Dance review: 'C(H)ord' hard to forget

It's a curiously compelling thing when performers push aside their humanness, when movement is so bizarre as to make you forget that you're watching humans. But then the inkBoat ensemble, and especially director Shinichi Iova-Koga, whose "c(H)ord" premiered Thursday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, are remarkably adept at generating simple images that you just can't get out of your head.

Like most of the 10-year-old inkBoat's butoh-inspired theater, "c(H)ord" - a commission for YBCA's Making Peace series - is hardly literal or linear. Boasting an international cast - which includes Finnish performer Heini Nukari as well as the Japanese Takuya Ishide, Yuko Kaseki and Sten Rudstrøm (both based in Berlin) and Sherwood Chen, Dana Iova-Koga and Dohee Lee - it's the sort of show where you can't seriously ask yourself what just happened. The pleasure lies in allowing its vagaries to cascade past you episodically, and the overall effect is not so much discomfiting as strangely charming.

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SF Symphony's Adventures in Music program

It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered."

Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look.

As the kids themselves are quick to explain, it's all part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music, one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.

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Arielle Jacobs stars in High School Musical

If the producers of the national tour of "High School Musical" were trying to dream up the right actress for the role of Gabriella Montez - the smart, quiet newcomer to East High School who aspires to break free and sing in the school musical - they could hardly have asked for a more perfect match than Arielle Jacobs.

A native of Half Moon Bay, Jacobs was 14 when she moved with her family from California to Princeton, N.J., just as she was to start high school, so she knows what it's like to be the new girl in town.

"Fortunately for me, there were two middle schools in Princeton," she says, laughing. "So everyone just thought I was from the other middle school."

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High School Musical hits the Orpheum stage

If you fall into the post-tween age group, your experience of a little phenomenon called "High School Musical" might be limited. But say "We're all in this together" to anyone between the ages of 9 and 13, and you're likely to get a rousing chorus of one of "High School Musical's" nine chart-topping songs and probably a few fancy hip-hop moves to go along with it.

One of the Disney Channel's most popular movies, "High School Musical" has garnered hundreds of millions of young fans around the world in the past two years. The movie's soundtrack went quadruple platinum, and last year a rock-concert-style tour featuring the film's stars sold out in 40 cities, with the Beatlemania-esque shrieks of young fans shattering eardrums across North America.

The rousing popularity of the movie has spun off one sequel already, another is in the works for this summer and there's even an ice-show version making its way around the world. Now, for those who just can't get enough of the story of handsome jock Troy Bolton, shy, bookish Gabriella Montez and their struggle to break free of stereotypes and win roles in the school musical, the high-energy, Broadway-style stage production of "High School Musical" comes to San Francisco, opening Tuesday at the Orpheum Theatre.

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