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Kansas by the Bay

West Wave Dance Festival
programs 5, 6 and 7
Theater Artaud
San Francisco, CA
July 20, July 22 and July 27

 by Ann Murphy
copyright ©2006 by Susan Reiter

Vacations have pulled me out of town in recent summers just as the annual West Wave Dance Festival was getting underway. Little did I know that that the absences would leave me feeling like Rip Van Winkle. It appears that while I was gone many small changes were taking place, and now, jammed together in anthology programs over a couple of weeks, these shifts begin to look like major sea changes. The liquidy domination of release technique, for instance, has virtually disappeared from view, while the past obsession with dance theater has relievedly dried up. Meanwhile, a new technically proficient and accomplished generation of ballet and modern dancers is cropping up all over the place. That’s a welcome sight. The level of the choreography hasn’t budged much from its standard over the last decade, although If the size of the dance community can continue to grow that too might change. The one place where I might have expected striking developments I found none: only a couple of the dances in the three programs were topical. Almost no one except AXIS dance, itself a political cri de coeur against bias, seems to know that a war or two are going on or that global warming has arrived. Or if they know it, they don’t find it suitable material for choreography. Maybe this isn’t the Bay Area afterall. Maybe, Dorothy, we’re in Kansas.  

Whether there's Kansas creep here or not, the Bay Area has become a magnet and a breeding ground for a new generation of well-trained performers, like Linda Bair and her company in program 5, or the highly talented Amy Seiwert and her troupe of movers who appeared on program 6. These are dancers who don’t scorn technique — they even appear to go to class regularly. The bad news is that only the most seasoned dancemakers have a complete grip on their music or seem to know what effects sound can have on a work. Among the neophyte choreographers this is understandable. But what to make of the strangely disembodied use of sound by adepts like Katie Faulkner or Manuelito Biag?  

In Faulkner’s often compelling “Fit of the Survivalist,” with its well-crafted group sections, the music arrived in unformed blocks heaped next to each other, the dancers a fraction behind the beat. The effect was like watching a movie when the dialogue trails the action by a comic nanosecond. Biag’s tender, texturally rich duet with Alisa Michele called “the Shape of Poison” (an excerpt) was packed with compelling Indonesian allusions and a shimmery abstract beauty about tetchy interpersonal bonds. But the live squawking by Jess Rowland had a brutal quality that competed without adding to the depth of the duet. By contrast, Monica Mark, whose work was executed with less polish than some of the others, was a lively and inventive choreographer who grasps the kind of catalytic action sound can have on movement in her gutsy and entertaining “D:Qube/A Punk Rock Ballet”  and “Reoload.com.”   

A number of dances made the audience sit up straight. Bair’s “16x24” in program 5 was a stunning group work that employed swift streams of linear, cross-cutting movement and mercuric shifts from small group to large employing precise balletic leg work and quirky arms. It was all executed to a heartbeat-like pulse and performed with sophisticated zeal by Bair, Cathy Dean, Cassie Gardner, Jean Larock, Andrea Masten and Katie Speck. The appearance of ghostly gestures (a baseball wind-up, plucking an arrow) added witty vernacularisms that came like welcome bits of slang in an elegant poem. It’s single major problem arose from Bair not knowing how to tighten the middle to keep her focus and when to quit.   

When to quit wasn’t an issue with the veteran Janice Garrett in her latest premiere, a work-in-progress called  “Archimedes’ Revenge,” a finely wrought dance in which Garrett packed more traditional movement in a single phrase than any choreographer around. There were no uncontemplated movements, no transitions unconsidered. But given the hypomania that ensued, the work started to feel like the efforts of a lost renegade who hasn’t found a way to break with the forms she knows other than to stuff them to overflowing. It would be interesting to see what would happen if, like Paul Taylor, whose style “Archimedes’” echoes frequently, she allowed her work’s moods to swing more radically. I’d also like to see her inflict chance on a piece. What would happen if a section were glacially slow rather than simply moderato? What if the dancers danced faster than the music? That said, she once again assembled an indefatiguable group (Brendan Bartel, Jennifer Bishop-Orsulak, Ashley Burnett, Tammy Cheney, Kara Davis, Julian De Leon, Hope Mohr, Heidi Schweiker, and Nol Simonse). They executed a relentless array of leaps, turns, lunges, ricochets and complex patterns, always like fierce surfers on the crest of Michael Thomas’s score.   

Kate Weare’s premiere of “Drop Down” and WestWave festival producer Brittany Brown Ceres’s “Simultaneous Solos” were also stunners. Weare, whose past exposes of relationships have sometimes slipped dangerously close to the inbred, made a witty neo-tango that was on target in its depiction of the battle and heat of romance. Never devolving into slapstick or self-parody, employing humor that was full of pathos, Adrian Clark and Leslie Kraus constantly changed places as aggressor and aggressed. Their fevered lower legs ronds-de-jambed, sliced, clutched and pushed, becoming truculent outposts of the psyche as well as sexual and locomotive tools. Sex as dance and dance as sex; relationship as dance and dance as relationship--it was all there.   

Ceres’s “Solos,” also a premiere, was set to the the composition “Weather” by Bang on the Can co-founder Michael Gordon. With its post-Cunningham elemental elegance and artful use of a mere five performers to fill the stage, Ceres juxtaposed slicing, linear leg work with circling, shuddering arms, nervous hands and undulant torsos. Where many young choreographers seem to make a fetish out of gesture without knowing what they are supposed to communicate, Ceres embedded the gestures in the impulse of the dance itself. Where she faltered was in finding enough impulse to propel the work to its full breadth and to shake the steps out of their regularity.  

Pulse alone wouldn’t have fixed what ailed a number of dances on these programs.  Dancer Ashley Taylor charmingly performed Alma Esperanza Cunningham’s “Parade” (2001), and at first glance the work seemed to be aiming for a cunning bit of wit and satire. But as Taylor ably transmogrified from baton-twirler to soldier to circus performer, dancing to the thumping 1-2 swagger of John Phillip Sousa’s “Washington Post” march, the opportunity to lampoon dance history (the 1917 Diaghilev production of “Parade”) and current events (jingoism) evaporated like a mirage.   

Axis Dance Company’s “Room 5600,” choreographed by Sean McMahon, and Sue Li Jue’s “(Not Your Traditional) Fan Dance, each a premiere, openly aspired for political content but missed their mark, despite often impassioned dancing. McMahon took the dance’s name and inspiration from Ernesto Cardinal’s poem Room 5600, which decries the economic policies of the U.S. government. Li Jue’s three-part dance began with Miss Perceptions, set to Noam Chomsky’s commentary on the U.S. government’s Asian policies spoken by the linguist in voiceover. It was followed by two more segments: Edge and Fan It.   

Cardenal’s poem, a plain spoken, highly specific protest against the U.S., was the source for all the movement vocabulary, the timing of the dancing and the imagery, according to the program notes. But “...the shining waters of Lake Eerie without fish....”  and plenty of other highly specific lines were never even remotely captured by the choreography. Gestures of bondage and steps of entanglement, which the three performers rendered eloquently, have to be structured in such a way they take on political and not just existential meaning — saying they are political hardly makes them so.  “Miss Perceptions,” perhaps inadvertently, came across as itself a misperception  of what Chomsky meant when he forecasted China’s future supremacy. Decked out in cowboy garb and sunglasses, Li Jue, Rae Chang, Aileen Kim and Frances Sedayao engaged in parody and swagger, yet Chomsky’s predictions were meant to be dire for all — while China is economically on the rise, it won’t be long, he said, before it’s able to compete with the U.S. militarily. Fan It and Edge, free of  tomes, were much more successful in pairing movement and message. Chang powerfully danced Edge like she were on it, and Fan It, a cabaret-style number, had a cheeky wit that transformed the Asian dance fan from a demure prop to a weapon of sass.   

If Sean McMahon’s movement choices floated free of his intentions, Deborah Slater’s movement in “Without TIme, Without Place” revealed that her intentions themselves were muddy. Slater’s new work with chairs and suitcase appeared at first glance to have a discernible story about loss or betrayal and there was a lovely  American gothic feel as Travis Rowland struggled with his suitcase. But once that slipped away, the previously enigmatic emotion evolved into angst-ridden drama with no object. Kerry Mehling, Elizabeth Randall ad Travis Rowland were inexplicably lost together and so were we.   

Movement was limned so clearly we could feel its meaning in our own bodies in Heidi Schweiker’s stunning solo “Come Rain ” on program 7. It was by turns schizy, feral, focussed, fierce and exquisitely danced. But like a number of young choreographers, Schweiker’s train of thought seems to run away from her mid-way through a work. Unlike many of her peers, she almost inevitably gathers the threads again and creates a satisfying conclusion that has emotionally evolved.

Ben Levy’s “Violent Momentum,” also on program 7, was an example of a work that never recouped after a powerful opening, in this case visually arresting and Pinteresque in its emotional tone. The two couples (Brooke Gessay, Christopher Hojin Lee, Scott Marlowe and Lauren Slater) depict lovers as the equivalent of the body’s dangerous free radicals, causing havoc and attaching to whomever happens in their path.But adult drama slipped quickly into sophmoric posturing about the violence of longing. Clearly Levy has talent, and just as clearly he needs to learn how to develop it beyond his topic sentence.   

Alex Ketley’s “Careless,” ( program 7) ferociously danced by young neoclassical dancers from the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, was another partial success. Full of original and ruminative fragments, “Careless” revealed a  burgeoning talent that needs to learn how to let the uniqueness of the parts speak to the design of the whole. The dance’s superstructure tended to be a bit gimmicky, with dancers beginning and ending in the audience as well as on stage, and a bit mechanical, with patterns derived less from the need to communicate specific ideas or visual motifs than from what seemed comfortable and familiar. Claudia Hubiak’s “Obpulsion”  and Rebecca Pappas’s “Undergrowth,” both on program 5 suffered a similar desultory feel, while Barry Webster’s “Serenity, danced passionately by Tecsia Ross and Catherine Newman, read as a student effort to embody the style of Alvin Ailey.   

A lot has changed since Jose Maria Francos and David Hartman launched the first summer dance festival, the Bay Area Dance Series, more than two decades ago. What hasn’t changed is the generous desire by a handful of people to offer local dance of all stripes a stage, an audience and a bit of publicity each summer. In the evolution of Bay Area dance, that’s invaluable, even if leaving the theater I sometimes wonder if I’m in Kansas.    

Photos (courtesy of West Wave Dance Festival):
Jean Larock, Linda Bair, Katie Speck, Cathy Dean of the Linda Bair Dance Company. Photo: Matthias Falk.
Kate Weare. Photographer unknown.


Volume 4, No. 29
July 31, 2006

copyright ©2006 Ann Murphy
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©2006 DanceView