THE BYGONE YEAR'S BEST IN BAY AREA DANCE
                Highlights in Innovation, Design, Ballet  
<>                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Jan. 6-13, 2012
                                                                  Vol. 14, No. 32
          In the Bay Area during the past year, unique and significant collaborations between art forms have brought dance to the forefront, melding art forms in a cogent way that future choreographers cannot ignore. In many parts of the country, economics have dance shrinking or dying. But here, the vitality in modern creativity remains extraordinary.
            At the Lines Ballet, Alonzo King’s new “Triangle of the Squinches” (April, San Francisco) offered an arresting interplay with the art work of Christopher Haas.
                Can an astute sculptor’s set design upstage an entire evening of modern dance? 
             Haas came very close with his Lines Ballet assignment. He produced a broad eight-ft.-high movable structure that was part wall, part rock-climb, part lattice, part prison window, part zigzagging Jefferson fence, and part overture to another world. And the dancers pushed it, pulled it apart, tilted it, climbed it, broke through it, and used it as a pulpit. Never have I seen a more versatile set, so attractively textured.
            In the prelude scene he also furnished a wall-to-wall array of sparkling strings, like a torrential tropical rainfall, but elastic enough to pull out and form geometric lines across the stage---echoing the dance company’s name, Lines. And there again, another chance for the dancers to go through and enter another arcane world behind.
            And the new Margaret Jenkins choreography of “Light Moves” (November, San Francisco) featured the most extraordinary new video-projection designs by Naomie Kremer, of a sort not even seen in richly endowed ballet companies today. The projections are best described as dynamic mosaics, sometimes shifting from galaxies in outer space to metallic micrographs in color, with internal elements constantly on the move like single-cell organisms. Kremer's video techniques set a new gold standard to be heeded by other designers whom she has left in her wake. Jenkins’ four couples dancing wove memorably in and out of these dazzling light designs.
            Important new and recent dance troupes were coming up across the Bay at birthing sites like the Yerba Buena Gardens and the Z Space. Amy Seiwart started up her troupe in the West Wave Festival (July) via her  “Trust to Fall,” with Andrea Basile surfing precariously on shifting waves that turned out to be undulating bodies.
            A month earlier, Janice Garrett, who has been creating dances here for nearly a decade, teamed with Charles Moulton to produce “The Experience of Flight in Dreams,” a high-energy work with high-caliber performers.
          This initial venture was a strong entry. Of course, no one was flying, despite the title, and there were no trapezes. But the quest of man to reach to the heavens is carried out again and again, culminating in a grand finale of Dudley Flores on a tiny platform held up seven feet off the ground by the ensemble, yearning ever higher. And along the way, the high-energy dances draw the viewer in, like the current of a fast-rushing river.
            Intensity and stress are the hallmarks of  the Zhukov Dance Theatre, where the troupe of seven  is put through infinitely pliable modern-dance moves, supplementing it with live art work, film and prerecorded music.
            It’s as if Yuri Zhukov had set down the scenario from a remembered dream, complete with nonsequiturs and flights of imagination. Plus falls, crawls, and more bends of body than on a Russian slalom course.
            And then there’s the San Francisco Ballet, one of the world’s elite international companies. A stage full of brief flesh-colored costumes, and seemingly naked dancers provocatively sniffing each other like canines, is the essence of Wayne McGregor’s flamboyant “Chroma” (2006). As usual this was danced exquisitely, despite the high physical demands of the choreography. The dancers wiggle and twitch, with joints you were unaware ever existed.  Partners are whipped around and lifted upside down in what looks like very well organized chaos. Significantly, the younger audiences toward the rear cheered this one wildly. And that exuberant reaction will not be lost on management in planning next season.
            Despite my misgivings about his “Number Nine,” I find Christopher Wheeldon among the most inventive choreographers around. He has done six original ballets for the SFB, with “Continuum” and “Ghosts” at the top. In “Ghosts” (2010) he’ll have a big knot of people untangling and scattering, like a classic diffusion experiment in the chem lab. There are windmilling arms, and bodies sliding and rolling cross the floor. There is no corps de ballet---all have distinct roles to play.
            And back in the less active East Bay, the Oakland Ballet returned from not one but two deaths (2006, 2009) with a brief May repertory program at Laney College, showing a solid ensemble under Director Graham Lustig, capped by ex-ODC veteran Brandon (“Private”) Freeman a strong, attractive figure paired very compatibly with the much younger Sharon Wehner, a sylph-like figure around whom entire repertoires could be built.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2011

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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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