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Bay Area Report

Anne Bluethenthal and Dancers, the Oakland Ballet, the Gay and Lesbian Dance Festival, Summerfest, The Spirit of Cambodia, Rosy CO, the Mark Morris Dance Company.

by Rita Felcianol
copyright © 2001 by Rita Felcianol
Autumn 2001

When earlier this spring Anne Bluethenthal, who is Jewish, realized that the only open performance date for her Anne Bluethenthal and Dancers was the weekend between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, she knew that this was an opportunity not to be missed. She consequently invited PalesEtinian dancers and musicians to share her program and co-choreograph with her Tears of Rock (September 20, Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco), a piece which fervently but un-sentimentally looks at the human cost of the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East. Never did she dream that these performances would take place ten days after September 11.

While Bluethenthal’s choreography is formal and abstracted, and she works within a fairly narrow vocabulary, it is always grounded in emotional narrative. Excavations of the Spirit examined the lack of spirituality in contemporary life; In My Bones started as a memorial to a friend who died of breast cancer; in the early (1989) Fish Can Sing, she looked at childhood memories, both painful and uplifting. In Tears of Rock, she says at one point, “I wail for broken spirits.” To Bluethenthal’s credit, she didn’t pamphleteer but let dance speak for her.

The work was preceded by Arabic and Jewish music performed live, the latter by Vocolot, an a cappella women’s group. Despite the musical selections’ vibrant individuality, they poignantly illustrated rhythmic and melodic kinships among Middle Eastern cultures. An ecstatic Palestinian fertility dance, Ya Halai-Ya Mali (Rotrease Yates and Elias Khoury) intrigued in part because the relationship between the male and female dancer went back and forth between being egalitarian and gender specific.

Most of Tears’ choreography, for Israeli and Palestinian dancers as well as her own ensemble of six, was Bluethenthal’s, including a whipping solo that sent her careening across the floor in exultation and despair. A ritual dance to traditional Lebanese music drew on Jewish and Moslem gestures of prayer of bowing and rocking; another section highlighted reaping and clapping moves inspired by an Israeli folk dance. A central duet showed a Palestinian (Laura Elaine Ellis) and a Jewish (Bluethenthal) woman going through identical paces as each lamented a child, folding their veils into a baby, a shroud and finally a tomb. The choreography evoking their initial distrust and hate growing into mutual acceptance was as economical as it was eloquent.

A few days earlier the season premiere of Oakland Ballet (Sept. 14, Paramount Theater, Oakland) also had lifted spirits. Even though she assumed her post as Artistic Director fifteen months ago, this is former Dance Theater of Harlem Principal’s Karen Brown’s first official season. Since two-thirds of the company is new, one might as well call this a new Oakland Ballet. At this point these dancers are more promising than accomplished. Flubbed turns and insecure balances point to much work to be done, but at the very least, the dancers knew what they were aiming for, and the ante has been raised. The performances were committed, intelligent and at times skillful.

Two repertory pieces and a world premiere made up the first of this season’s three programs. Val Caniparoli’s Djangology is a happy-go-lucky romp to a collection of infectious Django Reinhardt glosses on jazz classics. José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, effectively coached by former Limón dancer Gary Masters, did Oakland honor. However, Thirsting, the world premiere by Bay Area choreographer Robert Henry Johnson was an unmitigated flop. Not even the lively harmonies from the Belgian/African pop group Zap Mama, who performed in the pit, could squeeze life out of this hackneyed affair.

Set in a music-infused Saturday night dance hall with show-offs galore, Djangology is light weight but smartly put together. At first Samuel Pott dreamily endearing stumbled over his own feet but then woke up into bounding leaps and whipping turns. Pott is no prince, but neither is he a frog. There were oafs, a quartet of men backing onto the stage like a line of lumbering elephants where they encountered a gaggle of self-assured women who strutted their stuff on pointe. Newcomer Chih-Ting Shih’s hilariously and solidly danced take on “Georgia on my Mind”. While she showed comedic ability, her stage presence and ability to place her lines promise a more complex talent. She is one of newcomers to be watched. The other is Rhea Roderick whose fiercely executed turns as often landed her in Osmany Garcia’s arms as they spun her away from his grasp.

Oakland’s was a modest but convincing Pavane with Garcia as The Moor, Pott as His Friend and two new dancers, Cynthia Sheppard as The Moor’s Wife and Yoira Esquivel-Brito as His Friend’s Wife. If the performance somewhat lacked the requisite emotional weight, the intelligence and restraint way that these young performers brought to their task added great poignancy to the work. They were particularly effective in shaping the Pavane’s disintegration. An odd match, Pott physically towered over the slight and much shorter Garcia. But Garcia stood up to the challenge, his anguish inexorably building until it eventually exploded. Pott was more vampire than snake, and he probably should pull back some in future performances.

The formless Thirsting is loosely inspired by the biblical Samaritan woman who is given water. Johnson interpreted the story as being able to drink from many fountains—ballet, modern, Hindu, African etc. Guided by Pott as “Water of Life” and Thomas McDonnell as a mysterious “Birdman”, the Woman at the Well (an excellent Phaedra Jarrett) encountered—sometimes participating in, sometimes observing—a series of dances designed to evoke the multiplicity of world dance styles. Unfortunately, Johnson’s embarrassing visitation of these expressions of world culture was of the tourist type, unable to provide any but the most superficial perspectives on them.

Summer is festival time in the Bay Area much as it is in other parts of the country. Scheduling conflicts made me miss the annual August Bhuto festival, but I did manage to take in the Gay and Lesbian Dance Festival (GLDF) (Mission Dance Theater, June 15-17), now in its fifth, and Summerfest, in its tenth year.

The GLDF is an opportunity for a community to celebrate itself. What does that mean in terms of dance? Dances about being gay? Gay dancers? Dances who happen to have been made by gay or lesbian choreographers? The two programs, “Queer Dance: Sex and Comedy” and “Moveable Feast/Commissioned Works” offered a little of all of the above. Despite some ghastly missteps into boring camp—Laura Bernasconi’s Girl Land and Enrico Labayen’s The Chosen Two come to mind—the quality of this festival is improving. Much of the work—whether serious or comedic—bears repeating.

There was room for humor. Remy Charlip’s Moveable Feast was an unmitigated popular success. Finely crafted, it showed the aging Puck of San Francisco dance in a gay man’s dream: meeting and being partnered, cuddled, fuzzed over and finally carried into heaven by a bevy of nicely proportioned males—who happened to be nude. It was a charmer that left the audience hollering and the performers grinning.

There was also room for mindfulness. Bluethenthal’s trio Blood Line/Heartline played off the inherit imbalances of the trio form, holding opposite forces in viable tension. Punches, karate kicks and silent screams suggested aggressiveness but were balanced by languid reaches, support hold and hands that cupped heads and reached out. Mercy Sidbury and Julie Kane’s Trouble in Paradise, their take on Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” was a modest but effective duet of feline grace and tumbling awkwardness.

Among the Festival’s best were two solos, each tackling fluidity of gender identity. The introspective choreography for Sean Sara Dorsey’s shadowy Unmistakable Chosen was liquid, with pronounced shifts of directions and levels and delicately wispy hand gestures, including the recurring image of index fingers pointing somewhere into the wings. While the text raised questions about sexual identity, the dancer didn’t commit. KT Nelson’s choreography for Hot Flash tackled a subject I had never seen choreographed—menopause—apparently in admiration for “men who want to become women.” Performed with great restraint by ODC’s Brian Fisher the piece had him strip himself of a series of slips until he sank to the ground upstage, naked, vulnerable, yet wistful. Some of the movements which Nelson derived from the initial accumulation of phrases felt self-conscious but Fisher’s sense of awkward insecurity and his bravely trying on of “female” gestures ultimately tied this package together convincingly.

To celebrate its first decade, Summerfest (Cowell Theater, July 13-22) forewent its usual practice of auditioning choreographers in favor of inviting a select group of artists who had shown works on earlier festivals. It was not an all together felicitous decision since promising artists—the group on whom the festival tries to focus—often start out with small forms. But to have whole evenings of solos and duets is wearing.

The opening Gala a rather triste celebration, was a case in point with but one highlight, Remy Charlip’s Meditation, the first piece he ever choreographed back in 1966. Focused, simple and translucent, it even made you even love that saccharine excerpt from Massenet’s “Thais.”

I saw one of the two subsequent Summerfest programs in which the quality was more encouraging. While The Real Thing (by Austin Forbord/Shelley Trott) and Impact of Buildings (by Mary Carbonara) belong into the “intriguing but need work” category, three pieces bore repeated viewing. They were polished works of considerable integrity.

A simple but well realized idea, that of a bird learning to use its wings, propelled The Biting Air (by Katherine Warner). The piece opened with the powerfully built Felipe Sacon in a tight crouch that gradually opened up and sent him into a trajectory of huge leaps and soaring circle runs. The explosive Approach and Retreat (by Kate Weare) looked to me like a duet for one, with the dancer/choreographer forcing herself into tornado-like confrontations with an invisible partner that repeatedly succeeded in knocking her down but not out. The best was saved for last. Depart (by Sonya Delwaide), performed by the choreographer and ODC’s Brandon Freeman, with a live string quartet of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”, is a marvelous study of confrontation and surrender. Delwaide has an ability to string together multi-colored movement confetti until they have the tensile strength of a chain.

Two companies from Asia, Dance: The Spirit of Cambodia, and Rosy CO alighted in the Bay Area in the week before the world as we knew it changed. Dance: The Spirit of Cambodia (Zellerbach Hall, September 8) presented an evening of classical dance as elegant and refined as anything in ballet. Also included were theatricalized folk dances performed by dancers trained in those traditions.

Beautifully supplemented by delicately placed head and gestures the gliding symmetries and floating unisons of the opening Robam Apsara included, quite unusually, finely calibrated turns on one leg. In Robam Makar, the evening’s other abstract dance, male and female dancers, differentiated by costume accents, floated through overlapping and kaleidoscopic patterns ending with what looked like a Cambodian version of a congo line. The overlaps, as did the face-covering fans in the end, were meant to suggest the scales of a mythic sea monster.

Intriguingly in the folklorically-derived dances, music was structurally integrated into the narrative. In Robam Tunsaong, the story of a hunt, for instance, two of the characters, the Hunter and the Tiger, sat on the sidelines and participated in the drama through their instruments, voice for one, the drum for the other. In Chhayam, the comically made up musicians, ritornello-like took turns in the spot light while a dancer teasingly interacted with the solos they played. The excerpt from the Ramayana, Reamker excellently integrated high and low style dancing. The lice-eating, eternally scratching monkey soldiers went through their raucous paces at the periphery of a nobly restrained drama about a heroically suffering and finally rehabilitated Cambodian Griselda, the patient princess Neang Seda.

The West Coast debut of Kota Yamazaki’s Rosy CO (Sept. 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) featured a company that in its full-length Chinoise Flower dipped its feet into bhuto as well as hip hop and threw in a generous dose of Stephen Petronio at his most lightening fast. An electrifying work, more for the way it was realized by an extraordinary group of dancers than for the integrity of its formal ideas, it left you breathless with admiration for the dancers but also with a gnawing skepticism about this being a highly perfumed but short lived hot house flower. A thin thread of a story of confrontation, defeat, mourning and resurrection was told obliquely, through images.

Kota Yamazaki is a hurricane on legs; he is so fast that even recognizable hip hop moves blurred in the eye. Dressed in black, later in white, his was a solitary figure that first appeared up stage as the ensemble awakened from a catatonic torpor. Later he unsuccessfully stalked Kimuko Shimada and was finally struck down with a cascade of what were supposed to be fresh flower petals but sounded more like crackling rice. A campy funeral ceremony followed until the circle closed on its opening images.

Shimada as Yamazaki’s counterpart proved to be long-limbed and classically trained, delicate and breathtaking beautiful. Except for one kicking explosion in her encounter with Yamazaki, she remained perfectly reposed whether leisurely unfolding her limbs in the opening passage, or later hopping around on wobbly pointe like a wounded bird in light thrown by a flower-like chandelier.

Some of the most intriguing dancing of this puzzling work came from the eight-member ensemble whose individualized moves—they are very differently trained and Yamazaki took advantage of those differences—still managed to create a sense of commonality and timelessness. Even as a group the dancers remained self-absorbed and isolated so when two of them engaged in parallel moves, even across space, it hit like a thunderbolt. What came to mind was a still body of water which shimmers because of the way sunlight dances on it.

When the Mark Morris Dance Company (October 5, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley) less than a week before the first of its three Berkeley engagements this year announced a program change in order to preview a just finished piece, V, (officially scheduled for a London premiere in November), antennas went up all over the Bay Area. When a program note announced that “this is a work we wanted to present now, this month, here in the United States, and most especially in the Bay Area, our second home” one couldn’t help but think that September 11 may have prompted the decision.

Morris is much to sophisticated a thinker to use his art to make political statements but much like The Office, which was created during the siege of Sarajevo and presented on the same program, the tenor of the times put contours and shades on to Morris’ extraordinary interpretation of Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat major for piano and strings, Opus 40. Additionally programmed were Taylor-cousin Dancing Honeymoon and the middling call and response Silhouettes.

Written in 1848, the year Europe was thrown into chaos by short-lived revolutions everywhere, Schumann’s quintet reflects the emotional turmoil—both in terms of the despair and the hope—of those times. Morris may initially have simply been attracted by the work’s history and its intrinsic musical character. He has said that the V in the title most obviously stands for the Roman numeral five. But the work is surely also shaped by what happened in New York. Of course, any good work of art makes a universal statement even as the specificity of its imagery allows for multiple interpretations. One thing is sure, Morris has rarely been so up front with his emotions even as he clothed them in patterns striking for their formal consistency and even rigor. This being the first performance, the dancers’ nervousness showed in several near collisions, but those barely mattered.

For V Morris used two sets of seven dancers each, one dressed in steel blue tunics and shorts, the other in greenishly tinged white jump suits (by Martin Pakledinaz). Set apart by their uniforms, the two groups eventually came together both as units and as individuals. Community in action is found in many of Morris’ pieces; here he showed the process of creating a community which in the process of mourning rediscovers life. At the heart of V lies Morris’ heart of darkness. Out of it grows one of his most poignantly humane statements. Set to the quintet’s Largo, music which is mournful, measured, and full of soul, the two groups of dancers approached each other from opposite sides of the wings. On all fours. Their eyes to the ground, weighted down by their bodies, like members of a chain gang they dragged themselves across the stage in a stop-and-go pattern. At the point of intersection, the individuals of one group—later to be repeated by the other—flower-like, pushed through the earth. Still weary, but upright, they continued their journey. It felt like resurrection was possible.

Choreographically V follows Schumann just about to the letter. Sometimes that one-to-one relationship felt too tight and distracting, but at the very least it illuminated music which appeared to inhabit two different worlds, with the piano being a kind of engine setting a trajectory pulling the strings along.

The piece opened with seven dancers in blue, ththeir raised arms in V formations, a gesture to be repeated later by the other group. (The work also ended in a V, its point, however, broken by a leaping Lauren Grant.) The stretched out arms became hugs, at one time of desperate intensity in which people literally flung themselves into each others arms. Fierceness was counterbalanced by gentleness, such as a bouncing step with the dancers’ stretching their arms in parallels front of them. They probably were holding an invisible gossamer veil.

Inspired by the dynamic piano writing, Morris again and again sent ripples of movement—hops, cross steps, beats from one person to the next, along diagonals, around a circle, in and out of the wings. Gestures seemed to have an independent life but picked up momentum as they were propelled through the ensemble. Counter to that feeling of pulsating inevitability ran a sense of interruption. Phrases simply stopped. Lifts ended in midair. Snapping heads froze a just formed trio. In another, three men were left standing one knee and one arm suspended. Attempts to join a central duet by other couples were short-lived by them being pulled back into the wings. V is an astounding work even by a choreographer as experienced and gifted as Morris.