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San Francisco Letter No. 13

WestWave Dance Festival
Programs 3 and 4
July 16 and 18, 2006
Project Artaud Theater, San Francisco

Erika Shuch Performance Project
Orbit (notes from the edge of forever)
Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco
July 21, 2006

by Rita Felciano
copyright ©2006 by Rita Felciano

The WestWave Dance Festival is exhausting. A mixed-bill program every other night tests even the most dedicated dancer watcher’s stamina. It doesn’t help that so many of the choreographers are young and relatively inexperienced and, it must be said, some, with little talent.

So what to do? I could stay home to avoid disappointment and select programs that look promising. But I don’t, I just dive in and try to keep my head above water. The frustration at inadequate skills and imagination is somewhat offset by seeing how bravely some of these young dancers try to show something meaningful, using only that most common of tools, a torso and four limbs.

We are now half way through the season, and the works have ranged from excellent to poor. When WestWave started — it’s in its fifteenth year — the idea was to have all new choreography. That proved to be overly ambitious. Then the programs became half and half. This year the percentage of premieres is even a lower but since many of the pieces saw the light of day only a couple of months ago, the need for discovery — essential to any festival — is satisfied. Only one of this festival’s offerings goes back to as far 2001. Producer Joan Lazarus has become quite adept at balancing a variety of styles and genres, giving the evenings a good sense of ebb and flow.

Out of the thirteen pieces on programs three and four, two were very recent works, four of them were world premieres. Two duets proved to be standouts. The premiere, the delicately transparent “Alone Together,” was Christy Funsch and Sue Roginsky’s latest exploration of duo form. It was their most poetic exploration yet of what being together means. Each dancer pursued a distinct trajectory of character specific movements which repeated ritornello like. While the dancers traveled within the same physical confines, they never directly connected yet you could almost touch the connective tissue between them. Maybe that’s how blind people find each other or how thoughts go out to find a mate. Funsch often has a little girl’s sense of wonder in her dancing. Here she was the dreamy wanderer to Roginsky’s more angular, more earthbound presence.

“In Between” (2004) paired dancer/chorographer Patricia Banchik-Bell with Private Freeman, recently of ODC. The choreography’s easy athleticism and the give and take between the dancers evolved as naturally as a friendship. “Between” was enhanced by the dancers’ physical compatibility; they are of similar height and body build, fast on their feet and able to convey pleasure in what became unexpected hook ups.

Banchik-Bell’s airy septet, “Dream Realm” (2004) didn’t roll along quite as smoothly. It juxtaposed recombining duets and quartets groups in a fairly standard manner. The work ended with a lovely gesture. Three dancers lightly touched a twirling one as if to tell her that it was OK, she could stop now. Comedy in dance, as this festival’s two programs showed is possible. Kerry Mehling’s “Just a Little One” (2005) and Jenny McAllister’s “Only in Fairytales” took very different approaches. Both worked.

Mehling’s hilarious duet — with Dyan McBride on video — brought back to life Dorothy Parker’s monologue about a boozy blonde and her increasingly drunken suitor. McBride’s slow descent into stupor was splendid, much enhanced by Mehling’s — on stage, in a man’s suit — increasingly desperate attempt to hang on to her while keeping himself more or less erect. With that pencil-thin mustache and glassy look and falling all over herself, Mehling could have stepped out of silent comedy. Her comedic timing — with those little suspensions that keep us wanting for more — was immaculate.

Over the years, McAllister has made comedy her trademark. These three sketches are among her best. Short, succinct and deliciously irreverent, they had Ann Berman’s Pussycat, more panther than kitten, just about devour Blane Ashby’s Owl. Snow White’s evil queen as a vampire? You bet. And Hansel and Gretel, dissatisfied with bread crumbs, being lured by ever-bigger lollipops? Absolutely.

Music had to supply the humor in Carol Abohatab’s “The Birthday Suite” (2003. Peter Heidrich’s variations on Happy Birthday — composed as a fifth birthday gift to Gidon Kremer’s Camerata Baltica — included among others a waltz, a tango, a jazz sequence and, as an exclamation point, a splendidly robust czardas. The jokey choreography didn’t even come close to suggest some of the wit and charm of those musical (rhinestone) jewels.

Ambition fuelled two of the larger, multi-cast pieces. Cheryl Chaddick, an experienced choreographer, condensed the episodes from her site-specific “Landslide” (2006) into a tableau. Whatt had been sequentially presented, now was served at the same time. Like putting all the dishes of a multi-course meal on the table together. Center-stage Chaddick put an incessantly screaming woman, just one of the characters in the original. In this version “Landslide” looked like collage whose patches didn’t adhere very well.

Carmen Carnes has choreographed for only a few years. In “Ma Kali: Fierce Mother” (2005), with nine dancers and an equal number of musicians and singers on stage, she reached for much and achieved quite a bit. The choreography verged between ritualistic evocation and a quasi narrative, centering on the goddess of creation and destruction. Male/female duets embodied the ongoing struggling, forcefully if a little awkwardly. Four female dancers functioned both as commenting chorus and as independent units. Some of those dance gestures convinced more than others. Carnes herself danced a voluptuously fierce opening solo and later returned in a bloody incarnation of Kali. What really intrigued was Carnes’ ability to elegantly fold Indian dance and yogic gestures into a fairly athletic version of Western dance. This was an achievement in itself, something she can work with in the future.

 A much less successful cross-genre transformation happened in the premiere of “Rough Magicke”, an excerpt of what will be a physical theater production of the “Tempest” by Anna Dal Pino and John LeFan. Setting the scene for Prospero’s (Bob Taxin) great monologue “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,” in which he forswears his magic powers, were ten wrestling, frog hopping, yanking so called “spirits”, about as ungainly a group of movers as Theater Artaud as ever hosted. They have a steep learning curve ahead, though not much steeper than Taxin’s with Shakespeare’s poetry.

Erika Chong Shuch is a dancer, writer, theater director and, probably, an inspiring teacher. But more than anything, she is a catalyst for a type of multi-media theater that is imaginative and wacky, as amusing as it is serious. It shas packed her performances almost since her Erika Shuch Performance Project (ESP) opened its doors in 2001.

In residency at Intersection for the Arts, she has used its tiny theater for the last three years to investigate big, really big questions. “All You Need” looked at the unlikely relationship between love and cannibalism. In “One window” she wondered whether there we could become one with the universe if we just found the right entry point. Her latest trip was another one, into physics and metaphysics, “Orbit (notes from the edge of forever)”, led her into outer space. What happens to signals we send beyond the solar system? Can, and should be expect answers?

The questions Shuch asks are the of the kind philosophers and dreamers, trying to come to terms with the unfathomable, have asked for centuries. Except that only the poets among them formulate them into theatrically viable languages. For the most part, Shuch does as well; she gets a lot of help from gifted colleagues and collaborators.

In “Orbit,” designer Sean Riley, one more time, worked his visual magic. He skewered table lamps, stacks of books and video screens onto steel poles; he then hung them on ceiling tracks. Pulled to the side, they became theater curtains; suspended center space, they suggested both information and labyrinth. Musicians Daveen DiGiacomo and Dwayne Calizo — who unfortunately didn’t sing — created the wistful score. It was performed by a bevy of enthusiastic dancer singers, among them Erin Mei-Ling Stuart who, it turns out, also plays a mean viola. The seventy-minute, metaphor-heavy “Orbit” is not Shuch’s strongest work. For that it was too wordy and, at times, too repetitive. But the piece had its moments of magic.

First of all there was Shuch herself, a mesmerizing, loose-limbed performer, paired again with the burly Danny Wolohan. Opposites attract. Her childlike curiosity and wonder were grounded in hard facts. Wolohan’s lumbering physicality sheathed a dreamer’s soul. The two of them were drawn to each other like magnets until the polarity changed. The index-to-index finger touch, a recurring gesture, may have been a little obvious but it was nicely balanced with hands (and bodies) that circled around each other and, of course, never connected.

The excellent Melanie Elms was a sci fi Puck who lead the two lovers through the wilderness. The play within the play was splendid. Funny and well designed as a cartoon, it had Wolohan almost drown when he was saved — or was he? — by a Shuch as a blinking light house.

Photos:
First: 'Just A Little One' TalisManic Physical Theatre. Choreographer/Dancer: Kerry Mehling. Photographer: Luiza Silva
Second: Daisy Stoloff, Jose Castillo, Chelsea Taylor and Kristen Glennon of Carmen Carnes Dance Ensemble in
“Ma Kali: Fierce Mother.” Photo by Campfire Media.
Third: Kristen Glennon, Daisy Stoloff, Chelsea Taylor, Amie Miller and Heidi Landgraf of Carmen Carnes Dance Ensemble in “Ma Kali: Fierce Mother.” Photo by JCBPhotos.
Fourth: Danny Wolohan (left) and Erika Chong Shuch (right) in "Orbit." Photo: Lisken Rossi-Huber.

Volume 4, No. 28
July 24, 2006

copyright ©2006 Rita Felciano
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©2006 DanceView