Tap into annual dance fest

When I was 10, I so wanted to be Eleanor Powell.

A glamorous powerhouse with a sassy smile and a great pair of legs, Powell seemed to me to be way cooler than Ginger Rogers. No marabou feathers or froufrou ruffles for Powell -- just those little short-shorts that showed off her brilliant tapwork. Plus, she was always surrounded by hordes of adoring men, and even better, she was the equal of any guy. Even Fred Astaire looked at her with a different kind of respect and affection in his eyes, and with good reason -- she could easily dance him under the table.

There's a special kind of happy that I get from watching tap. It's a dance form that oozes joy and exuberance with every carefree scuff or teasing slide. So there's a good reason to look forward to Aug. 13-19, when the Bay Area's Stepology hosts its annual weeklong tap fiesta, with classes, workshops and free panel discussions -- even a public tap jam at the San Francisco Dance Center. It all culminates in a blowout performance at the Herbst Theatre called the Bay Area Rhythm Exchange.

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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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Sally Streets: 'I guess I've come full circle'

MORNINGS are quiet on the residential stretch of College Avenue in Berkeley, where Julia Morgan's elegant Craftsman-style theater rests under shady trees. From the outside, it seems impossible to imagine the few dozen dancers who are inside sweating up a storm in Sally Streets' morning ballet class.

Sometimes sharp, sometimes funny, but always plain-spoken, the 73-year-old Streets presides over the class -- a mix of regulars and drop-ins, older and younger, professional and non-professional -- with equal measures of earthy common sense and inspiration.

Nothing seems to escape her notice, from the tip of a head to the angle of a toe, but then, this is doubtless what has made her one of the Bay Area's most sought-after teachers. Perhaps her best-known student is her own daughter, Kyra Nichols, who in June will retire from after an unprecedented 33-year career in New York City Ballet.

Midway into the class, she stops all the action to give a correction to a dancer -- and it seems she's given this correction before. The young dancer is respectfully attentive, but obviously hesitant, and Streets goes on.

"You know," she says quietly, "you might just want to take what I say seriously. After 70 odd years or so, I think I know a thing or two."

Indeed, in the course of a rich career, Streets has been associated with a dizzying array of ballet companies, including New York City Ballet, Pacific Ballet, Oakland Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Diablo Ballet, and her own Berkeley Ballet Theater, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this season.

Streets took her first ballet classes though at Dorothy Pring's Berkeley studio, only steps away from where she now teaches. "It was on Forest Avenue, just two blocks away," she says with a laugh. "I guess I've come full circle."

A professional from a young age, Streets joined the legendary company of Mia Slavenska's Ballet Variante right out of high school and toured with them for a couple of years.

"It was on an old school bus," she recalls, "with the costumes stored in the back of the bus in wicker baskets. When we got to our destination, we all had to help bring the costumes in, set up ironing boards, steam the costumes, then have class, then do the performance, then get back on the bus. Sometimes we had to ride all night to the next place or late at night to get to the next place. Oh it was all over the United States. For a year you were on the bus!"

After a few years, however, Slavenska's company planned a tour to Japan and Streets learned that she would not be taken along. "Oh, I was furious. I thought, 'I'll show you!' And I went and auditioned for New York City Ballet." She laughs in amazement, "And they took me. It was just luck, because someone had hurt themselves the night before and they needed a corps person. So I just dropped into New York City Ballet."

The young company was then under George Balanchine's careful development, but Streets saw a golden era marked by stars such as Maria Tallchief, Jillana and Tanaquil LeClerq. Even so, the pragmatic young dancer only stayed for a few years, giving ballet up when she met and married her husband.

Dance was never quite out of the picture. Even after Streets had her first two children, she ran a ballet school out of her basement. Nevertheless, after eight years away from the stage, when Alan Howard called her to say he was forming a company called Pacific Ballet, she still felt compelled to sneak out of the house without telling her husband where she was going. "I just knew he'd be very upset that I was going back to this thing that consumes your whole life," she says. "But once I got back to the barre, that was it, I became hooked again."

Under the direction of the charismatic Howard, Streets came back to the stage full force, starring in exotic ballets made for the company by Mark Wilde and John Pasqualetti and honing her teaching skills under ballet masters such as Richard Gibson, who now runs the Academy of Ballet in those same studios. When Pacific Ballet closed, she turned to the Oakland Ballet, dancing for another seven years under the direction of Ronn Guidi.

With the founding of Berkeley Ballet Theater in 1981, Streets finally began a career as choreographer and full-time teacher. For Diablo Ballet alone, she's choreographed 17 new works (she's the company's artistic advisor), and she's taught all over the world.

"You ask about it, I've been there," she observes. "It was a very rich time in ballet."

Reach Times dance correspondent Mary Ellen Hunt at mehunt@criticaldance.com.

WHAT: Berkeley Ballet Theater's spring season: "Cinderella" and "Nonet" by Sarah Marcus, "Le Cirque Magnifique sans Elephants" by Sally Streets, "But Not Forgotten" by Brian Fisher and "Heartfelt" by Damara Vita Ganley
WHEN: 7 p.m. May 18, 2 and 7 p.m. May 19, 2 p.m. May 20
WHERE: Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College Ave., Berkeley
HOW MUCH: $15-$20
MORE INFO: www.berkeleyballet.org, 510-843-4689

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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Keeping Dances Alive

How do you keep a dance alive?

Dance is perhaps the most fleeting of all the performing arts and I sometimes marvel that we’ve been able to preserve any ballets at all. Sure, there are videos and films, but the real art of the ballet is still passed on in oral tradition and you’d be surprised how much of the ballet repertoire exists only in the memories of the people who danced it.

So, let’s say you had a hankering to put together a famous work created, maybe 70 years ago, or even a work made last year. A musician could pull out a score and set to work learning it immediately. For dance, though, things are a little bit different.

Although there are several notation systems for movement– Labanotation and Benesh are among the best-known –unlike musicians and composers, many dancers and choreographers can’t read or write in either one. Most rely instead on memories, recordings, and the feeling for movements stored in their muscles from years of doing a ballet. Trained to pick up a series of steps within minutes and retain them --plus any changes a choreographer might make – it is the dancers who keep these works alive over the years.

Even though videos and films have helped to preserve dance immensely, recordings can be unreliable—any misstep from a dancer can be carried through the years as choreographic gospel. And a film also won’t necessarily relay the inspirations or feelings that breathe life into a step.

Enter the repetiteur – the ballet master or mistress whose job it is to guard the collective memory of these works.

On a warm afternoon, in the Contra Costa Ballet studios, dancers of Company C Contemporary Ballet are still scattered about the studio readying for rehearsal when Donald Mahler, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman, enters and chats with the Company C’s ballet mistress Lou Fancher and director Charles Anderson.
“You ready?” calls out Mahler finally as he settles into a chair at the front of the studio, “You swear?”

A ballet master of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Mahler is in Walnut Creek for a whirlwind couple of weeks, during which he’ll stage “Dark Elegies,” one of Tudor’s most somber and difficult ballets on this young troupe of dancers.

As the dancers scurry into place for the opening, a sudden change comes over their faces, as if something had suddenly clouded their eyes. The mood shifts palpably and suddenly all focus is on the quietly anguished Gianna Davy and Elliott Gordon Mercer, who dance a pas de deux in the center of the room.

Austere and emotionally weighty, Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” was created in 1937 for Ballet Rambert—now the Rambert Dance Company and Britain’s oldest dance company. Tudor’s Expressionist choreography, filled with angular breaks, and twisting limbs, seems to match the wrenching music, Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” or “Songs on the Death of Children.”

Although there is no explicit narrative, the two scenes of this one-act ballet clearly paint a picture of a small community in mourning for the loss of their children. Through choreography laced with fiendishly difficult steps and jagged body angles, Tudor strives to show the inner turmoil outwardly without launching into histrionics – a balance that is a difficult one to master, and the devil can be in the details.

Only a few minutes into a run of the ballet, Mahler shakes his head.
“No, that’s not right,” he says pointing at the feet of the women corps, “That’s not right. Let’s stop. Let’s fix that.”

He adjusts the emphasis of where they’re placing their feet, corrects the direction slightly. The changes seem small and perhaps very minor, but ultimately, it makes a clear difference to the quality of their movements.

Mahler’s association with the Tudor legacy dated back to his own youth, when he hitchhiked from Syracuse to New York for his first taste of ballet in the big city.

Mahler studied with Tudor and Margaret Craske in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, then danced for the National Ballet of Canada and Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where he would later become the Director of the Ballet. Now considered an expert on the work of Antony Tudor, he spends much of his time staging the choreographer’s works for such companies as American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, Ballet West, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Alberta Ballet.

Like the most skillful ballet masters, Mahler has a mental file not only of each ballet, but also of the many variations that may have been made over the years. Mahler will not just set what he has stored in his memory banks, but he also continues to refines those recollections, enabling him to stage each work in a way that he feels will be true to Tudor’s intention, and yet still work on the dancers in front of him.

Mahler, a cheerful raconteur with numerous amusing and woolly stories, cites a section of the “Dark Elegies” in which the dancers are on their knees on the floor and then tilt backward at an angle. For years, he says, he set the tilt at a 45-degree angle backward. More recently he had an encounter with a dancer who had worked with Tudor and was certain that the dancers had leaned backward all the way until their heads touched the floor.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said, “Because no one else seemed to remember that, but then much later, I saw a very old clip of film of the ballet, and there they were, all the way back.”

Back in the rehearsal, Mahler makes indications with his hands and murmurs to Fancher, “You’ll have to have them work on that. That should be fixed.”
Fancher nods, and you can see her writing the mental note to herself. In another week, Mahler will return home, and it will be up to her and the dancers to carry it on.

Company C Contemporary Ballet performs “Dark Elegies” along with “3 Epitaphs,” “Hush,” and “Firebird” at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton on Saturday (April 7) at 2 pm and 8 pm. For more information, call (925) 931-3444, www.companycballet.org

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Dance Column: Holiday Treats

A veritable bouquet of holiday treats are headed our way starting this weekend. Some are like old friends, back for their annual visit, and others are newcomers, but safe to say, we won’t lack for entertaining things to take the kids of any age to see throughout the month of December.

ODC/Dance’s “The Velveteen Rabbit”

Why do I love “The Velveteen Rabbit” so much? Is it because I’m a sucker for hard luck cases? Possibly. I get farklempt at the mere description of the threadbare, velveteen fur and shabby velvet nose.

KT Nelson’s take on the tale of the “bunchy, fat bunny” and the boy who loves him has become an enduring holiday tradition, and justly so. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the enormously popular “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and a host of special guests will be on hand throughout ODC/Dance’s run to help celebrate. Among the events this weekend, Friday’s matinee (November 24) is Grandparent’s Day, Saturday (Nov 25) is ASL Signed Narration Day with actor Ty Giordano, and Sunday’s matinee (Nov 26) will be followed by a milk and cookies party with the dancers (Call the Yerba Buena box office for tickets to the party.)

And as always, plan to bring your stuffed animal friends along to enjoy the show. Don’t they deserve a night out too?

ODC/Dance performs Margery William’s beloved classic November 24 – December 10 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. (www.ybca.org, 415-978-2787)

Smuin Ballet “Christmas Ballet”
Fans of Michael Smuin’s holiday revue are in for a treat this year as the Smuin Ballet adds seven new numbers to the lineup, including three by Michael Smuin, two contributions from associate director Celia Fushille-Burke, and one apiece from Amy Seiwert and Shannon Hurlburt. With newly refreshed sets and costumes, this Christmas buffet, which comes in hot and cool versions, puts a sassy spin on the Christmas roundelay.

The 2006 edition of the “Christmas Ballet” makes its bow on the stage of the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts November 24-25. Or you can catch it at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from December 15-24. (www.smuinballet.org, 925-943-SHOW or 415-978-2787)

Moving Arts Dance Company’s “MAD Hatter” Performance and Tea Party
For something a little more unusual, follow Alice’s granddaughter Allyson down the rabbit hole at Moving Arts Dance Company’s second annual “MAD Hatter” Performance and Tea Party. There are sweets aplenty on the table and on the stage as choreographers Anandha Ray, Michael Lowe, Dudley Brooks, Jenny McAllister, Dianna Rowley, and Isabelle Sjahsam offer up their version of life in Wonderland.

Moving Arts will have two shows in San Francisco at the Cowell Theater on December 2 (www.fortmason.org, 415-345-7575) and two shows at the beautiful El Campinil Theatre in Antioch on December 9 (www.elcampaniltheatre.com, 925-757-9500).

Diablo Ballet’s “Nutcracker”
In collaboration with Civic Arts Education, Diablo Ballet will unveil its very first production of the “Nutcracker” at the Del Valle Theater in Walnut Creek. Directed by the Diablo Ballet Intermediate Program’s Rebecca Crowell, the production won’t lack for talent. Leading the cast of 58 dancers – which includes children and adult drawn from all over the East Bay, as well as the Diablo Ballet apprentices – will be Tina Kay Bohnstedt and Vikot Kabaniaev as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier. Lauren Main de Lucia and Matthew Linzer will rule over the Land of Snow, and Nikolai Kabaniaev, Diablo’s co-artistic director, will even take his turn onstage as Herr Drosselmeyer.

Diablo Ballet’s “Nutcracker” premieres at the Del Valle Theatre in Walnut Creek, December 1-3. (www.diabloballet.org, 925-943-SHOW)

San Francisco Ballet “Nutcracker”
The gold standard of "Nutcrackers” around here has always been the San Francisco Ballet production and Helgi Tomasson’s grand version, with its spectacular, larger-than-life sets and costumes holds delights for kids of any age. With dreamy scenes and even dreamier dancing, this “Nutcracker” is sure to send patrons, young and old, twirling out into the streets.

At the regular family performances, there’s milk and cookies in the lobby, plus, SFB also offers a chance to give a little holiday delight with the annual San Francisco Firefighters Toy Drive. Bring along a new toy or book to donate when you come to the show and the SF Firefighters will see that it brightens a needy child’s Christmas.

San Francisco Ballet’s “Nutcracker” runs December 14-31 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. (www.sfballet.org, 415-865-2000).

Contra Costa Ballet "Story of the Nutcracker"
For an early start on the holiday season, you can see the Contra Costa Ballet’s "Story of the Nutcracker," an hour-long version of the ballet, which features Diablo Ballet’s David Fonnegra and Company C’s Jenna Maul as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.

The Contra Costa Ballet performs their version of the holiday classic from November 30-December 2 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts in the Hofmann Theater. (www.contracostaballet.org, 925-943-SHOW).

Berkeley Ballet “Nutcracker”
Teacher, choreographer, director, Sally Streets has been a mainstay of the Bay Area ballet scene, and this year the company she founded, Berkeley Ballet Theater, celebrates its 25th anniversary. Streets and Robert Nichols choreographed this colorful and lovely version of the Tchaikovsky classic to make a more intimate experience.

To kick off their anniversary season, they’ll be performing their production of the “Nutcracker” from December 8-17 at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. (www.berkeleyballet.org, 510-843-4689)

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