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Bay Area Report

Dance Festivals, On-Screen and Off, and a Tilt at Windmills

by Rita Felcianol
copyright © 2001 by Rita Felciano
Winter 1999

Summertime is festival time, and the Bay Area certainly has its share. To see concentrated doses of work in the company of like-minded theatergoers is appealing. These communal love feasts create a buzz of excitement and prime audiences to expect something out of the ordinary; sometimes they even get it. Such was certainly the case at the 1998 Mill Valley Film Festival where the one-day (October 3) showing of Dancemaker, Matthew Diamond’s full-length documentary on Paul Taylor, filled the house with a multigenerational audience from all over the Bay Area. They were not disappointed.

Dancemaker is a rare accomplishment. In addition to providing an insightful perspective on Taylor’s artistic personality, it captures the joy, the grind and sometimes heartache of being a dancer. It also shines a bright spotlight on the complex support system that keeps the Taylor machine humming. The dance fragments are beautifully filmed, with the creation of Piazzola Caldera wending its way through the film like a guiding beacon of light. The personal highlight is the inclusion of archival film of Taylor’s dancing his solo in Aureole and then teaching it to Patrick Corbin. Diamond brilliantly intercuts Taylor’s dancing with Corbin’s; there rarely has been a more moving demonstration of how dance is passed on from body to another, one generation to the next. This is a terrific film with a subtle and nuanced portrait of a complex artist and the people who makes his work possible.

Footage: A Dance Film Festival (October 23/24), the brain child of a Marin County choreographer and dance film maker, Cynthia Pepper, is only in its second year but given the audience’s response there will no doubt be others. The offerings were somewhat haphazard, ranking from the amateurish to the slick and highly professional. Probably most encouraging was the realization of just how far we have come in trying to synthesize both of these moving arts. The festival showed seventeen films and videos, some of them in excerpts only.

The most striking was a German contribution, Burnt (1997), by Holger Gruess from Cologne. Set in an anonymous, hard-edged, yet very elegant business building lobby, it was choreographed for two men in business suits and a woman who danced double roles as a cleaning woman and as the men’s partner. Lit in stark black and white, the choreography was aggressive, confrontational, and yet as anonymous as its surroundings. Fragments of narrative floated by. Is this triangle relationship, the cleaning woman’s dream, a memory of something that happened to her? At one point the camera zeros in on her glowing cigarette butt which assumes the dimension of a burning inferno. The work has a sense of murder mystery about it, enhanced by the film’s odd angles and above all by the way it was edited. Movement phrases are started or were cut off in the middle of the momentum, creating a sense of breathlessness and unstableness, which kept the viewer guessing.

Hepa (1998) by Laura Margulies, uses a technique called rotoscoping in which the artist, apparently, paints directly on film. Very expressionistic in her use color and broad, sweeping brush strokes, Margulies initially introduced a hiphop dancer who also is a drummer. Very quickly, however, the filmed dancers disappear into swishing color schemes in which the human figure remains but one element of a broader canvass. Every once in a while the human reappear but as a ghost, as negative space, of itself. Hepa is too literal in the way it translates musical rhythms onto the screen but its use of the dancing body that somehow manages to survive its pictorializaton proved to be intriguing.

Douglas Rosenberg’s video on and of Anna Halpern’s My Grandfather Dances is skillful and at times very poetic rendition of Halpern talking about and also performing her memories of a Jewish childhood in Chicago. The challenge of presenting Halpern as the narrator and also as the performer of a narrated dance created some interesting logistics for Rosenberg. However, this double vision with consummate ease. In his hands the crosscuttings, fades and pans became the clay out of which a flowing piece of poetry which can stand quite apart from its subject matter.

Also noteworthy were Pascal Magnin’s mysterious Queens for a Day in which three athletically dancing couples intrude into a folkloric celebration; Pepper’s own SandDance filmed at the Pacific Ocean but ending in a swimming pool; Witnessed by Canadian’s Allen Kaeja and Mark Adam, a stark evocation of a concentration camp.

The festival ended with a look backward, Hilary Harris’ lyrical Nine Variations on a Dance Theme from 1967 with former Taylor dancer Bettie de Jong. Modernist in its thrust toward abstraction, it provoked catcalls from an audience not yet born in 1967. Harris’s leisurely pacing, the restriction of means and his, admittedly, sometimes self-conscious though very lyrical use of the camera deserved a more knowledgable reception.

The San Francisco Butoh Festival (August 10-28), probably the only festival of its kind in the country, focused on the internationalization of butoh. The invited artists came from the US, Canada, Japan, Thailand, Argentina and Mexico. Personal expression not surprisingly outweighed national origin, with the possible exception, interestingly enough, of the two latin participants.

Gustavo Collini-Sartor, a pupil of Kazuo Ohno, from Argentina in Tango Butoh laid claim to a connection between the two styles. Unfortunately an over-the-top theatricality of grand gestures and allusions to drag queens did not make up for paucity of imagination and a body as expressive as a rhubarb’s. Mexican dancer Diego Pinon, who looked flat two years ago, returned with two much stronger performances. Both seemed to be inspired by the Mexican cult of the dead. The sense of being on a journey, an immaculately timed one at that, and the articulation of his personal imagery, some of it Christian, some of it probably Indian, was haunting.

Two of the visitors, Canada’s Kokoro Dance, and Japan’s Akira Kasai, produced work in conjunction with local artists. On one of the coldest afternoon all summer, Kokoro and some fifteen dancers performed Beach Dance, a ritual at the sandy edge of the Pacific in which the performers ever so slowly progressed along the water’s edge, oblivious to the waves that washed over them. The fact that these dancers, after only a week, had absorbed so much of the stillness and internal focus of butoh, certainly supports the claim that butoh is as much a mental as a physical discipline. Kasai’s Exusiai (a category of angels) alternated tightly set pieces for four local dancers with dazzling solo improvisations. Outside of time and space he seemed to roam endless universes which contracted at the twitch of his lip. At one point the white clad women looked like fragments of statuary, at other times they appeared blown in and sucked away like tumbleweeds on a pockmarked planet.

Abe M’Aria, a young woman of anything but a virginal look, was the most radical of this diverse butoh practitioners. Her piece, White Noise, performed live to the earsplitting accompaniment of a score that makes the scrunge version of rock sound angelic, consisted of her flailing and bouncing off the floor like a drop of water on a hot griddle. Later she raced through the audience, throwing herself against the back wall and then full force back on to the stage. I wish I could say that I abhorred the piece but the consistency of her undaunting vision, her daring and sheer physical stamina won my grudging admiration.

Compared to the Butoh festival, this year’s Third Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival (Oct. 3-18) was a relatively tame affair. In part the brain child of the City’s “Cultural Equity Fund” (to support traditionally “underrepresented groups”) this multigenerational festival, with some thirty choreographers participating, introduced a real hodgepodge of Bay Area dance. Some of it was so amateurish as to make one wonder what criteria besides sexual orientation the curators had in mind. Still the City’s fund provided this shoe string operation with some commission money and, given the difficulty of producing work, put on stage some delightful pieces which might have had a hard time finding a venue.

The best of the new was Jose Navarrete’s Essays on Tango. Reaching back to the time when the tango was a male-only dance, this fulminating duet (Navarrete and Arnel Santiago Alcordo) was a chilling re-creation of a hot dance. Aggression and attraction held each other up in perfect balance. Navarette offered none of the hi-jinx acrobatics of a Broadway tango show but a weighty and attentive game of one-upmanship; bodies circling each other like bulls, wearily anticipating the partner’s next move. Physical contact often was restricted to a hand on a chest, a hand against a crotch, a chokehold or a foot on top of a partner’s. This was a sensual, dreamy evocation of the tango with more than a touch of the unstated anger that makes this dance appear so dangerous.

Another commissioned work was the delightful Internal Dance Number One by the guru of a whole new generation of dancers, Remy Charlip. Charlip stood in the center and some ten dancers, one by one, shot from the wings to tell him what to do, such as, balance your head on spine, open your back etc. Charlip, however, never moved. It was a whimsical piece, with a lovely sense of accumulation, probably as close to conceptual art as dance can be.

On another evening, Kevin Ware, a dancer with ODC/San Francisco, presented The Man, a solo for himself in which he seemed to relive a past relationship. Ware is a powerfully built yet exceedingly lyrical dancer with a large and nuanced expressive vocabulary. Starting on a note of high exuberance he was soon flying through the air, went through agitation and turmoil, to end coiled up on the floor, racked in pain. The piece ended in resignation, with Ware’s putting his head into the outstretched hand of his a capella singer-accompanist Cedric Brown. Clearly and economically constructed, Ware’s piece was not new, but it deserved the additional exposure which the festival made possible.

On the same program Sonya Delwaide’s Lui paid tribute to veteran dancer Frank Shawl who had a career on Broadway quite some time ago. He is still a lively, captivating performer whose body, however, has been stiffened by time. Delwaide concentrated her dance in the upper body with stirring, stretching and grabbing movements, punctuating them with occasional slides and a few jazz steps. It’s the kind of occasional work that capitalizes on what a dancer can do and also shows that restrictions are something to be prized.

Don Quixote is so rarely performed on the West Coast that a trip to Sacramento, where Sacramento Ballet (Oct.22-25) was producing the entire version, seemed warranted. Maybe, I figured, this dear old war-horse might gain a new life since these days audiences can’t get enough of full-length ballets. It certainly would be more attractive than some more recent creations such as Lar Lubovitch’s vapid Othello or Ben Stevenson’s painfully thin and clutzy Dracula which alighted in San Jose for a four day run in October (Oct. 8-11).

Sacramento’s co-artistic directors Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda were part of Boston Ballet when Nureyev toured the ballet with the company. Their version sported adequate though somewhat drab sets and costumes from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; music was on tape. If you don’t mind a disjointed narrative and conventional choreography, this ballet has potential: bravura dancing, showcase solos, character dances, crowd scenes, a love interest, comedy and even a duel. It’s all formula but a first-rate production can leap across the obvious weaknesses.

Sacramento is a perfectly decent regional company which at this time, however, doesn’t have the resources to bring off this potpourri piece successfully. The performance level was so wildly uneven as to make it a very bumpy ride. Sacramento has good dancers but they are not technically topnotch. Nolan T’Sani as Gamache, Bruce King as Don Quixote, and above all Kevin Hawke as Sancho Panzo, would do well in any production, while Luis Napoles as Espada was badly miscast. Also sparkling were Whitney Simler as a fiery Street Dancer, Charles Hodges’ leaping Gypsy Man, and above all Phaedra Jarret as a quickfooted, charming Amour in the ballet’s dream section of Act II.

The first act’s market place scene was lively and well balanced, with detailed attention to characterization, particularly in the fishermen’s quartet. Even the mime (what there was of it left), which dancers are not easily comfortable with these days, came across naturally and unselfconsciously. In the ballet blanc section the dryads’ classical alignment and restraint showed both understanding of and good training in 19th century style. Too bad the choreography was so thin compared to other ballets blancs.

The major problem with this Don Quixote were its protagonists, Kirsten Bloom and Jared Nelson. But of them are moderately good dancers, but they only came to life in the final pas de deux. Apparently they saved their energy for this most famous piece of bravura dancing. It consequently stuck out like a piece totally unrelated to the rest of the ballet. Also Bloom’s Kitri often looked more like a spoiled, foot-stamping American teenager than a flirtatious and independent young woman. In her turns her torso froze as if she had been forced into an unforgiving groove. But she is a brave woman; to have submitted herself to Nelson’s repeated and always dangerously wobbly one-armed overhead lifts takes courage.

Sacramento Ballet has potential but Don Quixote is not its vehicle. Sometimes there are good reasons to retire a classic. So the search goes on; rest in peace, Don Q.