Dance Review: Smuin Ballet's "Soon These Two Worlds"

A genuine sweetness pervades Amy Seiwert's carefree new ballet, "Soon These Two Worlds," which Smuin Ballet premiered Friday night at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Perhaps it sounds dismissive to call something "sweet" these days, but Seiwert's latest is a genuinely upbeat diversion that melds solidly structured energy with a fresh, sunny disposition.

Lit with a dusky, afternoon glow by David K.H. Elliott, the six couples have the vibe of companionable friends, perhaps celebrating after a long workday - individuals make their own interpretations of Seiwert's complex steps, but everyone is dancing to the same purpose.

Although there's a hint of African influence in Christine Darch's vibrantly striped tights and skirts - which elicit a pleasant dizziness as the dancers twirl, like watching the slots of a zoetrope go 'round - and an unmistakable African dance flavor to the rounded arm swoops and hip accents, the overall effect of the choreography is 100 percent Seiwert.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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Riding the Wave

WestWave Dance Festival
Cowell Theater, San Francisco
July 12, 2009

By the time we got to the Cowell Theater, full of anticipation for the 2009 WestWave Dance Festival, the line stretched far into the parking lot of the Fort Mason Center making the distance between us and the seats of the Cowell Theater feel like they were miles away. Patiently determined theatergoers, however, looked undaunted by the 20 minute wait (at five minutes to curtain) and box office mixups and by the time the show finally got underway half an hour late, the mood was unaccountably good-humored despite the obstacles.

(photo of Amy Seiwert by Andy Mogg)

In the long foggy San Francisco summers, WestWave Dance Festival's concentrated showing of local choreographers has long been an indispensable annual event for Bay Area dance aficionados. So it was happy news that despite tight financial times, producer Joan Lazarus was forging ahead with the festival this year, albeit in a shortened version -- one night only and with a limited number of companies participating.

Some of the work has been seen before, but worth a second--or third-- viewing. Katie Faulkner's seductive film "Loom" which traces the threads of a relationship played out between Faulkner and Private Freeman made an appropriately moody lead-in to "Until We Know for Sure," which the same two dancers performed live to snippets of music drawn from Maria Silva and Alfredo Duarte, among others. Floating in patches of light, Faulkner and Freeman melded one movement into the next with an ease and fluidity that still managed to surprise the eye with its impulsiveness. It doesn't hurt that the both of them have technical strength to burn--Faulkner's stability in a deep plie on half-pointe was mesmerizing, and Freeman's steady and attentive partnering was the linchpin on which the entire encounter turned.

Linchpins also leapt to mind while watching Amy Seiwert's latest "Response to Change" in which the choreography turns on split-second catches and fiendishly speedy interlocking of limbs. Dressed in purple tunics and t-shirts, Im'ij-re's four couples (Robin Cornwell, Vanessa Thiessen, Sharon Wehner, Kathi Martuza, Kevin Delany, Koichi Kubo, Matthew Linzer and John Speed Orr) work with seemed --given the score by Mason Bates entitled "The Life of Birds"--a fitful birdlike theme, although the demands of secure pointework seemed to make some of the women slightly cautious at first, though their confidence seemed to blossom as the piece developed, and one could only appreciate Thiessen's bullet-like pluck-- a pleasant counterpoint to Martuza's matter-of-factly, almost slyly, delivered supple extensions.

Also on the program was the premiere of Manuelito Biag's "Terra Incognita," a fractal of a dance that moved through solos, duets and trios for Biag, Kara Davis and Alex Ketley accompanied by song fragments composed and sung by Faulkner on guitar. On first view, "Terra Incognita" looks disjointed, dancers sussing out admittedly beautiful phrases of movement in a set dominated by bare lights and chairs. Davis and Ketley play out a tender pas de deux, Biag dances a solo with weighty moves that recall tai-chi, Davis flies about the space in an impassioned solo like a wild woman-- but still, this looks a bit like a dance being workshopped and still in progress. Nevertheless, as phrases of movement and music repeat and reassemble in ever-growing patterns a certain kind of organic order emerges. Even if the whole never seems to really cohere into a complete statement, it was worthwhile, both for the concept and the execution.

"Terra incognita" could well have described "*FLASH REAL* a Song Dance Cycle" Kim Epifano's mystifying and oddly frustrating journey through two years' worth of work which opened the evening. Accompanied live by composer and didgeridoo player Stephen Kent -- who also created the sound bed for this first of a multi-part work-- Epifano sang, swooshed and flew about the stage, drawing props and clothing Mary Poppins-like out of a capacious suitcase and seemingly menaced by a dangling crystal chandelier that loomed over the whole procedure like the sword of Damocles. I'm a bit of a skeptic at heart and any piece with a lot of running in circles tends to make my eyes narrow, but "*FLASH REAL*" was simply perplexing. Even though I had some awareness of Epifano's journeys to China, Tibet and Ethiopia, and followed her recent work, I couldn't fathom at all where she was taking us, although the collaboration with Kent looks like an avenue worth exploring.

Whether "Wake", the title of LEVYdance's offering on the WestWave program, refers to awakening, or to a funeral is unclear, although this lengthy duet for Brooke Gessay and Scott Marlowe felt as though it tended far more toward the sepulchral. As esoteric as I found "Wake," though, it's maybe a little unfair to try to re-evaluate this 2008 work based on this performance. Solemnly slow motion hip swivels and shoulder rolls were jarred out of focus by an obviously distracted and bored toddler who ran about the aisles and was finally removed shrieking from the auditorium. While I couldn't condone the impulse that led her parents to take her to what was obviously an adult event that was just too long for her, I also couldn't help but sympathize with her.

The evening closed on a similarly dark note with Patrick Makuakane's "From the last to the first," performed by the hula troupe Na Lei Hulu i Ka Wekiu. Beginning with a wailing lamentation and moving through somber ground through traditional dances to broadly curvacious choreography set to Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," this was hula seen in a serious mold. Unfortunately, although the power of the group and the sway of the mass of dancers onstage, in another context, might have been alluring and provocative, I was hoping not to leave the theater so depressed.

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Smuin Ballet: Been Through Diamonds, Carmen

There's a different look to the Smuin Ballet company these days. Not to say better or worse, just different. New faces and a new energy along with new repertoire was what I took away form the company's season opener at the Palace of Fine Arts.

It's been a year and a half since the company's highly visible and high-energy founder passed, and time has wrought some changes. Celia Fushille-Burke has assumed the mantle of company director, while dancer Amy Seiwert is now a choreographer-in-residence. Added to the roster this year are dancers Darren Anderson, Ryan Camou, Terez Dean, Ted Keener, Brooke Reynolds, Jean Michelle Sayeg and Shane Messac.

Friday's program opened with a premiere of Seiwert's Been Through Diamonds, a larky neo-classical look at relationships between four couples that found the men clad in loose suit jackets and pants and the women in Mario Alonzo's sexy dresses. With its dark smokiness and mysterious interplay between the sexes, Diamonds has a bit of the look of a much earlier work that Seiwert did for Oakland Ballet in 2003, Monopoly. Whereas Been Through Diamonds is set to Mozart, the music for Monopoly was Gorecki, but in both Seiwert stepped away from movement as abstraction and given her steps a more human backstory and emotional context.

When I saw Monopoly-- which also featured a rock-solid Erin Yarbrough-Stewart, who stood out in Diamonds too-- I recall thinking that something about Seiwert's trademark twisting and fluid style didn't quite jibe with the story at hand and likewise, it's not clear to me that she had found a comfortable way to get her emotional points across while still utilizing the distinctive connectors and thrusts of weight that mark her work.

Still, as more of a meditation, Diamonds made an impression, particularly in the confident way that Seiwert layers complex steps and transitions from one scene to the next. Newcomer Camou made an appealing soloist, as did his partner Susan Roemer.

The other new work on the program was Robert Sund's Carmen, a one act distillation of the famous story of love gone wrong, this time set to tracks from Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Sketches of Spain. Although it seems like the perfect sort of vehicle for a company known for larger-than-life stories, this Carmen came across as less dramatic than angst-ridden.

Aaron Thayer, as the ill-fated Don Jose and Jessica Touchet as his titular lover did their best with the choreography, which offered serviceable, though not always inspired moments. Touchet-- a dancer who sports a bright charm to go with her dead-centered turns--engaged in much teasing and flicking of her shawl and one rather absurdly tame catfight with Yarbrough. She worked hard to serve up sizzle, but it wasn't her fault that ultimately at the moment of highest emotion, she was little more than kicked around.

Also on the program was Michael Smuin's cleverly nostalgic portmanteau ballet Dances with Songs.

Program Notes.

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West Wave Dance Festival's Uni-Form: Ballet Program

Dance fans can celebrate that like a cooling rainshower, the two week-long WestWave Dance Festival -- which runs through this weekend at the Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco -- has arrived to quench the summer dance drought.

The festival, now in its 16th year, has found a fresh new focus this year, with carefully plotted programs that emphasize quality over quantity. The first week’s “4 x 4 series” offered a quartet of evenings, each centered on the work of a particularly notable, up-and-coming choreographer (Kate Weare, Christopher Morgan, Monica Bill Barnes and Amy Seiwert). And this week’s shows—categorized into evenings of ballet, world dance, modern and dance theater—feature programs entirely of world premieres, surely a surfeit of riches for audiences who crave to see new work.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that this year’s festival has been enjoying sold out houses, for Seiwert’s justifiably anticipated program, as well as for the “Uni-Form: Ballet” program on Thursday. True, all is not perfect. Given the contemporary styles on view in the latter program, it felt as if “ballet” was less a descriptor and more a convenient box to place works by people who have been ballet-trained and common to almost all was moody atmospheric music of the sort that could inspire a half a dozen new onomatopoeic categories: “oopy-bloopy” music, “cricky-cracky” music, “plinky-plonky” music. Still, if most of the works on Thursday night could have done with some judicious pruning, they were on the whole well-produced and offered satisfying moments that made viewing well worth the time.

The program began with Irene Liu in Viktor Kabaniaev’s solo “Fragments of…” set to an oopy-bloopy score, created by Nicolas Van Krijdt. Dancing to sounds that evoked thoughts of undersea bubbles and phantom radio broadcasts traveling through space, Liu, who has apprenticed with Diablo Ballet, made the most of the choreography, creating effects that were both natural and disquieting with softly undulating arms and a twisting, snaking spine suspended in impossibly deep back arches.

In what was perhaps the most entertaining and polished piece of the evening, Christian Burns played out a solo “Beneath Your Sheltering Hand,” against a wall-sized video of tropical and computerized interior scenes. Looking like a man in desperate need of a tropical vacation, Burns moved across the stage in frantic stammers and starts to Anthony Discenza’s sound score of garbled marketing tropes spoken through a voice synthesizer and hawking self improvement products that prey on our modern hypochondrias.

Only one woman showed work on this program although female dancers outnumbered the male two to one —a sobering reminder that even today in the ballet world, there are plenty of women to dance, but very few who choreograph. Unfortunately, Martt Lawrence’s “Rogue,” an excursion for five women and two men was perhaps the weakest entry of the evening. Filled with much rushing about the stage, meaningful slashes at the air, and pregnant looks, it was a bit like watching a telenovela when you don’t speak Spanish. You’re aware that drama is definitely afoot, but you can’t understand a word of it.

In “Digression,” composer Les Stuck -- who according to the program note, seems to think that he is the first musician ever to attempt choreography—offered an arrangement of dance phrases created by Alex Ketley. The six women ably took on the challenge of sometimes literally bone-crunching leaps and falls to the ground set against still moments of proferred limbs and ominous fingers circling overhead, all to Stuck’s own, rather cricky-cracky sounding score, although ultimately it looked less like a structured work, and more like an assemblage of steps.

Live accompaniment from composer Jack Perla and cellist Sam Bass bolstered Mark Foehringer’s “In Fugue,” a faintly menacing and confrontational work for Katherine Wells, Maya Hey, Carlos Venturo, and Joseph Copley, as well as ODC’s Private Freeman, Brian Fisher and Diablo Ballet’s Jekyns Pelaez. Foehringer was fortunate to have such a heavy hitting list of performers, Wells, Freeman and Fisher in particular, who can express more with the spaces in between the movements than most dancers can with a panoply of technical feats.

Still throughout Thursday’s program, one particularly vexing commonality stood out – the peculiar self-absorbed “windmills of your mind” style of dance marked by impressive, yet mechanical technical feats topped with a closed-off, sightless gaze into space --that has become so popular. Nowadays, watching contemporary dance can feel like an act of voyeurism, a discomfiting glimpse into the performer’s private madhouse. Is that really what makes a ‘serious” dance now?

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Even dance critics love a surprise (or two)

Dance critics are such a difficult lot.

We’re constantly clamoring for new work, and then when we see it, we criticize it for being not as good as the old classics. We want to see performers break out of the mold, to tread fresh ground, and yet when they do, we gripe about how pretentious they are. We grouse about taped music instead of live, expect world-class performances on a shoestring budget and demand imaginative new methods of presentation every year.

But in our defense, I feel that what we-- like many of our fellow travelers out there in audience-land-- keep hoping for is that rush that we get when we see a performance that surprises us. As a gripe-y critic, I can say that the number of performances this past season that elicited that certain delighted grin can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But when it happens, there’s an unmistakable, gleeful tickle in the part of my brain that processes serendipity.

It’s not always about the lavishness of the production, or the international cachet of someone’s name, or even the sheer novelty of a work. It’s happened in small intimate settings as well as in the opera house – but always there’s a pervasive sense that the audience and artists were partners together in a kind of fearless adventure.

“Astonish me,” the impresario Serge Diaghilev once famously said when asked by artist Jean Cocteau what he should do in the theater. The period of their collaboration marked one of the dance world’s most adventurous eras, and not just within the confines of the Ballets Russes itself, but throughout modern dance, music, theater and art.

“Tact in audacity lies in knowing how far to go too far,” Cocteau would write later.
Sometimes the critic in me wonders what happened to all that spirit of exploration.
Regularly, my inbox is flooded with press releases for new dance works, ones about social justice, about loving and losing, explorations of the human conundrum. There’s modern dance coming up, world dance, eco-dance, dance to new music, dance to old music, dance to no music. I just hope that in some way or another there’s something in there to astonish.

Still, as I scan the list there’s a twinge of anticipation, an underlying hope that maybe, just maybe, this show might hold one of those wonderful “too far” moments. That’s why the announcement that this year’s WestWave Dance Festival presents not just a handful but a tantalizing full schedule of world premiere works, perks my interest.

Will there be half-formed, forgettable works? Probably. Will some of them land far short of the mark? Almost assuredly. But then there’s the promise of those pleasant discoveries that are guaranteed to stick in your mind. And better yet, there’s a golden opportunity to see if anyone is willing to step out audaciously and surprise us.

Now in its 16th season, the West Wave festival has already proven itself to be a worthy outlet for experimentation. I can still picture scenes from last season-- Kerry Mehling’s comic lounge-lizard video duet, Brittany Brown Ceres’ simultaneous solos for five women or Kate Weare’s pithy duet “Drop Down.”

The first week showcases singular choreographers – among them, Weare (July 19), Christopher K. Morgan (July 20), Monica Bill Barnes (July 21), and Amy Seiwert (July 22) -- each one presenting a program brand-new works on a different night. Mixed programs that highlight various genres of dance -- and feature five or six artists on each night --make up the second week’s schedule. Diablo Ballet’s Viktor Kabaniaev will present his latest work “Episodes of…” on the “ballet” evening (July 26) for instance, while you can catch Ceres and Mehling on the “dance theater” night (July 28).

It doesn’t have to cost a lot to see these works either. Tickets to the West Wave Dance Festival are $20 each – less, if you subscribe to a four, or the whole eight, performance series. In my view that not only makes the festival accessible to a wider audience, it also takes some of the pressure off of the choreographers.

Freed from the stress of self-producing and unburdened by audiences keen to get their money’s worth, and charged with giving us something brand new, there’s no need to present those surefire, ticket-selling, but mostly bland pieces.

Go ahead, astonish us.

And Summerfest Dance’s West Wave Dance Festival runs over two weeks from July 19-29 at San Francisco’s Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida Street between l7th & Mariposa Streets (415-863-9834, www.odctheater.org)

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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Smuin Ballet: Schubert Scherzo, Romeo & Juliet Balcony Pas de Deux, Falling Up, Carmina Burana

Dancing without the 'Boss,' Smuin Ballet tearfully honors its founder

The crowd was oddly quiet, even subdued in the lobby of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts before the opening of Smuin Ballet’s spring season. Ushers still smiled as they took tickets and handed out programs and old friends still greeted each other warmly but a muted uncertainty hung in the air as audience members took their seats for the company’s first public appearance since the death of their founder on April 23.

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Smuin Ballet: Christmas Ballet 2006 edition

Smuin Ballet
“The Christmas Ballet” 2006 Edition
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
December 15-24, 2006

The post-Thanksgiving crowd at the Lesher Center showed no tryptophan drowsiness at the opening of Michael Smuin’s annual favorite, “The Christmas Ballet,” which made its bow last weekend with spiffed up new costumes by Sandra Woodall and newly designed scenery by Douglas Schmidt and Paul Swensen.

Smuin’s flagship productions are usually elaborate affairs, and this year’s refurbishment of the company’s holiday staple actually benefits from having more sparkles and fringe. In the first half, new white drapery suggests an elegant ballroom with outsized lacy snowflakes hovering overhead, while the second half is bathed in yards of Christmas crimson velvet, punctuated by dozens of fluffy, white, beachball-sized “Santa cap” pom-poms.

Admittedly, the designers have gone a little projection-happy, in the second act particularly, where video of everything from church bells to mistletoe only distract from the dancing. Still, all the new flash and dash does help create some truly lovely images. In the opening to the second act, “Christmas by the Bay,” the dancers now dip and swirl behind projections of San Francisco holiday scenes, and the simplest images -- the lights of Union Square’s Christmas tree or the outlines of the Embarcadero Center -- make a romantic frame around the five couples.

The high-flying company is also still getting used to the low-flying snowflakes. During an excerpt from Handel’s “Messiah,” Ikolo Griffin tossed his partner so vigorously that her head bonked into one of the snowflakes, causing some mirth in the audience.

If the company took a little time to warm to their work in the opening “Magnificat,” by the second piece -- “Noel Nouvelet,” Amy Seiwert’s contribution to this year’s edition -- Aaron Thayer and Erin Yarbrough make a ____ couple. Seiwert gives them simple, and yet unexpectedly lovely choreography – mere pirouettes facing in opposite directions are effective because they fit to the music beautifully.

The look of the women in the company has gradually been shifting towards more of the bullet-like, compact zingers like Vanessa Thiessen, who stood out in the “Zither Carol” and “Away in a Manger.” In “For Unto Us a Child is Born” Yarbrough, partnered with James Strong, evinces the same speedy, knife-like technique along with a regal, classical upper torso, but when she lets her hair down, as she does in “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” – a sweetly romantic diversion contributed by Shannon Hurlburt -- the sex appeal is palpable. As always, Strong proves himself a more-than-just-reliable squire, particularly in “Hodie Christus Natus Est” which he danced on Friday night with Thiessen. Her light jumps and intent confidence gave the couple an illusion of breathlessness, but when certain lifts proved difficult to manage, it was Strong who kept the duet moving.

The company will always need its long and leggy dancers though. Nicole Trerise makes a luscious comedienne in “Licht Bensh’n” and the ever popular “Santa Baby,” which had the audience clapping from the first “ba-boom.” She shows off a more serious side paired with Thayer and two other couples in Celia Fushille-Burke’s “Es ist Ein Ros Entsprungen.” The graceful refinement of Fushille-Burke’s choreography for the three couples has all the hallmarks of her own dancing. The footwork for this section, as well as for her “Resonet in Laudibus,” which immediately followed, offered deceptively pretty, and yet tricky combinations -- of the sort that Fushille-Burke herself always navigated with aplomb.

Jessica Touchet shows off formidable baton-twirling skills in the oddly gimmicky “Carol of the Bells,” which Smuin created for her this year, while Hurlburt, always a favorite, reprises his signature showstopper roles in “Little Drummer Boy” and the dazzling tap solo to “Bells of Dublin,” as well as his usual solid yeoman work throughout the evening.

And though it’s often the new dancers -- like Griffin, Courtney Hellebuyck, and Yoko Callegari, who just joined the company this month – who receive notice, there’s a definite pleasure in watching others like Aaron Thayer improve year by year. Thayer’s solo -- a new section created by Smuin to a recording of Placido Domingo singing “La Virgen Lava Panales”-- has a mature conviction and vitality, and in “Pretty Paper” a duet with Robin Cornwall, he hits just the right balance of playful solicitude.

In the end, this year’s edition of “The Christmas Ballet” is jam-packed with 28 bite-sized numbers. Some of them are cheeseball, some quite lovely, but all adding up to a jolly way to start the season.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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Dance Review: West Wave Dance Festival

There are those who think of San Francisco's four week, eight program West Wave Dance Festival as a marathon, but I prefer to consider it an investment in the future. It's true that with works by 48 different choreographers -- and not all of it good -- it can seem like a bit of a slog. And I must confess that amongst the 24 that I saw at the Project Artaud Theatre, the dances ranged from seriously absorbing, to "Are you kidding me?" Still, West Wave's summer festival represents a bargain of a chance to sample a broad variety. If you tried to see all these dance-makers in their individual shows during the year you'd have -- well, you'd have a fulltime job as a dance critic.

In this year's lineup, many of the choreographers were new-ish to the San Francisco scene -- many of them look fresh out of college, and so do their dances. (I hope they still teach form and structure of choreography in school -- it wasn't always apparent.) But the festival also intersperses works -- often in progress -- from more experienced hands, and hopefully the opportunity to cross-pollinate and watch other work will be an education in and of itself.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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