like a Chopin etude. But this was an etude on steroids — a very big statement on a very little stage. This jazzy piece, backed by a liquid, electronic score, ranged over a wide vocabulary of double contractions, high extensions, geometric sequences, and running-in-place. I was reminded of an apocalyptic “Run, Lola, Run”. Sadie utilized every inch of the available space, creating a superb three-dimensional dance.
Victoria Robertson presented pretty much a single-act multimedia show. She stepped onto the 4×4 stage dressed in a beautiful kimono, gracefully disheveled, and began to vocalize. Arpeggios, runs, octave shifts, throat-clearings, water-sipping — a typical early morning vocal warm-up for a professional singer. Vocalizing continued while Victoria put on her makeup. This was all very fun, and there was much more to come. She peeled off her robe, in a low-key striptease, revealing a stunning little red dress. Red, of course, is the color of Carmen, and that’s exactly what Victoria proceeded to sing. The famous Carmen aria. On a proscenium, in a full Carmen production, the character teases the men as she sings, caressing them with her scarf or shawl. Victoria gave us a full-on Carmen, flirting with the men lucky enough to be seated nearby. Very nearby. This was performance art of the highest order, presented on a teeny stage of the smallest order. Heroic. Magnificent.
Alicia Peterson was a beautiful blonde in a lavender cocktail dress. And, as the third act, she gave us an early demonstration of how to engage with an audience that is literally in the performer’s face. The dancer performed lovely, lyrical choreography, her character sensual yet wistful, a woman hopeful of connecting in a meaningful way with a new, as-yet-unmet man. This was an intimate performance in a very intimate setting, and succeeded with grace and tremendous courage.
The stunningly successful evening concluded with the suave, urbane, and uproariously funnly Renowned Choregrapher Correspondence course presented by George Willis. There was even a quasi-”checklist” handout so the audience could follow along and self-test their knowledge of tempo, lighting, and staging. Wonderful, witty satire.
I thank the Sushi Performance and Visual Art brain trust for cooking-up this wonderful event, and I particularly thank the owners of the Bluefoot Bar and Lounge for saying “yes” to Sushi and having the vision (and terrific business savvy) to host this brilliant series of performances.
I can’t wait for the next 4×4, which will be on December 12th.
November 19th, 2006
I attended the opening-night performance of IMAGO moves at the gorgeous Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building at UC San Diego. IMAGO moves presented Garden Trilogy.
Yolande Snaith, Artistic Director of IMAGO moves, is an award-winning choreographer for the stage and film, and created the choreography for Stanley Kubrick’s terrific film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The first piece, Ghost Garden, was a thrilling, complex, fully formed work that succeeded on many levels, reminding me of the best that dance can be. In fact, and before I read the program note that mentioned the Kubrick film, I had the strong notion of cinematic choreography, and I don’t think I’d ever had that impression or experience before.
Film, of course, is a collaborative medium. And, film is very much like opera — the costumes, the sets, the lighting, the detailed story, the score, and the actors/singers/dancers combine to provide a rich sensory experience for the viewer. Ghost Garden was like this.
Cinematic choreography. Visual choreography. Dancing that stimulates, dancing that makes you think, dancing that causes new associations to form in your brain. Ghost Garden presented a series of novel images, scenes that were both archetypal and future-directed. In one unique sequence, prompted by the choreography, I imagined Sir Walter Raleigh and his ladies playing cosmic croquet using Star Wars light sabres as mallets.
The dancers were stupendous. In Ghost Garden the four women and two men presented grace, beauty, intelligence, and sensuality. Sensual, graceful intelligence. That’s a hot combination.
The four women, Alison Dietterle Smith, Erica Nordin, Raffaella Judd, and Sadie Weinberg, demonstrated marvelous technique. Long legs and arms, clean, tight turns, beautifully pointed feet, strong extensions, wonderful balance, and full dance vocabularies in both allegro and adagio sections.
The two men, John Diaz and Robby Johnson, were excellent partners and provided supplementary masculine focus and energy.
All six dancers demonstrated deep musicality, filling out the phrases consistently and completely. All dancers performed with joy, dedication, and attention to stagecraft, quietly reveling in their training and muscularity, reveling in their bodies-as-machines.
The costumes and sets were extremely interesting and provocative, heightening the imaginative rewards of the lucky viewers.
Cinematic choreography. All theatrical elements contributing to a fully realized creation. A stage continually filled with stimulating activity, not necessarily spread across the stage but occurring at discrete corners and places of visual power.
Ghost Garden is dance theater of the highest order.
November 1st, 2006
I sometimes think Twyla Tharp has ruined an entire generation of choreographers.
On Friday, October 6th I attended “Gabriel Masson Dance”, presented by San Diego State University School of Music and Dance. My comments here will focus on the choreography, not the choreographer.
It’s important to make this clear distinction. As human beings it’s so easy to leap directly from “I failed” to “I am a failure”. It’s very difficult for us to distinguish what we did from who we are. So I want to be very clear — what I have to say is about the choreography. Only the choreography.
I believe choreography is one of the most elusive art forms, one of the most challenging in which to create something vital, true, and real. Think about it. As dancers, we spend years training in particular dance styles and methods. Those styles, characteristic movements, and language are deeply rooted in our bodies, in our muscle memories. When a dancer trained in Graham technique makes his or her own choreography, it’s so natural for those dances to look like Graham copies. This isn’t intentional, no one wants to be derivative. But those steps, sequences, and combinations are what that body and mind knows. They are what’s available in the moment.
And this is extremely hard to change. It’s very difficult for a choreographer to find his own voice, to create a brand new language of expression.
I assert that a certain style has cast this exact thrall over the last 25 to 30 years of new choreography. And, for me, this is not a good thing. My particular problem with this style is that, for me, much of the movements are simply not organic. Not truthful.
OK, yes, there’s a lot of frantic eye-catching movement and much of it is pretty bravura. Dancers dancing these sequences have terrific control and strength. It’s inspiring. But ultimately, it’s not that interesting because it’s merely kinetic. Not much else.
And, here comes the rant. All that touching — touching the arm and lingering, touching the face, touching the head. Placing a hand on another’s head and pushing it down. Using a hand to turn another’s face. None of this is organic. In my opinion, I’ve never seen any such movement that had any sense of choreographic flow. To me, it seems the choreographer just throws this stuff in because he’s seen it on stage before. Probably, he or she has done this stuff in class.
And the glances. If a dancer is going to look at another on stage, this suggests a human interaction. Since this is the case, the dancer had better have training as an actor. The dancer had better have something going on in his head beyond “I’m supposed to look at her now”. Otherwise, it’s just another false movement, another false moment.
Meaningless gestures. Rolling on the floor. Sitting down on the floor or getting up from the floor without any clear intention, without any choreographic flow or relation to any other preceding or following movement.
Choreography is not merely stringing a sequence of steps and movements together. And yet, we see a great deal of this over too many years.
So ends the rant.
The empowering questions are, what is the choreographer’s vision, where is the invention, where is the value and meaning for the viewer. As an audience member, I want to transcend. I want to learn something new or see something in a new way, I want to be a witness to the humanity of myself and others.
Putting stuff on a stage is a big responsibility.
To be complete, there were a number of transcendent moments in the “Gabriel Masson Dance” concert. In “LOVE: STORY” there were several stunning snapshots involving the four dancers — stop-motion complicated sculptures of great beauty. And, the use of props was ingenious. A bunch of roses was employed metaphorically and allegorically, and also, brilliantly, as compositional elements. You’d be following a sequence of movement, and suddenly notice a bunch or roses had created a two-dimensional room or an arrow or dividing line between the players in the love story. For me, these moments revealed the true voice of the choreographer.
The dancers were terrific. Jillian Chu, Elizabeth Swallow, Sarah Ebert, grace shinhae jun, Veronica Martin-Lamm, Victor Alonso, Eric Geiger, and Bradley R. Lundberg all had great energy and terrific commitment to what they were doing. From a dancer’s point-of-view, all the allegro sequences demanded strength and virtuosity, and everyone performed admirably. Great attention, great focus, stopping on a dime, throwing their bodies around with abandon, having fun doing it. This was all wonderful.
But, for me, I wanted much more. I wanted to see what the dancers could do. This style of dancing has no jumps to speak of, no turns, no extension, no rhythm. Yes, there were many complicated lifts, many that were inventive and breathtaking, and yet that’s just not enough. It’s not dancing.
I’m certainly willing to consider that I just don’t understand this style, and I’m definitely willing to admit that it doesn’t match with my worldview of what dance wants to be. And given that, “Gabriel Masson Dance” was a very good presentation of this form of expression. I definitely appreciate the dedication, hard work, and many long hours involved to bring such an evening of dance to the public. And, I’m grateful for having been able to be present.
And yet, I say, blaze new trails. Be more inventive. Let dancers dance.
October 14th, 2006
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