Eve of Destruction
Akram Khan, Kaash
Yerba Buena Theater, San Francisco
September 18, 2003
By
Paul Parish
©
2003
Akram
Khan's brilliant Kaash began before I was aware of it. The house
lights were still up; I was turned around talking to the person behind
me when I realized I'd lost her attention—a look of alarm had come
into her eyes, and I turned to see there was a knife-blade slender youth
onstage, with his back to us, dressed in black, gazing motionless into
the huge black rectangle suspended, floating on the horizon in silence
like a monstrous new planet or a black sun up in the sky. The scene looked
like a Rothko—and the image on the back wall did not change throughout
the disturbing, rattling contemporary dance that took place in front of
it for the next ninety minutes or so. The black hopeless object held focus
amidst peripheral washes of color, sometimes pearly white, sometimes blood-red.
The entire dance seemed to be the image of an unquiet train of thought
that began with "If..." (Khaash means "if," or alternatively
"what if," in Hindi, according to a program note) and went to
a lot of dark places...... One of those dark meditations that leads you
in an apparent circle but in fact is spiraling downwards. When we reached
a bleak place after about an hour, and were overtaken by an overwhelming
roar that shook me to the bones, it turned out that the dance had returned
to the opening configuration, and the opening section began all over again.
more>>
Past and Present
Du
Passe Au Present
ODC Theater, San Francisco
Saturday Sept 27
By
Ann Murphy
© 2003
Forty-four
year old Montreal native and Bay Area transplant Sonya Delwaide ended
her career as a performer this weekend in San Francisco with one of the
few dance quotes apt enough for the occasion: Odette's mournful seated
bow, wings folded over one extended leg en face.
The lithe dancer's Gallic features had acquired a Pierrot-like sadness in this last dance of the evening, her signature Du Balcon, the only dance in which she appeared in the concert Du Passe Au Present (from the past to the present). But then that haunting wistfulness found a dignified and logical close when Delwaide linked herself to the famous swan, woman trapped between worlds who, in the end, chooses to put the dangerously enchanted realm behind her.
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