DANCE AND SCULPTURE: ARTS INTERSECT
             Christopher Haas' Sets Thrust Us into Another World 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of April 21-28, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 93
          Can an astute sculptor’s set design upstage an entire evening of modern dance? 
            Christopher 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 and magnificent 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. When the string are plucked, there is a dazzling disorientation with the trompe l’oeil silvery shimmer  that endures enticingly. 
            Such were the artistic highlights of Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet evening-length world premiere piece, “Triangle of the Squinches,” at the Novellus Theatre. This is not to take away anything from the troupe of 10 or so, which produces high-quality modern dance (not ballet). Its dancers are lithe, angular, sinewy and willowy in turns, immensely flexible and geared to fast movement on a breath-taking scale. King’s choreography  demands the max  of this well-balanced ensemble dynamically, carried out in various permutations from solo to full company.         
            A lot of the choreography incorporating The Wall was contrived; King did far better with the earlier Haas string arrays, where the manipulation, plucking  and entry  was far more natural. 
            The music by Mickey Hart was predominantly new-age electronics, geared more toward other-worldly fantasies than to dancing pulses.
            These performances mark the grand finale for the ubiquitous dancer Lauren Keen, a nine-year Lines veteran.
            “Triangle of the Squinches,” choreography by Artistic Director Alonzo King for the San Francisco-based Lines Ballet, at the Novellus Theatre, S.F. Through April 24. For info: (415)   978-2787, or go online. 

         ©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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