Dance Review: Joe Goode Performance Group-Remember the Wonder...

Midway through the performance of Joe Goode's latest "Wonderboy" -- at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through June 15-- the dancers operating the titular puppet abandoned their charge and left him sitting alone in his window, awash in drifting filmy curtains. Such was the storytelling power of this fabulous creature, though, that I continued to stare at him for several minutes, ignoring the dancers downstage. Somehow I wanted to see what he'd do next-- I wanted to catch what his reactions to the unfolding dance would be--even though I was quite aware that as a puppet, he wouldn't...couldn't possibly move.

Goode's latest collaboration with the San Francisco-born, now New York-based puppeteer Basil Twist (they worked together on Paula Vogel's "Long Christmas Ride Home" for the Magic Theater) makes for memorable theater. If the execution is not entirely perfect, the wonderful boy at the center of the story is charismatic enough to carry the show, which plays on a double bill with an abbreviated version of Goode's 1996 "Maverick Strain."

As in "Christmas Ride," the style reflects a modern version of the Japanese bunraku puppet form, in which the operators of the puppet are not only visible to the audience, but play characters of their own. In a strange way, the parsing of Goode's choreography, with slightly self-conscious, inward-seeking movements, makes an excellent match with the range of motion available to the boy himself.

In fact, the dancers (Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, Jessica Swanson, Andrew Ward, Patricia West and Alexander Zendzian) have obviously lavished attention not only on their own solos and duets, but also on matching their movement to Wonderboy's choreographed phrases. Perhaps though, there is no one better suited to this danced bunraku style than movement professionals. Accustomed to working in partnership and projecting the lines beyond their own bodies, the human performers generously transfer "realness" to this latter-day Pinocchio.

But making "realness" is also Basil Twist's stock in trade. A master puppeteer, who can seemingly enable any object--puppet or not--tell its own story, Twist imbues his boy with endearing details, an enigmatic lift to the corner of his lips, a sparkle in his eye, that continually draw your attention back to him.

As Wonderboy observed and commented on the workings of the world from his spare metal window frame-- just as the audience was watching from outside our own proscenium/window-- I couldn't help marveling at the enormous empathy I felt for the little guy. When he left the stage, I was a little unnerved and disappointed, like a kid whose friend has moved away, and when he tentatively dips his foot into the flow of life, I sensed a rush of exhilaration at his jetes from place to place. If only we could have flown up the aisle with him at the end.

Visit joegoode.org for more information on the show.

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Joe Goode's Humansville

You have to hand it to Joe Goode. With “Humansville” --which the Joe Goode Performance Group premiered on Thursday night in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum in San Francisco— he breaks open the theatrical box with a highly effective dance theater installation with a style that few can pull off.

Presented as part of the Deeply Personal Series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the hour-long, site-specific work integrates live dance, music performance and video –both pre-recorded and live--with a dazzling complexity. From a purely technical standpoint, it is perhaps Goode’s most ambitious work, sectioning part of the open Forum theater into four living dioramas, some of which display Austin Forbord’s video projections against Erik Flatmo’s scenic elements. Jack Carpenter skillfully manages the tricky task of unifying the individual scenes with lighting, and the whole space is bound loosely by the ambient score by Joan Jeanrenaud-- a founding member of the Kronos Quartet-- who plays the cello from a mobile platform that can be wheeled throughout the performing area.

Dispersed among the tableaux are the members of Goode’s current group of performers. Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello sit silently side-by-side opposite a gargantuan projection of a woman gesturing “come hithers” at us. Around the corner, Alexander Zendzian and Melecio Estrella, each in a separate tiled cell, fling themselves in synchronized desperation against the grey and blue walls. Dressed in powder pink 50’s crinolines, Jessica Swanson chats with her beau—another giant projection on the side of her wall-papered room, while in a red fuzz-lined alcove, Patricia West appears through a small window to gripe about a restaurant reservation while employing gestures that eerily mimic a weeping woman projected on a TV screen just below her.

As with any installation art there are multiple layers and points of entry. You don’t have to start at any particular place, and you needn’t stay through the end of each of the 7-minute “plays.” In fact, there’s a passageway behind the walls where audience members are free to wander and peek through cut-out windows into the back of each scene, adding both interactivity to the work plus the disturbing sense that we are all peeping Toms, constantly trying to see what the neighbors are up to. Did the audience members who craned forward for a glimpse under the ruffled valance of Swanson’s window realize that their image was being projected larger-than-life on the other side of the wall?

The combination of video with live action is highly persuasive. There is the sense of being immersed in a moment, but as with the installations of Bill Viola or Julia Scher, you also have a slightly creepy feeling that you’re being played. This is a risky and fascinating way to present questions about human nature, voyeurism, our understanding of others and of ourselves. How willing are we to cross over lines and put ourselves out there? When a projected woman holds out her hand and invites us to “touch me,” it takes several minutes for the crowd to figure out that someone has to walk forward and touch the projection before the sequence will continue, but once it becomes clear, the invitation evokes a kind of delight too, as if we’ve been wallflowers who are suddenly asked to dance.

When the piece moves into a more conventional presentation style, however, the momentum wanes. After about half an hour of roaming and peeping, of intersecting with lives that are only partially observed and never fully understood, the lights in the Forum come up, signaling the shift to the second part of the show and the audience sits down obediently in bleachers facing the blank pair of angled walls.

From here, the action moves into episodic dance segments that offer a prismatic view of some of the elements seen in the installations. The dancing is potent--particularly intense duets for Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello. Nevertheless, we glean no further information about the personalities in the boxes and even with a final series of text snippets that address empathy and human connection, it’s not clear how to tie it all together. Plus it’s not nearly as much fun as walking in and around the action.

Even so, “Humansville” is a compelling journey. The overall look is beautiful, melding together all the production elements masterfully and if Goode’s aim is to provoke, to invite us to think, then he succeeds at that-- admirably.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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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: David Dorfman's "underground"

"Would you overthrow your government? If not, why not?" Spoken quite matter-of-factly on the Yerba Buena Center stage, the question hangs in the air for a moment, as we all consider what it would mean.

In perhaps his most provocative work to date, David Dorfman turns a none-too-oblique gaze at contemporary apathy in underground, a multi-textured work that had its Bay Area premiere on September 21. His examination of activism and terrorism comes wrapped in a reminiscence of the "Days of Rage," when the '60s militant group, The Weathermen -- a splinter of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society -- waged a guerilla war against the U.S. government in protest of the Vietnam War. Bombings, riots -- they even busted Timothy Leary out of jail and got him to Algeria -- and yet, as revolutions go, the Weathermen's efforts to shake Americans from complacency through violence brought home to our doorsteps largely fizzled.

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

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Chitresh Das and Kathak at the Crossroads: Innovation within Tradition

For three days at the end of September, San Francisco played host to one of the biggest gathering of Indian dance gurus in the country. The brainchild of the Bay Area’s resident kathak guru Pandit Chitresh Das, this symposium cum festival brought a roster of kathak experts whose names might not be familiar to the casual dance-goer, but who, in Indian dance circles – represent the legends of this classical form.

The evening performances, held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, were long – running for at least three to three and a half hours – more Indian dance than I had ever seen all put together in my life. But the sum of it made for a fascinating primer on the form, as well as a heartening look at an age-old genre of dance that is undergoing conscious reinvention at the hands of its own preservers.

For many kathak fans, without doubt, the highlight was the appearance on Friday night of the legendary Pandit Birju Maharaj, descendant of the famous Maharaj family whose influence on modern kathak cannot be underestimated. Credited with bringing the element of choreographed theater into the world of kathak, Maharaj was in his own time a modernizer and innovator. Perhaps he still is, if the busy schedule on his website (http://birjumaharaj-kalashram.com) is anything to go by.

True to the Lucknow gharana’s style, (Maharaj is considered this school of kathak’s leading exponent) his invocation to Govinda had an expressively elegant and subtle character. Clad simply in white with a gold and saffron belt, Maharaj gave us a slow burn of twining arms and hands along with the occasional whimsical quirk of a brow.

Is it because of the nature of the dance’s structure, or because of the gurus’ natural pedagogical leanings that each performance became a bit of a lesson? Whatever the reason, for those of us who have had little exposure to the form, it was a welcome part of the performance. It was during this point that I realized that something on the order of 80% of this audience lived and breathed these dauntingly complex rhythms – they clapped along with the musicians easily and were delighted by the challenge of a nine and a half beat metric. I’m lucky if I can discern the difference between ¾ time and 6/8 time, so unraveling the complex rhythms and bols of kathak, learning the tihais had become a little like trying to learn the game of chess simply by watching. I was fine up to a point, and then inevitably someone castled.

Maharaj, though, interjects small nuggets into his performance. “We see that there are different views, different ways,” he says, speaking of the symposium’s focus on the modernization of kathak, “but always, it’s dhaa-dhin-dhin-dhaa,” -- the simplest start to the rhythmic 16 beat cycle that kathak dancers call the “teental.” “The teental is symmetrical,” he continues, “but it always reaches to ‘1,’ to Krishna, to home.”

Maharaj, at 68, is a charming raconteur as well, and probably could have danced an entire evening of stories by himself. In one segment, he does what the jazz musicians call “trading fours” with the tabla player, using the rhythms of his ankle bells and the rolls of the tabla to depict a heroine (bells) being playfully chased through the forest by a hero (the tabla). And a padhant or recitation of rhythms, sketching out various kinds of birds, including a chicken running down the street with her chicks scurrying after her, was both dazzling and amusing.

Sharing the stage that evening with Maharaj was an accomplished group of musicians, including the renowned sarangi player, Pandit Ramesh Mishra.

Notable performances from the other dancers included that of Maharaj’s student Madhumita Roy, who has trained in both the Jaipur and Lucknow gharanas. Her explanation of the tukara as a rhythm that to her feels like a person trying to move forward even as someone else pulls them back from behind emerged compellingly in her composition depicting the childish impulses of Krishna, held back by his sense of duty as a king. A technically brilliant Prashant Shah also startled the audience with unusually secure turns and lightning fast footwork, as did Charlotte Moraga’s whirlwind manege of fast turns around the stage in Chitresh Das’ “Pancha Jati.”

Kathak, especially the Jaipur gharana brand, lends itself to a kind of rock star, virtuoso performance and it’s that side of kathak that comes forward most forcefully in Das’ recent collaboration with tapper Jason Samuels Smith in “India Jazz Suites.” Less a “fusion” per se, and more of a East-shakes-hands-with-West, this showstopper piece -- which features both Das’ Indian musicians as well as the jazz compositions of Marcus Shelby – brought down the house on Saturday night.

It was an evening that started at a high level of energy, with the wild and hot-blooded Rajendra Gangani, and a more delicate, but equally intense performance by Saswati Sen (also a disciple of Birju Maharaj). Sen’s compositions to a time cycle of nine and a half beats – a gift to her from Maharaj – was both seductive and a challenge intellectually. Everywhere in that rhythmically savvy crowd, we were visibly trying to keep up with the beat. In the dark, I could even see Gangani, who slipped into an empty seat after the break, keeping time along with her.

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Theater Review : Super Vision

The Netizens of the world are in the midst of an identity crisis -- there is more information publicly available about each of us, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we have less to fear from the government's Echelon agencies snooping on our reading lists than we do from Amazon.com's patented shopper profiling technology. Heck, even the government is turning to the online giants to get its info. AOL recently ignited a firestorm by making public a detailed record of their users' online searches. They didn't have names attached to the searches, but the New York Times found it almost laughably easy to identify user No. 4417749 simply by analyzing what subjects she searched on.

This mounting identity crisis is precisely the subject of Super Vision, an elegantly, beautiful and disquieting multimedia production by The Builder's Association and studio dbox, which I caught at the Yerba Buena Center forthe Arts. Mixing cutting-edge computer technology with real-time action, it's a show that makes a powerful impact, visually and viscerally.

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

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Dance Review: Joe Goode's "Stay Together"

Joe Goode Performance Group
“Stay Together” and “Deeply There”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
through June 11, 2006

Given the polished intellect and sheer professionalism that the Joe Goode Performance Group gives to maverick theater, it’s a little bit surprising that the company has never before paired up with that other maverick leader in town, Michael Tilson Thomas. But if the success of Friday’s premiere of their first collaboration “Stay Together” is anything to go by, this won’t be their last joint effort.

At twenty years old, the company is something of a San Francisco institution and the articulate Goode himself is well-deserving of his reputation as one of the most intriguing and offbeat theater masters around. And given how strong and carefully assembled his shows always are, it’s not a heavy criticism to say that the music has always been the weakest element. But the singsong tunes often seem to imply that this is a group of dancers not wholly comfortable with singing onstage, and the musical interludes scores were more often than not stitched together from a variety of sources.

Inspired by one of Tilson Thomas’s offbeat songs, and with an original score by the maestro, however, “Stay Together” knits concept with musical execution in a satisfying way, and at last, we feel that the wit of the music matches that of the theatrics.

And theatrical it is, blending video with stage and recorded with live, in a seamless and yet quirky and thoughtful way.

Suspended over the stage are two large screens, mirrored by a pair of small television screens to one side that display rotated versions of the same images. Strong dark lines run across a wash of red in the back of the space -- almost like a screwy horizontal hold on a TV screen broadcasting a Mark Rothko painting. And below in the darkened space, the dancers seem almost dwarfed by their surroundings.

In “Stay Together,” Goode plays Bob, a visual artist whose relationships loosely tie together the characters – notably his lover Bertie (Melecio Estrella), a manager played by Liz Burritt. It’s never quite clear what kind of artist Bob is. Perhaps an avant-garde video artist like Bill Viola, or a Mark Rothko sort of painter -- though the occasional voiceover intoning instructions to the dancers as they appear on the screens seems to indicate the former.

It’s a fractured view of existence, reflected in the fractured video effects and the zany episodes scattered throughout the work.

Goode’s ever-talented mainstay, Burritt creates yet another disarmingly neurotic character as she mugs in front of an onstage camera with her face projected in IMAX proportions behind her. Lines that could read as banal, are instead in her hands droll and amusing.

“I tell myself, ‘Stay together, listen deeply and something good will happen,’” she drawls, “I don’t know how that’s going to work out…” Meanwhile, four dancers move beside her slowly, like architectural exclamation points to her monologue.

As always, Goode’s monologues are wordy, and the work as a whole comes in many layers, like a neatly packed portmanteau. But the pleasure of it ultimately is in our mental unravelling of the imagery. Occasionally, the words pass us by, barely registering as we focus on disembodied heads running through a gamut of expressions as they floating over the space. Curiously, this has the effect of magnifying small moments and snippets of the monologue, without ever bringing them clearly into focus. Then just as you begin to get a grip on the deeper meaning of what a character might be saying, the faces melt away into storm clouds drifting lazily across the screens leaving behind a ghostly echo, a mix of taped and live effects that happens seamlessly.

The second half of the program is given to “Deeply There,” a work created in 1998 and trimmed here from evening length to fifty minutes. It is probably Goode’s best known work and to many, his best work.

The setting takes us back to the height of the AIDS epidemic, which coincidentally began twenty-five years ago. But anyone who’s ever kept vigil at a dying person’s bedside will instantly recognize the scene. Relatives and friends tiptoeing quietly about a house and warning newcomers not to be shocked by the fragility of the person in the bed.

There is truthfulness in the duet for Goode and the young Joshua Rauchwerger, who show that in essence, Goode’s choreography and drama is really about getting back to what some might call child’s play and others might call simple honesty. The silly comic moments -- a Jackie O dance led by Ruben Graciani, the rising hysteria of Burritt’s musings on the gay lifestyle – are interposed with tender poignant ones, such as the affecting Marit Brook-Kothlow’s turn as the family dog who considers what it means to be left alone.

Compared to the elegantly assembled “Stay Together,” “Deeply There” can seem wordy, even fussy. The video effects are less experienced and the transitions are less graceful, but there is a core of rage and raw feeling that suffuses this particular piece, and leave a deep impression of the bittersweet experience of saying farewell.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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The world in Inbal Pinto's "Oyster"

Inbal Pinto – ‘Oyster’
San Francisco Performances, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
May 7, 2006

That sense of unease began with the sound of the wind, blowing across a vast, deserted space. As the twilight glow came up on Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s “Oyster,” a little shiver went down my spine.

Outside of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, crowds of people were lolling in the green lawn, enjoying the warm sunny afternoon, but the less fortunate they, because those of us who had wandered into Pinto’s dark cavern of circus freaks were in for a wild ride.

Pinto, who is a former member of Israel’s acclaimed Batsheva Company, incorporates many familiar theatrical touches into her sideshow – the white-face makeup, zany costumes, a bare stage framed by naked light bulbs that suggest a dilapidated carnival – but the pleasure of “Oyster” is not that it breaks new ground, but in how expertly she and collaborator Pollak have put the elements together.

We’ve seen duets with aerial work before, but rarely done with such ease and insouciance. Dancers have been strung and manipulated like puppets before, but rarely with such creepy implications. But “Oyster’s” cavalcade of sideshow freaks displays a canny understanding of the real art of pantomime, and though it has been categorized by presenter San Francisco Performances as “dance,” it’s really a skillful theater piece.

The twelve members of the troupe take on personas that defy adequate description, ranging from circus animals – performing dogs, elephants, etc. – to a double headed barker, whom I found to be as disturbing as “Laughing Sal,” the coin-operated doll that used to stand in San Francisco’s Musee Mecanique. The music runs from Astor Piazzolla to Yma Sumac, from old standards to throaty humming, many of which never before seemed so sinister or unfamiliar.

Faded carnies every one, the characters run through their paces, and at the end of the day, doff their accoutrements and sit down to amuse each other. The weary atmosphere has a tincture of forlorn sadness about it – though not of the self-pitying variety, but rather the kind that made characters like Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willie or Chaplin’s Little Tramp so compelling. Why do we watch them? Why do we watch sideshows? Is it that they evoke macabre fascination or empathy? And, Pinto seems to ask, what does that say about us?

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ODC: Part of a Longer Story...

ODC/SF
Dancing Downtown Season
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard Street @3rd, San Francisco
through March 19, 2006

Sentiment was in the air at last week’s opening gala for ODC/SF’s annual Dancing Downtown Season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Even the most jaded couldn’t miss the bittersweet edge to the special program that included premieres from both Artistic Director Brenda Way and co-Artistic Director KT Nelson. But even as ODC lures retired San Francisco Ballet principal Joanna Berman back into the spotlight for the company’s three week home season, it also marks the retirements of favorite sons Brian Fisher and Private Freeman.

It was the glamorous Berman who opened the show in Way’s “Part of a Longer Story,” a work set to W.A. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A that the choreographer has returned and added to in stages between 1993 and 2002. Way’s group sections -- created most recently, in 1995 and 2002 -- are disarming and sexy. She establishes encounters between dancers sketchily and then immediately melts them away in a flurry of sinuous movement. However, nothing is quite satisfying until Freeman and Berman emerge in the central movement, originally choreographed in 1993.

Guest artists often have a hard time fitting into a company’s signature style, but not so with Berman, who looks at least a lovely as she did when she retired from SFB in 2002. Though at the start of their duet she looked pensive, perhaps even a touch self-conscious, within a few measures of music, both she and Freeman seemed to release themselves to the moment, created a lyrical impression of a romance joined in progress. Partnering with an almost quizzical sensitivity, Freeman and Berman offered a transporting glimpse of how to make much more than just sense of a series of steps—of how to create nuanced shades of grey in between the black and white.

If the duet struck a chord of emotional depth, the last movement returned to a festive mood, highlighted by Fisher’s mischievous antics. It was a light-hearted if also light-weight showcase for Fisher, who was joined by Justin Flores, Corey Brady, Anne Zivolich and new apprentice Elizabeth Farotte.

One can only wonder if it’s the personalities of dancers like Freeman and Fisher, who have inspired the zany air of works like Way’s “time remaining,” which received its premiere on Thursday night.

Though packed with amusing imagery – dancers in saucy little tan tunics with peekaboo underwear, dancers sliding behind and tangling with dressmakers mannequins scattered like soulless stand-ins about the stage, a smarmy duet for Freeman and Andrea Flores – ultimately the meaning of time remaining is elusive. Is it a meditation on religious fanaticism, an investigation of the modern search for meaning, or a sketch of Heaven’s Gaters waiting for Comet Hale-Bopp? Ultimately, it is Freeman who entertains the most, with his jovially absurd holy-roller type. Seemingly unperturbed at the idea of looking ridiculous, Freeman plays his faith healer to the hilt with a consciously cheap twinkle in his eye to match the cheap twinkle of the giant blue rock on his ring finger.

ODC’s women of the moment – Andrea Flores, Zivolich, Yayoi Kambara, Marina Fukiyama and Quilet Rarang – ably displayed the their power-pack punch in KT Nelson’s premiere, “Stomp a Waltz,” to the music of Marcelo Zarvos. Flores, who was faintly subdued in “time remaining,” here blends sex appeal with knowing shrewdness in her quick glances at the audience from under her eyelashes.

Clad in black with pert splashes of red, the company headed into the final work of the evening full throttle, as if working off of the adrenaline push of a runner’s high. Nelson’s choreography, which bears the company’s trademark high-energy intricacy, is the kind of fast-moving and complex work that demands boldness. But though the strokes of each step are carefully calculated for the greatest effect, the dancers add a pleasant looseness as well, giving “Stomp a Waltz” a forward momentum to match the rhythmic drive of the music.

Watching the closing moments of the performance, with a freewheeling Freeman partnering Kambara, or Fisher and Andrea Flores cavorting, we suddenly remembered that there are only two more weeks to see them in action. At the reception after the show, an audience member murmured the same thing that was overheard at Berman’s retirement gala, “After that, it just won’t be the same again.”

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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