THE BALLET STRUGGLES TO FILL SAN JOSE'S GREAT VOID
                    But Can It Spark the Revival All Alone?  
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of March 1-8,  2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 71
          SAN JOSE---If it weren’t for Ballet San Jose, the city’s inviting, modern Center for the Performing Arts would gather myriad cobwebs, faced with folding its tent and going home somewhere.
            The Ballet is now the only substantial renter left in the CPA, with just seven weeks’ bookings  this season. In this millennium the two biggest users, the San Jose Symphony and the American Musical Theater, have given up the ghost, leaving only the BSJ standing. Both groups took major hits in the dot-com bust and then 9/11 from which they never recovered.
            You say the Ballet is a beneficiary of all this carnage? Not quite. The Ballet has been stepping lively, buying up some AMT scenery at auction, and flip-flopping certain programs for optimum sales potential.  It also enjoys a greater choice of dates. But if  attendance Feb. 27 is any indication, it has not siphoned off any patrons at all from AMT’s demise; BSJ had the smallest Friday-night attendance I’ve ever encountered  there over the past two decades.  
            As a ballet-company director in another city remarked when its orchestra went under, “People think that the (performing-arts) survivors all benefit from such a bankruptcy. But in actual fact, even the survivors are hurt as potential subscribers turn increasingly wary of domino effects.”
            Fortunately, in its program of five world premieres BSJ came up with one solid hit, “2-2 Tango” (It takes two to tango. Get it?). It was created by an endangered species: the female ballet choreographer, specifically Karen Gabay, the veteran company dancer making, quite incredibly, her very first ballet. It demonstrates that this ensemble potentially has the vitality and verse to revive the San Jose stage (even if the other four works as a group fell short of the mark).  And Gabay, who had frequently shown her theatrical bent over the years, took on a delicious comic role tangoing with Dracula (the habile Raymond Rodriguez), getting the kiss of death, and coming back numerous times to challenge Dracula on sheer endurance. 
            She also hatched the dazzling humor of a pas de love triangle, with Mirai Noda and Maria Jacobs-Yu  besting the swain Ramon Moreno, who remains one of the most arresting male leads in the company. And then there was the side-splitting trio of jilted machos who end up having to tango with one another.  Each of these scenelets, or the entire ballet, would warrant a spot on some future pot-pourri program.
            Unlike most of the other four choreographers, Gabay has discovered the impact of dance-theater, going beyond mere steps to acting and to showing emotional interplay brewing between the protagonists. The most successful of the others was Preston Dugger’s ”Languishing for Love,” a passionate interaction of the torchy Shannon Bynum with Maykel Solas, using recordings by the Icelandic singer Björk. This was a modern turn-about on “The Red Shoes,” with Solas driven to exhaustion, despair and collapse by a passion for the indefatigable femme fatale. The crisp moves by Bynum  would make a study for others in the troupe, whose phlegmatic routines provided ballast which this program neither merited nor needed.
            The BSJ is blessed   with a tall, strong male complement, starting with the dashing Maximo Califano playing the sharpie tango Romeo who began and ended Gaby’s ballet. Alexsandra Meijer’s “The Way We Fall” showed off four more that rival troupes would die for: Travis Walker, Willie Anderson, Jeremy Kovitch and Robert Raney.
            Dalia Rawson’s “Fém” (Metal) was notable mostly for a fast-rising younger dancer, the red-headed Mallory Walsh, as well as for the choice of some adventurous modern piano music of Ligeti played by Michael McGraw. The program opened with a bland, formal array of steps, “Legends,” by Tiffany Glenn, which the ballet school could appropriate  on at some point. 
            All five choreographers are current members of the BSJ’s dancing complement.
            PASSING OF A UNIQUE CHOREOGRAPHER--- Flemming Flindt, 72, died March 3 in his Sarasota home. The prolific Danish choreographer's work, notable for its dramatic thrust, had been featured close to a dozen times by the San Jose ballet compoany, most recently "The Lesson" and "Phaedra" in 2005. Earlier, his "The Overcoat" was performed here with the AIDS-stricken guest star Rudolf Nureyev in 1993.
             (Story updated March 11.) 
            Ballet San Jose, in five world premieres, through March 1. Next: Nahat’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with music of Mendelssohn to mark the latter’s bicentennial. April 2-5. For info: (408) 288-2800, or go online.

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2009
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        D. Rane Danubian 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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