Letter from San Francisco
Program 3
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
San Francisco, California
February 16, 2006
Talking Dance
ContraPULSE
San Francisco, California
February 12, 2006
Malonga Casquelourd Arts Center
Oakland, California
February 17, 2006
Noche Flamenca
Zellerbach Hall
Berkeley, California
February 17, 2006
by Rita Felciano
copyright ©2006 by Rita Felciano
“Lovely” is the only way to describe Paul Taylor’s “Spring Round”, premiered by San Francisco Ballet last summer during its Paris engagement. Set to a gem of a piece, Divertimento for small orchestra, Op. 86 (after Couperin) by Richard Strauss, which beautifully served Taylor’s mood of elegant casualness, the piece also put a rare spotlight on a dozen corps dancers. They offerde a glimpse into the future. Two of them look particularly promising: Matthew Stewart, who leaps as if born to them, and Megan Low, whose quicksilvery effervescence oxygenates everything she tackles.
Maybe most remarkable about this work is Taylor’s ability, even at his age, to suggest a youthful optimism without a dissenting note in it. That’s not quite true. When the dancers pour in with those lovely grounded runs, one woman expectantly looks at a man who by-passes her. So for just a moment, you anticipate one of Taylor’s bitter-sweet pieces. Not so. This is Arcadia; men and women enjoy each others' company, celebrating their commonality. Jennifer Tipton’s soft lighting and Santo Loquasto lime/lime corseted tops for the women and blouses for the men do their part.
Rarely has Taylor used the circle so intricately and with so many variations, skipping and leaping ones, large ones in unison, men’s inside women’s and the other way around; circles for couples and finally a triple one in the end. Even the Pas de Deux is full of them. Pascal Molat has his own set of audience-pleasing spins; he revolves around Kristin Long like a planet around the sun. But this is democratic Taylor, so she returns the courtesy.
Not the least of this delightful piece was the opportunity to see Long in a starring role. A long-time member of the company, a sunny performer and good and reliable technician, Long rarely gets first casting. An under-rated artist (her Giselle from last season still haunts me), here she shone in a part which gave credit to her ability to be wistful, exuberant and as fast as anything you want to see.
Compared with Taylor’s sophisticated take on social dancing, the hoe down in Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” looked pretty hokey. But how much fun it was to see SFB’s elegant males, in particular, go to town in what is one of de Mille’s best work. Tina LeBlanc’s Cowgirl had its knock-kneed, low-keyed charm; wisely she internalized a lot of the emotion but whipped them in furious outburst when needed—mostly with her back to us. Not ideally cast, she is almost too refined a dancer for the role. Stephen Legate, who retires at the end of the season, was the suave, slightly distanced but in control Head Wrangler; Rory Hohenstein a splendidly assertive boy-next-door Champion Roper.
While in symphathy with its status as a work of Americana and a welcome addition to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s attempt to make to demystify ballet, I can’t help but thinking that even in 1942, “Rodeo’s” must struck some audiences as limited.
Still de Mille’s ability to wring variations and create character and mood from such a simple device as a suspension remains admirable. It’s what keeps the ballet from being barnyard comedy. The suspensions, which suggest just a touch of collective longing, of something unfilled. first appear in the minuscule pause at apex of those bow-legged, rocking weight shifts in the opening. They return either in straight out or angled leg kicks which the Cow-Hands hold. The idea is most beautifully realized in the Cowgirl’s jutting out her leg (and an arm), only to curl in on herself and collapse to the floor. Like hope cut off.
Yuri Possokhov’s “Magrittomania” didn’t look as quite as of one mold as it appeared to be in 2000. Seams showed. Above all, much of Yuri Krasavin’s brash, at times even crude deconstruction of various Beethoven scores, though smashingly performed by the Ballet orchestra (under Gary Shelton) sounded rather pointless. Intended as the aural foil to Possokhov’s take on Magritte, Krasavin ripped whole sections out of their context without the wit of Possokhov’s gloss on the surrealist painter. Yuan Yuan Tan--she of the most sublime of line—reprised her fractured and angular solo to, of all things, “Fuer Elise.” She still looked elegant, though quite forlorn after her veiled “The Lovers” duet with Damian Smith who had inherited the wanderer’s role the departed Roman Rykin. Long limbed like a speed-skater, Smith in his initial three-limbed flailings (the second arm firmly glued to his back) managed to combine antic frenzy with a dreamer’s indifference.
Two round tables this week offered perspectives into dancers’ concerns about making work. An informal one, hosted by Jess Curtiss, who works in the Bay Area as well as in Europe, shed some light into the differences between European and American dance. Thankfully, the conversation only touched on, but didn’t descend into a complaints about the lack of financial support for American dance.
Generalizations about “American” and “European” dance are almost inevitable. For instance, generally richer production values in Europe were attributed to better financial support without taking into account the different origins of non-ballet dance on either continent. The influence of the European opera house structures has a ongoing trickled down effect on even the more experimental companies and the expectations of their audiences.
Still two notable distinctions emerged. Maybe the most important one was what Curtiss called “trash dancing” (i.e. cabaret style, raw, improvisational, sexually explicit) is presented in major venues while in this country it is still relegated to smaller theaters. Whether this has to do with the timidity of American presenters, or a genuine interest by European dance audiences to want the “unconventional”, remained unclear.
The second distinction reflected on the topic itself. The fact that the discussions revolved around European—and not French, German, Dutch—dance is an indication of just how permeable national boundaries—with a diminished loss of cultural identities?—have become. In Italy, where funding is tightly held in very few hands, dancers almost automatically travel north—like their grand parents who built Northern factories and highways after the second world war. Eastern European dancers also flocking to the West and in turn have created flourishing dance contemporary scenes in such cities as Budapest, Prague and Moscow.
Berlin, the discussion participants seemed to agree, is the place where reasonable rents, lots of cheap rehearsal space and a generally welcoming attitude toward innovation, seems to have become the turntable of contemporary European dance.
A few days later, the second Black Choreographers Festival, took a step back from performances in a symposium entitled “The Evolution of Traditional Dance in the Arts.” The cohesiveness of the perspectives among the panelists was a little surprising—everyone agreed with everyone else—and, though little new information was conveyed, the dedication and commonality of purpose among these dance activists made one hope for the future. The poor attendance at this event, however, also raised doubts. During her keynote address, Dr. Albirda Rose Eberhardt gently reproached the Bay Area for its absence while praising a smiling Jason Samuel Smith for having managed to pack his symposium (on tap) in Los Angeles.
Eberhardt traced Bay Area African American dance back through Ruth Beckford to Katherine Dunham. In the seventies, she explained African Americans started to self-define and establish an evolutionary trajectory of their traditions. She recalled the challenges choreographers like Gus Solomon and Bill T. Jones presented. They didn’t easily fit in. But, she said, they do. Tradition does not preclude innovation; it is inclusive.
The subsequent hour-long discussion over and over stressed the need to take charge and not have “outsiders” define you and your tradition. The impression was unavoidable that these dancers feel themselves under siege; whatever gains have been made in the last thirty years, they see as fragile and on the verge of being eroded. San Francisco State University, for instance, has just abolished the teaching of specific dance traditions.
What also emerged was a strong belief in dance as having a social function, as being integral to community and identity building. The faith in the transformative power of dance came across with the force of a moral imperative. Very little attention was devoted to dance as an art of the theater. These women (and the one lonely male) may be fiercely protective of their legacy but they are also engaged in passing it on as. “Tradition,” Eberhardt said, “helps us to define and separate us from others.”
The process may involve teaching youth about the African roots of crumping or explain to young women the roots of Hip-Hop in the hope that they won’t let themselves be exploited by its commercialization. But it can also mean offering free classes on a college campus for kids who need a safe place to go. While the panel was adamant about the need for going back to the “elders” to pick up –and acknowledging—the thread of the past, these dancers are equally determined to spin their own.
This perspective on Noche Flamenco is a minority report. The concert started fifteen minutes late as audience member kept piling in to fill Zellerbach Hall to the rafters, showering the performers with a long lasting standing room ovation at the end. Being part of this audience felt like being an outsider. It also threw an illuminating light on how tradition can be used—or abused—when putting it into a theatrical context.
Martin Santangelo, Noche Flamenca’s Artistic Director and Choreographer, has clear ideas of how to recontextualize Flamenco. Some of them work well such emphasizing the darkness of Flamenco’s soul by placing the performers into harsh lighting, black spaces, sounds of feet, hands and voices mysteriously emerging from nothing. Giving singers and dancers equal space was another one. Playing with Flamenco’s inherent drama as a solo form and inserting snitches of narrative was very effective. The evening was very much of one piece.
However, the show missed its mark in terms of scale. While gratifyingly I have rarely heard the finger-snapping pitos as clearly, the amplification was extreme to point of being assaultive. The level was approaching that of a rock or Stomp performance. The excellent singers (Manuel Gago and Antonio Campos) beautifully exhumed the mozarabic influences in Flamenco; the wailing, whispering and spinning of vocal lines was truly awe inspiring though the amplification remained problematic. Zellerbach seats a little over 2,000 people; sound enhancement may be necessary but a more subtle approach, surely, is possible. Like ballet, Flamenco can be impressively virtuosic, and Santangelo hired what must be the most technically accomplished performers he could find. Technically Antonio Rodriguez Jimenez and Juan Ogalla cannot be flawed. They are the Terminators of the art; they were spectacular. But faster, louder and projection-obsessed, they pushed the art over the top into athletics. If this style of Flamenco becomes popular, it may well become an Olympic sport.
Only Soleadad Barrio presented a personal take on Flamenco that combined virtuosity with a deep emotional investment. She was to one who saved the show.
Photos:
First: Kristin Long and Pascal Molat in Taylor's "Spring Rounds." Photo: Erik Tomasson.
Second: Noche Flamenco.
Volume 4, No. 7
February 20, 2006
copyright
©2006 Rita Felciano
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