The
Wave Crests
Summerfest
Cowell Theater,
San Francisco
July 24-25, 2003
reviewed
by Paul Parish
The
last weekend of Summerfest was an embarrassment of riches—what
a feast of brilliant performances. It's left me feeling
kind of glutted though. It's set up that way—with
so many pieces crammed together in so many programs,
with the best saved for last, so that the undeniably
best dancing is set on a program where the pieces don't
have time to set up their premises before they're over....
and then the next one takes you someplace else. Of course,
part of the purpose of a festival like this is to allow
modern-dance choreographers the chance to try new things,
work with dancers they normally would not, experiment.
Yet, the results can be still-in-process, or austere,
or idiosyncratic, with the puzzling impact of leaving
you—or at least me—feeling disturbed with
a wish that I'd understood more of what I saw.
For
example, a cryptic ritual interrupted Shadows, Whispers
and Sighs about two-thirds of the way through a
spectacle of remarkably fluent dancing: one of the dancers
approached another and began unravelling her bracelet,
which now hung nearly to the ground. (It was made of
raffia or straw or pampas grass? or some such). Where
did this come from? It left me baffled as one after
another underwent this ritual, and left me wondering
why I hadn't seen this coming. The dance is by the marvellous
African-American dancer-choreographer Laura
Elaine Ellis, with an all-star cast: Robert
Henry Johnson, one of the area's most accomplished dancers,
who's developed his own version of William Forsythe's
fusion of ballet, modern, and African-American idioms,
was only one of the four (who also included Ms. Ellis
herself, Frances Sedayo, and the statuesque Nora Chipaumire).
The program offered a note, but it explained nothing,
only thanked the sponsors. Perhaps when we see the whole
evening from which it is an excerpt, its meaning will
open up.
It
was followed immediately by the piece I'd been most
looking forward to, a male duet by KT Nelson,
starring two of the area's most personable and attractive
dancers, ODC's Brian Fisher and Shannon Hurlburt (of
SmuinBallets/SF)- which similarly left me at a loss
as to what they were up to. Hurlburt's sunny, boyish
demeanor and his infectious aim-to-please manner is
one of SmuinBallet's greatest assets, but Ms. Nelson
had no use for it in Floating Ridge. This is
a sincere and serious piece, dedicated "to my mother"
and set to a melodyless but harmonicially affecting
score by Arvo Pärt—"the Trisagion"—a
string quartet in the grip of deep emotions. The men
wore dark-purple trunks and were barefoot. Hurlburt
looked out-of-shape, uncomfortably sweaty, and like
he wanted to run into the wings and dry off, but meantime
the dance required him to project an unfamiliar personality
and maintain a postmodern logic he admired but did not
have the key to. Fisher DOES understand this idiom—he
has worked with Nelson at ODC for at least a decade—but
had to resist his own moxie and fight back an urge to
"sell it" that was inappropriate for the piece
but is a core component of his talent. I want to see
the piece again, though given the way these things work,
I doubt that I ever will.
For its last weekend, the showcase had moved to its
first fully professional house, the Cowell Theater at
the ex-army base, Fort Mason. (San Francisco, being
the oldest port on the west coast, has had a lot of
fortifications converted to peaceable uses in the last
couple of decades). The comfortable, charming space
seats several hundred and is built out on a pier overlooking
the Golden Gate—which is mysteriously and hauntingly
visible, through fog or mist or moonlight as you hang
out during intermissions).
The
stage is sizeable, and its grid is packed with lights—Sara
Linnie Slocum, who lit both evenings admirably, can
do almost anything she wants to here. And the pieces
were very very different—from Vegas-y Peter-Martins-ish
ballet by Charles Anderson to neo-Duncanism from Janice
Garrett to the sisterly moods required for dances by
Annie Rosenthal Parr and Mary Carbonara.
Anderson's
ballet did not appeal to me, but his star Sharon Booth
has a physical courage that no-one can fail to admire.
She has been also the star of Reginald Ray-Savage's
Oakland-based jazz dance company, and her ability to
go all the way through the cheesiness of this idiom
and bring up real sexual honesty is borderline heroic—she
puts me in mind of Sophie Tucker. On pointe. Awful costumes,
by Vincent.
Chamber-ballet
made several appearances in Summerfest. The problems
with ballet in spaces like this are several. First,
there's not enough room for the scale on which ballet
projects, so they almost always feel cramped, or like
they're grandstanding. Related problems come from the
heroic postural idiom; it looks pretentious or stilted.
And the potential for bathos is almost always fulfilled
(i.e, it takes only a tiny misstep, or lapse in choreographic
logic, for the sublime to be revealed as ridiculous).
When chamber ballet works, though, it can be really
refreshing, and the middle section of Michael Kruzich's
tantric-flavored Samsara, allowed a half-dozen
women on pointe to show dazzlingly syncopated footwork,
moving at great velocity with exhilarating abandon and
control to dizzying music ("Le Genneyya,"
by Hosam Ramzy). Very bright, tiny distinctions can
really tell. The smallest steps on pointe can read suddenly
huge, and multiple pirouettes, fouettées in fantastically
morphed shapes, can make a small stage feel like a god
has invaded the house. Verna Carter astonished me the
most, but Rika Onizuka, Kavita Master, Laura Rutledge,
Maricar Medina, Yumi Watanabe, and Jamie Duggan all
had moments of heart-stopping glory. Samsara
seemed to be inspired by a Hindu-Buddhist idea of the
world in transience, the flux of the atoms in the cosmic
wind—and ballet seemed well-tuned to interpret
such an idea.
Liss
Fain's River at the end of the Land,
to Hamza el Din's Escalay, was also "about"
the flow of life; Escalay means "waterwheel,"
and Fain's dancers used an idiom that reminded me of
Limón's to suspend and sustain themselves in
a slow, exquisitely sensuous flow of shapes across the
floor. (Jennifer Gorman and Sarah Claggett were particularly
gleaming performers.) It was a muscled, sinuous sort
of continuity, that suggested a trance-like state. Difficult,
gorgeous, peaceful.
Even
more gorgeous was Janice Garrett's
Laulu Palju, which premiered on the final program,
and seemed to take old-fashioned modern dance as a theme
on which to work many sumptuous variations. My companion
thought it was too pretty, and I would admit, it's probably
too long (Doris Humphrey: "all dances are
too long"), but Jesus, it was beautiful. It's set
to an unnamed score that sounds like a Mass, by Veljo
Tormis, performed in a language that's probably Estonian
by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and its
mode is melting, heavenly.
Garrett's
movement is intricate, wave-like (including the partnering)—and
as with waves, the movement is never over; the phrases
have what versifiers call feminine endings, and THOSE
turn out to have another sigh to them before they subside
altogether. Garrett used to confine her dancer's bodies—say
to a spot on a bench—and give them vivid things
to do with torso, head, and hands, particularly the
fingers. For the last few years, though, she's been
sweeping her forces around the stage, bringing back
folk-dance forms, moving her dancers FAST—and
alternating that with little interactions that remind
me of "all of Hamlet in 90 seconds."
In this piece she seems to be reaching all the way back
to Isadora Duncan for breath and surge and sweep and
musicality—and her dancers, who are very released,
seem to be naturally inclined to move in Duncanesque
arcs, especially Heidi Schweiker, the most fluent of
a remarkable group (which includes Kara Davis, Bliss
Dowman, Brian Grannan, Dana Lawton, Nol Simonse, and
Heather Tietsort Lasky).
Schweiker
is a wonderful dancer, and fantastically stage-worthy—
a little round girl with a large beautiful face, with
huge wide-spaced eyes like the poster-child for Les
Miserables. Every joint is supple, and her quality
of movement reminds one of the famously soft dancers,
like Barbara Dilley. Along with Steffany Toto, Schweiker
was the star of the weekend, performing in her own premiere,
Shadows of Tiny Things (with Erin Gottwald,
Deborah Miller, and Ms. Toto), and also in Mary
Carbonara's Little Girl Lost (which
was despite its diminutive title, a large-scale work
emotionally, and for me the most powerful of all the
dances in the series).
Schweiker's
own piece seemed dwarfed by its music; Carbonara's had
a clear and unmisunderstandable relation to the sound
score which Peter Swendsen made for it, a musical compilation
of many voices (all women's), speaking in many tones,
sometimes distinct, sometimes so overlapped as to make
the kind of buzz you hear when you're half-asleep, the
perpetual life-long oceanic voices of your family criticizing
you and each other. Some complaints came in a Brooklyn
accent, some in Valley Girl, the bland, the kvetching,
the soothing, the upsetting; I myself am very familiar
with such a chorus of Erinyes, who seem at times unplacatable,
at others surprisingly softened—so Carbonara's
piece speaks to me directly.
Carbonara
commissioned the score, which is layered so as to work
like a choral ode. There are lines which make literal
sense, and establish the theme (discovering parts of
your mother in your own movements, your expressions,
the face reflected in the mirror, the life choices you
find yourself making) and other confused voices that
build up an almost symphonic, oceanic heightening of
the emotion—so that the feeling has no name but
its urgency is overpowering. In these situations, it
was Ms. Toto who became an incandescent interpreter
of the material. At one emotional peak near the end
she came down from a near-vertical split into a releve
in the lowest possible second position—a drastic
change of balance with a complete loss of composure
for a split second, followed by an absolute assertion
of her existence—that is burned upon my memory
forever. Why it is so significant I can't tell you,
but I'm convinced I'll be thinking about it for the
rest of my life. I am told, and I'm not surprised, that
THAT section is comprised of Toto's own voice and her
own words about her mother, but I don't think anybody
would need the insider information to feel the congruity
between that imagery and the intensity of her performance
in that climactic moment in that dance.
What
Annie Rosenthal Parr's dazzling, windmilling duet (In
this Life We Will Be...), which she made for herself
and Patricia Jiron, was about I couldn't tell you, but
the two dancers certainly were characters of some kind:
perhaps energetic disturbances within the same field:
such abandon, such control! It was like you could see
both the Northern and Southern lights at the same time.
To put it another way, their relationship seemed like
sleepers in the same bed, the kind of awareness they
had of each other seemed so intimate, so intense, and
yet so unconscious. Set to Beth Custer's "I will
be sad in this life."
amended
August 13, 2003 by Paul Parish
copyright
Paul Parish 2003
Photos:
Top:
Mary Carbonara (backround) and Steffany Toto (foreground
.
Middle: Two
dancers of Janice
Garrett and dancers,: on the left, Heather-Tietsort-Lasky
and on the right, Kara Davis. Photo by RJ Muna.
Bottom: Annie Rosenthal Parr and
Patricia Jiron in In this Life We Will Be...
Photo: photo by David Fischer.
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