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Choreography by Versace

ODC/SF
Yerba Buena Theater
San Francisco, CA
March 16, 2006

by Paul Parish
copyright 2006 by Paul Parish

ODC has been in San Francisco now for 30 years, since Brenda Way, Kimi Okada, and star dancer KT Nelson brought the dance department from Oberlin College here looking for a real city to live and work in and perform for. It was a collective back in the 70’s which evolved into the longest running triumvirate in history. Indeed, into a dance empire, since the school they founded also became a presenting organization that has evolved into a major seminary of talent, with mentoring programs for beginners, residencies for emerging choreographers, and two youth companies. At the top of this pyramid is a fantastic cadre of post-modern dancers performing as ODC/SF. 

“Dancing Downtown” was a two-week season showing three programs. I only made it to Program 1—which had to be altered the night I saw it to work around a dancer’s injury, and that night only featured Okada’s “Lip Service,” Nelson’s duet “Shenanigans,” and Way’s “Time Remaining” and “Part of a Longer Story.”

Everything was exceedingly well-danced—indeed, there would have been no way of knowing that there had been an injury, or any problem at all, if Way hadn’t declared it in explaining why the program we’d be seeing was not the one advertised. ODC is invariably the best rehearsed ensemble in town—indeed, I’d say almost anywhere. Every detail—head position, flutter of the fingers, little flick of the feet, shoulder shrug, insouciant shedding of a jacket, sudden glance, wry frown, double-take—fits into place, in a style that’s casually sophisticated and owes a great deal to Twyla Tharp.

“Lip Service” is a full-company set of etudes, little studies in vaudeville techniques—the basic posture is a forward tilt (picture James Cagney in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) and the typical move is to walk forward with dogged intensity, and the typical event is to bump into an idea on route—“Am I going the wrong way?” “Why are all these people clumped around me?” “What’s this on my shoe?” Sometimes the idea is embodied in another person, who stupidly persists in not agreeing with you, Three Stooges stuff without the bops on the head. Sometimes a bit of shtick wears out its welcome, but mostly it’s endearingly respectful of a great school of comic movement.

Nelson’s “Shenanigans” is a wholly delightful virtuoso duet for Private Freeman and Anne Zivolich set to Darius Milhaud’s marvelous “Scaramouche,” with brilliant technical movement (quadruple pirouettes for her, for example) closing in truly hilarious positions that are themselves fully realized compositions, down to the fingertips and tilt of the eyebrows. It’s got crack timing, fully realized characterizations, Versace-esque costumes (by Cassandra Carpenter), a zany mentality, and star performances: Zivolich has a stage presence on the order of Lisa Viola’s. Freeman is right there with her, but he’s willing to play the amused straight man, as Dan Rowan used to to loony Dick Martin.

Way’s ambitious new ballet, “time remaining” [sic], used the whole company, especially Private Freeman, in an enterprise I could not fathom but clearly portended no good. “A Mighty Fortress is our God” rang out somewhere in the middle of tunes by Ara Anderson and Iron and the Albatross, but I don’t know why. Five or six dress-maker’s dummies swelled the ensemble, and they were danced with. The movement was complex, difficult, and never looked awkward.

Way set “Part of a Longer Story” to Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto.” The piece closed the show and made it clear why at intermission one saw so many SF Ballet dancers in the audience. Way had persuaded former SFB ballerina Joanna Berman to come out of retirement and dance in the adagio. The house was full of Berman’s fans (of whom I am one), and they cheered her resoundingly at the end.

Way made the adagio first, in 1993, over a decade before she finished the finale, and the three sections are quite distinct in feeling; they can pull more apart than together. To my mind, the only section that really cohered last weekend was the first, which is made on the company’s extraordinary women and has a structure like Balanchine’s Mozart ballet, “Divertimento #15.” That is, as the orchestra and clarinet sing to each other, each section of music is realized as a variation for one of the women. Each has an extraordinarily personal bit of choreography, each is quite difficult, highly inflected, and performed as if it were nothing by a dancer who is listening to the music with extraordinary attention and phrasing her steps with great sensitivity. Completely satisfying.

Wonderful though Berman’s clarity was, however, her demeanor seemed quite other than that of the company, as if say Deborah Kerr had turned up in a movie that had been written for Michelle Feiffer. She is a very generous performer, but her manners belong to a theatrical world that is idealized in a different way. The central duet is somehow doomed, but it was not possible to tell—when the abstract dancing yielded to unmistakable evidence of unsatisfiable longings—when the couple had to part, what they had wanted from each other.

The finale was made, it looks like, as a gift to Brian Fisher, a dancer of tremendous gifts who left Broadway to turn “serious”; Fisher is a key dancer, the choreographers’ assistant, and has been with the company since 1992. He’s mostly toned down his moxie and played up his musicality and flexibility—but this piece lets him give free rein to both (he’s lifted at one point in a spectacular full-on arch, in the shape of a shrimp). I’ve seen him make more of a romp of it than he did last Friday. The quartet of goofballs he’s playing with seemed to be much more carefree than he was. I felt, though I can’t know this, that his imminent retirement caught up with him, and that in the act of performing this piece that shows him off so, he was flooded with nostalgia, as if he missed the stage already.

The cheers were loud and long.

Volume 4, No. 10
March 13, 2006
copyright ©2006 Paul Parish
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last updated on March 13, 2006