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The DanceView Times, San Francisco Bay Area edition

       Volume 2, Number 5   February 2, 2004    An online supplement to DanceView magazine

Big Time Dance Kicks In

Limón Company
Cowell Theater
San Francisco Ballet Opening Gala
War Memorial Opera House
Dance Theatre of Harlem

U.C. Berkeley
San Francisco/Berkeley, California
January 2004

by Paul Parish
Copyright ©2004 by Paul Parish
published 2  February 2004

After a long hiatus, big-time dance kicked back in this week in the Bay Area. Dance Theater of Harlem opened a week's worth of performances on the U.C. campus in Berkeley;, San Francisco Ballet opened its winter season at the Opera House with a gala that spilled over into City Hall across the street; and the Limón Company danced nobly, to a very appreciative audience, in a one-night stand at the Cowell Theater, and set a standard of dance intelligence nobody else met all week.

Nothing else all week, except Concerto Barocco (of which more below) matched the dignity, passion, formal beauty, and rhythmic acuity of Limón 's The Unsung, which I had never seen before and found completely thrilling. The ballet is a paean in honor of the great warrior chiefs Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Metacomet, Tecumseh, Red Eagle, Black Hawk, Osceola, and Pontiac, danced in silence by six men who have each a variation interrupted by appearances of the corps, (I recognized many of the shapes Michael Smuin used in his Song for Dead Warriors, which of course he must have taken from Limón).
read review


Dresden Modern

Palucca School Dresden
Bancroft Studio
UC Berkeley
January 28, 2004

by Rita Felciano
Copyright ©2004 by Rita Felciano

On a Bay Area stop over during their California tour, the eight members of the graduating class of the seventy-eight year old Palucca School of Dresden brought a program that both intrigued and disappointed.

Gret Palucca (1902-1993), an early student of Mary Wigman’s, was known for a light and mirthful performing style and for being a strong proponent of dance as pure movement. She was a strong technician—her jumps were legendary--and also a survivor. Her school made it through the Nazi and the Soviet eras.

These dancers were excellently trained; their fluidity and sense of physical abandon belying the rigorous training that makes possible the appearance of natural ease. Large scale, with clean attacks and an appetite for space, they also danced delicately and communicated a nuanced expressiveness whether in a comic, dramatic or lyrical mode.
read review


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This weeks' articles

 

DanceViewNY
Mindy  Aloff's Letter from New York

The Balanchine Celebration
New York City Ballet:
A Veteran and a Raw Recruit
by Mindy Aloff

Heart and Soul
by Mary Cargill

Kid Stuff
Cas Public's If You Go Down To the Woods Today
by Susan Reiter

DanceViewWest
San Francisco Ballet:
New Wheeldon (Rush)
by Rita Felciano

New Tomasson (7 For Eight)
by Paul Parish

Possokhov's New Firebird for OBT
by Rita Felciano

Moscow Festival Ballet and Scott Wells
by Paul Parish

DanceViewDC
Hamburg Ballet's Nijinsky:
Nijinsky—Lost in the Chaos
by Clare Croft

NijinskyMadness and Metaphor
by Alexandra Tomalonis

Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes
by George Jackson

Batsheva: Breaking Down Walls
by Lisa Traiger

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence
by Clare Croft

Choreographers Showcase
by Tehreema Mitha

Zoltan Nagy
by George Jackson

 

 

 

 

 

Writers

Rita Felciano
Alison Garcia
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish

DanceView

The next issue of DanceView, a quarterly review of dance published since 1979, will be mailed out in mid-October.

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Copyright ©2003 by by DanceView
last updated on December 1, 2003