MULTI-MEDIA DANCES AND MODERN FAIRY TALES  
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
<>                                                                 Week of Feb. 20-27, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 68
            Robert Moses’ animated world premiere “Fables and Faith” blends his crack modern-dance company Kin of 11 with a boys chorus in a congenial multi-media piece  perusing several fairy tales.
            Even if you don’t know the stories of the Pied Piper, Phoebe or Nyla Belle, his venture nearly an hour long shows the choreographer-director in one of his most imaginative multimedia creations, further blended with the accomplished story-teller Anna Galjour in her authoritative low-pitched voice, starting with her version of the Creation.
            Galjour’s tales are decidedly updated. The menacing wolf (or fox) has a session with the therapist, whom he later runs over  her with his Suburban. He is eventually brought to his knees under the benign influence of the 40-voice San Francisco Boys Chorus, singing a cappella.
            The wolf, Dexandro Montalvo, steals the show, with his twitchy, scratchy, lunging persona, seemingly ready for some long-clawed, long-toothed Little Red Riding Hood sequel. But this deft actor-dancer was one of many, given the delicacy of Nyla Belle (Norma Fong). And also the powerful and faster-than-the-eye center-stage persona of Crystaldawn Bell as Phoebe, who after flashing her nimble solos calmly picked up the dead wolf (Montalvo) and carried off that knee-buckling carcass.  Montalvo also was the sinister, sinuous Pied Piper, attired like a Merlin wizard, in the first of the modernized tales.
            Still, the females are iconic in Kin, walking again and again over the prostrate bodies of the males, making a deliberate statement.
            Altogether, this was a well-shaped confluence of media: dance, theater, chorus, narration. What does not work is the attempt to integrate Ian Robertson’s fine boys chorus into the stage action: Kin should be content just to have some good voices.
            The same program features many views of conception, adoption and parenting in Moses’ “The Cinderella Principle” of last year.  Here too the dynamism of Moses’ choreography enlivens what could be as dead as a bad course in sociology. Of special note was the duo of Katherine Wells and Brendan Barthel, executing a long dance near the start to (mostly) percussive technorock music.
            Robert Moses’ San Francisco-based Kin modern-dance company, now in its 16th year, Feb. 18-20 at the Yerba Buena Novellus Theater. Choreography by Moses. For info: (415) 252-8384, 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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